Digital advertising is one of the most cost-effective and impactful ways to reach your credit union’s target audience. Unfortunately, when implementing an advertising strategy, there are various ways credit unions tend to waste money.

Poor campaign structure, targeting an audience that’s too broad, not continuously optimizing your campaigns, and failing to track your campaigns are some of the most common reasons.

With a limited budget, you must be strategic with your resources so you can get the most bang for your buck.

How To Make The Most Of Your Credit Union Advertising Budget

If you’re not careful, you can wind up spending more money than planned on advertising that doesn’t produce the desired results. Your mission should be to reduce wasted advertising dollars and stretch your budget.

To start, you want your data in order.

Know your audience well

You want to learn your audience inside and out. When you know who you’re speaking to, your advertising will stretch further. You can in turn implement better targeting and when you’re targeting the right audience, your ads will convert at a higher rate because it speaks to them in a way that they respond to.

Study your PPC data

Next, you want to study your PPC (pay-per-click) data. Your PPC advertising data will reveal which ads and targeting methods are converting better. In knowing what ads are working best, you can cut costs by eliminating what’s not converting well and reallocate spending toward things that are, for a better overall ROI.

Advertising Platforms To Use

There are various platforms you can use for your credit union advertising. However, with a limited budget, the following platforms are best to focus on initially.

Search advertising should make up about 70% of your credit union advertising budget, with most of that going towards Google Ads.

Google Search ads

Google Search ads are one of the most popular forms of pay-per-click advertising.

Google is the largest search engine globally, and advertising there means you have a better opportunity to position yourself in front of your ideal audience. This form of advertising allows you to bypass SEO and appear at the top of a page for your desired keyword until you build your ranking organically.

One of the main advantages of these ads is that you only pay when a viewer clicks the ad. This makes it easy to track the clicks, retargeting, and even conversions. It also places you at the top of the search for a selected keyword, even when the ad is not optimized for SEO.

Finally, it is low-cost, with the average CPC being $1 to $2.

Bing ads

Bing is often a forgotten and underrated search engine.

That said, it still accounts for more than 5.9 billion searches on the internet monthly. With Bing ads, you only pay for clicks just like Google Search ads.

Also, you don’t have to worry about having a minimum advertising budget; hence with a smaller budget, you won’t struggle much to get started.

You also have the freedom to set the budget and adjust spending daily based on the performance of the advertisement, among other factors.

Bing also allows for testing keywords, bids, and timing, enabling you to optimize the ad and maximize the ROI.

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising, such as Facebook and Instagram, should make up about 20% of a credit union’s digital ad budget.

Facebook ads

Facebook ads are some of the most popular forms of pay-per-click advertising.

The platform offers many advanced features that allow you to narrow down to a specific audience segment. These features include your ability to remarket to those who previously visited the client’s website, making it easy to follow up on leads.

With the average CPC being $1.72, Facebook ads are still affordable for credit unions with low-budgets to advertise while achieving the desired results.

Instagram and YouTube ads

Display and video ads should make up 10% of your credit union advertising budget.

Instagram offers a very unique audience, and one that many credit unions want to capture.

A significant number of Instagram users are not on Facebook. Being heavily interactive, Instagram offers one of the highest engagement rates of all the social networks. A higher engagement rate implies a faster way of advertising your brand to the consumer at a low cost.

YouTube also offers a high engagement rate, has no minimum investment, and enables users to interact with the advertisement first-hand.

Choosing The Best Credit Union Advertising Strategy

Advertising, especially with a limited budget, can be an uphill task.

However, the digital landscape has continually made it more possible to reduce the barriers of access. The success of smaller credit unions with limited budgets using digital advertising makes it even more of a go-to strategy.

Combining advertising with SEO strategy is a cost-effective way to reach your ideal member. Furthermore, other paid search platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube offer affordable ways to target, retarget, and convert leads.

Using various advertising platforms along with implementing the most cost-effective strategies allows you to reap the desired benefits of digital advertising no matter your budget.

Read more about How Much Credit Unions Should Budget for Marketing