Episode 88 - Making Sure Your Marketing is Fully Aligned with Larger Institution Goals

Meredith Olmstead and Kristin Mock from FI GROW Solutions discuss a recurring challenge faced by marketing departments in banks and credit unions: the lack of clear, measurable goals. In their conversation, they explore the importance of setting specific objectives for marketing teams to effectively align their strategies and resources, enhancing overall institutional performance.

Key Takeaways:

• Clear Goals Essential: Specific, measurable goals are vital for marketing departments to effectively align their strategies with the institution's objectives.

• Executive Communication: It's crucial for executives to communicate these goals across all departments to ensure a unified approach towards achieving them.

• Regular Updates and Reviews: Continuously tracking progress towards these goals and adjusting strategies as necessary is key to maintaining momentum and achieving desired outcomes.

Transcription:

Meredith Olmstead:
Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales and service consulting agency. We work exclusively with banks and credit unions. And I am here with one of our senior marketing and inbound marketing strategists, Kristin Mock. Hi, Kristin.

Kristin Mock:
Hi.

Meredith Olmstead:
So Kristin and I were just having a very interesting chat about something that we've kind of been butting up against with different clients of ours in January of this year. So it's 2025, it's January when we're recording this conversation. And the main thing that we are continuing to find is that our marketing clients and marketing departments that we're working with oftentimes don't have specific clear, measurable, smart institutionally level goals that they can share with us for their banks or their credit union.

So we're going to them and saying, "Hey, we really want to formulate your strategy for the coming months, quarters, year, whatever. What are some of your new 2025 goals or what's your bigger strategic three to five-year plan? Where is the institution trying to get to?" And a lot of our clients who are typically marketers, although sometimes when we were working with lending, they don't have really specific numbers to share and we're just head scratching like in 2025, is this still a thing? So Kristin, talk to me a little bit more about why we're finding this to be so weird and frustrating.

Kristin Mock:
Sometimes when I'm talking to the marketer, I just have to wonder if the reason they don't have an answer for that question is because marketing is left out of the loop, or are the executives creating goals and not communicating them? Are they not setting specific goals? I mean, we're always going to get a response like, "Oh, we want to increase deposits. Oh, we want to lower membership age." Those are always going to be the goals, but I'm never getting a specific, "These are the two things that we're really going to focus on this year and this is how we're going to do it." And when we don't have everybody aligned on specific goals, we're wasting resources. Your marketing is ineffective. You're not meeting any goals if you don't have any. And I think just creates frustration all around. Nobody really knows what the other hand is doing.

Meredith Olmstead:
So when you brought this up as a topic to me, I was like, "Okay, well, I want to think about actual examples," but before we jump into specific examples of where we're seeing this happening, talk to me a little bit about what you wish that you could see. So what do you think from all of your expertise, I mean, I know you worked at an institution at a community bank before you came to FI GROW, and there they had some pretty specific measurable goals that you all worked towards. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that. But so what are some of the solutions that you would like to see implemented for marketers or for our clients and just for credit unions and banks in general?

Kristin Mock:
Yeah. So the first thing that has to happen is your executive team has to set goals. I'm assuming that most institutions are doing that, but from what I hear, it doesn't always sound like it. So if you are not setting specific goals, that's the first thing you need to be doing. But then you need to be communicating them, communicate them to everybody at the institution. The marketers should know exactly what these goals are and how marketing can help support those goals. Your frontline should know exactly what those goals are and how their role supports those goals. Your training team, your lenders, underwriting, everybody needs to be on board. You need to foster this collaboration and get everybody really supporting the same end goal. And I mean, that helps the institution, that helps everybody on the team understand what they're doing, what their role is, that helps with job satisfaction, that's going to reduce turnover. It's like you have to set a goal and everything helps that.

Meredith Olmstead:
So I love the very specific example you gave from when you were working at your former bank employer and what their very specific goal was, and then how it permeated everything that you did and that people did even at the branch level. So talk to me about a little bit more about that goal. The goal was five services per household, but really the minimum was four. So for new accounts or for all accounts, really the goal was to have the minimum of four, but five accounts or services per household. So tell me about how that works for you guys.

Kristin Mock:
Right. Yeah. So we would always have a five-year plan and that would have multiple goals, and then we would focus on those goals throughout the year, throughout those five years. So one of them was getting five services per household, and that number didn't just get pulled out of the air. We looked at how many services per household we currently have, which was sitting at 3.9. And then you would say, "Okay, so what is a little higher than that, but still attainable, still measurable?" And so five became the number that we were working toward. And so we would at every team meeting, whether that was just your branch, whether that had the executive teams there, whether it was everyone from the institution, we would start by talking about what our goals are, talking about how your role rolled up into that. We'd have little rhymes, striving for five.

You always had a way that that was top of mind. We had posters in our branches back in the back room that we're showing these are our goals for the next five years. And so you understood on the front line, I know that I am opening a new account and I need to make sure that they start with four services and then I need to ask for a fifth. And that could vary on what that fifth one was, depending on the needs of the customer, but you knew that this was the expectation. And obviously it's not always going to happen, but it really helped. The frontline knew exactly what they were doing.
Marketing knew that we were like, "Okay, we need to start marketing debit cards because that's the one that people aren't getting or online banking because that's the one that people aren't getting. Loans." Whatever it was that we could look at the numbers and see this is the service that people are missing that we really need to make sure that they're getting when they sign up with us, that's what marketing would do. It's like training new. This branch is falling behind, so that's the branch I'm going to focus on. I'm going to start having some conversations, "Hey, pretend I'm a member, pretend I'm a new customer. I just walked in your branch. I asked you this question." And so you would get training that was specific to that goal. So I think it's just really important to get everybody working toward the same thing.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. So a goal like increasing deposits is not specific enough. Instead, you narrow that down to, we would like to add 1,000 more rewards checking accounts or basic checking accounts this year. And then you start to back out your tactics, marketing and campaign tactics as well as maybe training or other kinds of front line tactics to work towards that goal. But it's very important that if we understand these larger institution goals, then you can align marketing efforts working towards them rather than focusing so much on tactical approaches because I think a lot of times marketers will get really focused on channels and ads and budgets and emails and open rates and impressions and all of these things. And even if they're looking at new accounts being opened, are they the right kinds of accounts? Are they profitable? Is that really what the focus of the institution needs to be? Sometimes institutions really want to drive deposits. Sometimes they really need to be focused on loans or vice versa. So it's very, very important to make sure that everybody's aligned in terms of at the executive level to communicate those things down throughout the organization.

Kristin Mock:
Yeah. And communicating where you're at on the goal. If your goal was a thousand new accounts, every time you have a meeting, say, "Hey, we've got seven new accounts, we've got a hundred new accounts. We're halfway there. We're 75% of the way there." Help keep that momentum going.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. So making sure you're celebrating your achievements as well as reminding people about goals and what you're striving towards. And I think it's very important also in marketing, you can only do so much. Marketing, it can be about building relationships. It can be about better defining your brand or building trust around a brand and brand sentiment. It can be about driving impressions, bringing the information to people. But if you are driving a lot of leads or a lot of traffic or a lot of possible new customers to an experience, whether it's in person, whether it's on an app, whether it's on a phone call, whether it's on your website and you're not seeing conversions, you may have some other issues at hand that aren't necessarily completely controlled by marketing. So you might see that, hey, maybe there's something going on with the actual product not being aligned with the market out there and what's being offered at other institutions.

If you're not competitive in your market, that will start to show up with less new accounts, less new applications, less conversions. Slowly you're going to start to lose market share. So at some point, there may come a time where you have to say, "Hey, time out for a second. Marketing's been driving traffic, been driving leads, and we're still not seeing conversions. What's going on? Is there some unconscious bias going on in lending? Do we not have the right product lines to fit the people in our market anymore who are coming in and wanting to do business with us? Do we need to create a new product line for a different category of new customer or new member or new community?" Or something like that. So that is really, really key too, is making sure that all the responsibility doesn't fall on just one department. It is a shared responsibility.

I just had a conversation with a client who was talking about that their membership, this is a credit union down in the south. Their membership is staying pretty flat. And I said, "Okay, well, have you figured out why people are leaving?" And they were like, "Well, people aren't leaving. They're just not coming." And I said, "No, no, no. You always have customers leaving and you always have new customers coming in. When your customer base is flat, that means about the same number of people are leaving that are coming in."

So you've got to figure out, we know people are coming in, why are they leaving? Those are the people that you need to be looking at service standards and member surveys to figure out why people are leaving in order to better understand why you might not be hitting those larger membership growth goals. So awesome conversation, Kristin. Thank you so much for your insight. I think those examples are really, really powerful. If you are interested in learning more about digital marketing, sales and service consulting for your bank or credit union, please visit us at figrow.com. We have lots of other great podcasts, blogs, case studies, and we would love to connect with you and have you check out more of our content. And otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.