Looking to shake things up? You can fuel a new marketing initiative or marketing strategy at your credit union with market research.
Credit unions use the data from market research studies to make better decisions. What kinds of decisions? Well, in our experience many credit union market research studies focus on member experience.
As your partner, a market research company should work with a credit union to determine key objectives for the research. Ideally a credit union market research company will walk you through the entire research process to uncover secondary objectives and other opportunities for value-added questions.
Case in point? Before any project begins at Drive Research, we hold a kickoff meaning which keeps all stakeholders on task and centered around the goals of the market research.
Learn more about the Drive Research kickoff meeting here.
Enhance credit union strategy with market research. Here are 4 reasons your credit union should consider market research.
Reason 1: Fuel Marketing and Strategy
Whether you want feedback on marketing initiatives in the works or you want to know better ways to target and message current and potential members, market research is here. The data gathered through credit union market research is able to point marketing teams in the right direction to ensure messaging placements and language are aligned for success.
It's simple, you ask members what they want and how they act and then you build a marketing strategy around this feedback.
There are a few classic questions used in credit union market research surveys that help brands understand current positioning. Here are 3 of them.
Question 1
"What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you see or hear Example Credit Union?" The results to this question can be used to identify word associations as well as attitude towards the brand (i.e., positive, negative, or neutral). The results here often make a great word cloud with the most common brand associations popping out.
Question 2
"In the past three months, where have you seen or heard Example Credit Union?" This question is used to understand top sources of awareness. Results can point to the most effective medium for communication and opportunities for utilizing marketing channels strategically. For example, perhaps one audience segment is likely to notice ads on Facebook. This could point to an opportunity to focus messaging to the audience who is most likely to utilize Facebook.
Question 3
"Which of the following services are you aware of Example Credit Union offering?" Results to this question will help teams understand awareness gaps, saturation, and areas of opportunity. It's also an excellent way to use the survey as a vehicle to share other services offered at your credit union that members may not have known about. Dual benefits.
Learn more top questions to ask in a customer satisfaction survey.
Reason 2: Learn About Member Needs
What is most important to credit union members in your market area? Are you 100% confident in your assumption? Without having data as the ultimate gut check, it's hard to distinguish beliefs from reality. We always say, "Market research quantifies the gut feelings."
Credit union market research takes the guesswork out of understanding current and potential members' needs and wants.
Want to know what factors are most important members? A credit union market research company can find out. Want to then know how satisfied members are with the same list of factors? Researchers can find this out too.
By coupling this data together, market research companies are able to identify areas of opportunity and success. Factors that score high importance - high satisfaction and low importance - high satisfaction are areas of success. Areas of opportunity are factors that score high importance - low satisfaction and low importance - low satisfaction.
Your priority "fix" areas become the categories that score high in importance from your members but low in satisfaction. How's that for actionable feedback?
What's most important to credit union members?
Reason 3: Learn About Member Personas
One of our favorite pieces to create at Drive Research are member personas. Member personas utilize all of the data from the market research study to develop a story about members and their journey with the brand.
Here is an brief example of a credit union member profile:
Herbert lives in Buffalo, NY with his dog Chip. He recently turned 31 and started a new job at a local tech company.
After he graduated from Buffalo University, Herbert decided to stay in the area rather than move home to Central New York or elsewhere. After his decision to live in Buffalo, Herbert chose to become a member of Example Credit Union.
When driving past Example Credit Union and Herbert sees the credit union's sign, he immediately thinks of its ease of use. Herbert likes that Example Credit Union offers both in-person and digital banking services. While he mostly uses digital banking services day to day, he occasionally makes a visit to Example Credit Union once every 2 weeks to deposit his paycheck.
Ease of use and no fees are key reasons why Herbert chooses to use Example Credit union and highly recommends it to family and friends.
Herbert uses LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, but has only seen posts from Example Credit union on Facebook in the past 3 months. When it comes to choosing where he does is banking, the most important factors to Herbert is the ease of use, digital banking services, and the knowledge of staff.
Through these credit union member profiles, it can help a credit union break down members into segments and bring the data to life. These member profiles become helpful to assist digital marketing companies to take the next step with targeting.
Reason 4: Find New Members
The bright side of market research is that methodologies can be unique and customized, so market research companies can easily reach members as well as non-members. A lot of our credit union clients come to us looking to learn more about non-members rather than learn more from members.
A credit union market research company can customize a script which caters to non-members. In this survey you may want to ask about competitive usage of banks and credit unions, satisfaction with those institutions, who is used as the primary financial institution (PFI), likelihood to switch institutions, and drivers to switching. This data will help your credit union create a marketing strategy to grow its base of members.
This can help credit unions identify areas of focus when developing strategies to reach out to potential members. Once these opportunity areas are realized, credit unions can position themselves more effectively in the market in order to find new members.
Contact Drive Research
Drive Research is a credit union market research company located in New York. Learn more about the services we offer, like focus groups, online surveys, and in-depth interviews.
Looking for a proposal or quote from our market research company? Send us an email at [email protected], call us at 315-303-2040, or contact us on our website.
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