Creating a YOUnique Marketing Plan

“It’s not a question about what you could do; it’s a question about what you should do to create the biggest impact.”  

-Bruce Clapp, MarketMatch’s President

You have a pile of money, directives to grow membership and loans, and need to implement a marketing plan over the next 12 months.  Writing a strategic marketing plan takes time and it is never too early to start planning for next year.  In fact, many financial marketers are already starting their plan for 2014. 

But there are so many things to consider when writing a good marketing plan that it can often be daunting even to marketing experts.  Here are some tried and true processes for writing a solid strategic marketing plan.

• Before you begin writing the plan, keep a folder and, throughout the year as you see ideas and articles that inspire you, put these into the folder for safekeeping as you gather your thoughts.
• Perform an audit of previous marketing plans.  What worked well?  What didn’t, and why?  Make note of what didn’t work and remember not to include it in next year’s plan…your budget is precious!
• What are your credit union or bank’s overall organizational goals?  Make sure that your marketing plan is aligned with and supports the overall goals for your financial institution.  Create SMART goals for each one of the targets on which you are focusing your marketing. 
• Determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and develop a regular tracking mechanism for each one.  If membership growth is a top organizational goal, set a benchmark and then regularly measure this metric to make sure you are meeting or exceeding the goal.  Measurement on a continuous basis allows you to make adjustments to your strategy if the numbers aren’t meeting expectations. 
• What is your financial institution’s culture?
• Vision statement
• Core values/brand values
• Brand attributes
• Business philosophy and brand promise
• Unique selling proposition (what makes your financial institution truly different) 
• These act as the compass for your organization’s strategic goals, and having these in place will help you to deliver that YOUnique experience to your members and customers through your marketing and branding efforts.   Your brand elements will also help set your messaging themes.
• Determine your budget.  Before you get into outlining tactics and individual strategies to meet the goals outlined above, you need to have a solid marketing budget in place to invest for the kind of returns you want.  For example, we recommend that our credit union and community banks earmark at least 0.1% of assets for marketing use.  This number also depends on a lot of other factors including the size of your footprint, your awareness/perception in the market, how narrow you can define a target, media costs in your community, etc.  Does this budget include community sponsorships?  What about any operational costs from executing elements of the plan? Make sure you are knowledgeable about and clear on what your budget does and does not include. 
• Going from your KPI and organizational goals above, what products and services are you going to market, and how are you going to do that?  This is where individual campaign development will take shape.  
• Who is/are your target market(s)?  If you write “everyone” here, we need to talk.  There is a difference between a target customer/member and the RIGHT customer/member for your institution.  If you have a solid brand strategy in place, then defining your target market should come more naturally as you know who is best-suited for your financial institution and who you are best-suited to serve. 
• How are you going to tell the story and reach the right people at the right time?  Your budget will dictate what you can do, but the delivery strategies you implement here, if chosen correctly, will be what will move the KPIs.  Think strategically about the best methods for communicating to your target market, and remember that looking outside of the financial industry could give you some great ideas!
• Get buy-in from staff at all levels of your financial institution before the plan is complete.  Many times, people in my credit union would come to me with great ideas they’d been sitting on for months because they were afraid it would get shot down or be unsuccessful.  But they often turned out to get great results and there was more ownership of the marketing program because their voices were being heard.  Once you have buy-in, give everyone a 30,000-foot version of the marketing plan that highlights the overall strategies and reasoning behind the plan.  Then, communicate it and communicate it again through your employee intranet site, internal newsletter, staff meetings, and in other creative ways to make sure that everyone knows they are a marketer of your financial institution. 

Your completed plan will tie together all of these elements in a perfect way unique to your own financial institution.  However, remember that writing one is only half the battle.  It is only through consistent execution and measurement that you will achieve results. 

Good marketing is all about having a well-thought-out strategy and a plan of attack.  The more research you do, metrics you have, and buy-in from all levels of your organization, the better your plan and the better your results at the end of the year.  

Amanda

We bring these marketing philosophies to community banks and credit unions nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too.  Contact me for details.

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