AUX Blog

By Nathan Rogers, VP of Sales and Marketing

Recent changes by Facebook and Google, in particular targeting housing, employment, and credit advertising, have made the job of credit union marketers even more difficult. This comes precisely at a time when digital is becoming more and more important to the industry. Here we will highlight some resources to help you understand the changes and discuss how you can develop a digital strategy that still works after the change.

How Does This Affect Me?

While the title of this article may feel like we are steering you away from getting into paid digital advertising, be assured, we are not. We believe it has a place in just about every credit union marketers’ bag of tricks. What we are saying is that you need to be well informed to make the right budgetary choices.

First, the new rules from Facebook and Google only affect those ads that use highly targeted attributes related to age, gender, zip code, etc. The goal of the change is honorable. These organizations do not want their advertising platforms to be used in a discriminatory fashion. These changes do not affect PPC ads based on keywords which could strengthen their value for credit unions. The biggest limiting factor this creates for credit unions is from a budgetary perspective. It effectively forces advertising related to credit offers to be done in broader strokes, which also means at higher cost.

Here are some links that will dive deeper into the new rules:

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/business/news/updates-to-housing-employment-and-credit-ads-in-ads-manager

Google:
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9917652?hl=en
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9997418?hl=en

Second, these new rules do not specifically restrict deposit product ads in the same way. So, as long as no credit offer is included, checking/share draft and related deposit services should still be items you can target with greater specificity. At least, for now.

Third, while this will make it more difficult to control budget on the credit and mortgage side of the house, you can still target market if it makes sense for you. Albeit, to a much larger audience as targeting will still be allowed at the state, county, city, and metro area levels. This may work for some credit unions with a large geographic footprint or who are focused on sparsely populated areas. However, it could become cost prohibitive for those branching into new markets, those in densely populated areas, or those with smaller branch networks.

How Can I Go Digital Without Breaking the Budget?

• Content is king! One of the best ways you can drive traffic to your site is through a great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. A crucial part of that strategy is always content. If you’re struggling with developing a content plan for your SEO strategy or learning how to do it, this free course from HubSpot is a great place to start: https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/content-marketing
• PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising is a great alternative and may work better with a content driven strategy. PPC advertising is typically tied to keywords, the words we enter in the search bar on Google.com when we’re doing our research. This article from the Financial Brand breaks down the options with the changes by Google and Facebook in mind: https://thefinancialbrand.com/103342/google-digital-advertising-financial-marketers-agency-targeting/
• Don’t discount the opportunities already found in your existing membership! Analyzing the data that lives within your credit union can be one of your greatest opportunities for finding new product sales at the lowest cost of acquisition (you can tell I watch Shark Tank 😊). Do your best to gather all the data you can from your core, credit card servicer, mortgage servicer, LOS, etc.

If you need help, take a look at Cuery from Aux and check out how we can help you create a real data strategy to help you make the best marketing decisions you can. https://auxteam.com/cuery