As community banks and credit unions continue to weather the storm, marketing departments have had to make do with smaller budgets and fewer staff.
Marketers of these financial institutions are charged with creatively generating revenue and exploring untapped markets for new customers – all with fewer resources.
To make the most of their marketing dollars, many banks and credit unions are looking to online tools and web-based marketing portals, which offer professionally-created marketing materials for a fraction of the costs associated with outside agencies or in-house creative teams.
One credit union – Texas-based Mobiloil Federal Credit Union (MOFCU) – credits online marketing portal CUMarketingCenter.com with increasing its assets from $260 million to more than $405 million, largely through enabling them to quickly and easily advertise to new markets.
“When we started with CUMarketingCenter.com, we had $260 million in assets. Today, we are at $405 million. This growth comes from putting ads out in the field in places where people have never seen credit union marketing before,” said George Perrett, MOFCU’s vice president of marketing. “The process is fast, intuitive, and you can make modifications to generate professional-looking ads in less than an hour.”
Read the full case study here.
CUMarketingCenter.com has over one thousand professionally-created layouts for everything from ads to direct mail pieces, digital signs and more.
Credit unions can join for just a few hundred dollars a month for unlimited access to the full catalog, which can be customized with a credit union’s contact information, logos and personalized copy. They also have access to the site’s library of more than two million stock photos in addition to the option of uploading their own.
Once materials are created, they are immediately ready to download and print. The whole process takes just minutes.
Community banks all over the country are using a similar site – BankMarketingCenter.com – in a similar way.
“BankMarketingCenter.com is a great tool – particularly for community banks that want a nice, consistent look and feel to their marketing materials,” said Andrea Johnson, Bank of Tucson’s SVP director of retail banking. “I came from a big commercial bank with a large marketing department, but community banks often don’t have this luxury. With BankMarketingCenter.com, it’s like having a marketing department without really having a marketing department.”
To learn more about how Bank of Tucson found success with BankMarketingCenter.com, click here to read the full case study.
Just as banks and credit unions are now offering online banking for their customers and members, the successful ones are using online tools to grow revenue and cut overhead.
Has your financial institution found other effective tools to help you produce professional marketing materials?
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Neal Reynolds has worked with hundreds of banks and credit unions around the country helping them to grow core deposits and market share without growing their marketing budgets. Contact him at [email protected].
