These days, most people use the internet to research the things they’re interested in. It happens constantly with consumer goods—people read reviews, blogs, tech specs, and anything they can find about their intended purchase. People educate themselves with online content to ensure they make the best decision they can before they pull the trigger.
The same general thing happens with consumers and financial institutions. People rarely just walk into the first branch and open an account before doing a little comparison shopping. Similarly, people look at credit card offerings from different issuers before choosing one. Or they’ll search for who has the best auto loan rates. Or maybe they’re shopping for a home and want to see who can help them out with a mortgage.
It’s uncommon for people to engage a salesperson or representative without doing a little research of their own first. With inbound marketing, your credit union can help them.
But here’s the rub: only about 2% of site visitors make a buying decision after their research. The other 98% leave. Maybe they want to do more research, or maybe something came up—their child knocked over a glass of milk, they forgot something in the oven—and they forget about it.
Retargeting is an ad placement strategy designed to help that 98% remember you after they’ve left.
How Does Ad Retargeting Work?
We’ll spare you the lengthy details. There are better resources out there that can provide more detailed and more technical explanations. The short version is this:
There are many, many ways of retargeting. Ultimately, it involves tracking the online behavior of your website visitors or other known contacts (such as your current members). Then, as they browse the web or scroll through social media, your paid advertisements pop up on other websites or in their feed.
The idea is that after they leave, you bring them back through ad placement. If they click the ad, they’re “retargeted” back to your site. Click-through rates for retargeted visitors are higher than regular pay per click (PPC) ads, and retargeted visitors are 70% more likely to convert on your site. That’s not bad for a simple ad!
How Credit Unions Can Use Retargeting
Many credit unions have been using retargeting in their digital marketing strategies for a while. Others are just getting started. And then there are the rest—those who may have heard the term, but don’t know what it means.
Regardless of which camp you fall into, you should know this:
There are two main strategies for retargeting ads. Which one you choose depends on your credit union’s short-term goals. You’ll have to ask yourself:
Is your credit union looking to grow in size by adding new members??
Or…
Does your credit union want to promote specific goods or services to its existing members?
Both retargeting strategies can help with each goal. However, each retargeting strategy is slightly better suited to one of those goals than the other. Here’s how they break down.
1. Retargeting for awareness
Credit unions that want to grow their membership will be better served by awareness campaigns. The idea behind these campaigns is simple. As prospective members search for their next financial institution, they will visit the websites of each institution they’re considering.
When they arrive on your site, you’ll embed a small code that allows you to track their behavior on the internet. After a period of time—say, two days—you can begin deploying ads on the websites they visit or in social media.
Awareness campaigns are there to keep you top of mind with prospective members. They reinforce your brand even when they’re not actively searching for you or thinking about you.
Awareness retargeting is harder to measure ROI. Conversion tends to be lower than in conversion campaigns (big surprise, right?). However, they can do wonders for getting your brand’s name in the mix and growing your credit union.
2. Retargeting for conversion
Credit unions that want to promote specific goods and services are better served by conversion campaigns. These campaigns are suited to promoting things like certificates of deposit, premium credit cards, boat loans, and other major opportunities for existing members.
In fact, conversion retargeting campaigns are a fantastic way of increasing engagement. If you feel that your members aren’t using your card often enough and you want to increase your share of wallet, you could begin marketing your credit card to specific groups of members.
Generally, the people who see ads from conversion campaigns for credit unions are already members. These ads are designed to increase product saturation, introduce new products, or advertise events. These campaigns are better suited to traditional measures of efficacy like ROI, forms filled, cost per lead, and so on.
Should Your Credit Union Try Retargeting?
Yes. Why not? If you’re already using digital marketing and running (often) expensive ad campaigns, this one is a no-brainer. With retargeting, your credit union can specifically target ads to people that have already interacted with your brand and your content! The familiarity is there, and so their likelihood of success is much higher.
There are numerous retargeting platforms out there. Google AdWords, Facebook, and Instagram are probably the most well-known. However, there are others, such as ReTargeter and AdRoll. However, while all these platforms provide all the metrics you’d want, they’re not as robust as other options.
For example, at CU 2.0, we use Perfect Audience as part of our marketing automation platform. It provides all the same abilities, but it also comes with the expanded capabilities of automated marketing, CRM, form building, email platform, and so on.
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Or, if you’re curious to see more about how retargeting fits into the marketing automation picture, contact us to schedule a short, 15-minute demo!
