Sustaining Your Youth Campaign

You’ve come up with an excellent and effective youth campaign and launched it. Now it’s time to monitor it for ongoing success.

Monitoring

You can build a free listening station for your digital marketing and social media activity that will enable you to monitor the Web for activity around your brand, your products and services, and your competitors. Set up a Gmail account to get access to free Google applications, including Google Analytics, Google Alerts, YouTube, Google+ and more.

For managing your social media presence, Hootsuite is a great choice. It will improve your productivity by managing all your social networks within a single dashboard. Plus, you can set it up to work within a team environment.

Other useful tools include Bitly, a trackable URL shortener. Social Mention is a social search tool and Klout is useful if you want to get a quick handle on the folks who are following your accounts.

Layering and Pulsing

Sustaining a compelling young adult marketing campaign at your credit union beyond two or three months is hard work. Once the dust settles, you really need to have a plan to sustain momentum over a long period of time. The way to do this is through a mix of layering and pulsing.

Consider adding contests from time to time. Everything from simple sweepstakes to elaborate user-generated video contests can be effective. What’s interesting is that contesting may seem to be nothing to do with sales and growth, but we’ve been able to correlate, time and time again, that an increase in Web traffic and attention translates into spikes in account growth. However, the social Web is experiencing a bit of contest fatigue as every brand clamors for attention, so you’ve got be creative and pretty generous with your prizing if you want to attract participation.

Smart contesting can work for companies of all sizes. Every year, Google invites K-12 students to work their artistic magic on the Google homepage logo. The winner receives a $15,000 scholarship, a computer and a $25,000 technology grant for his or her school. Google received 33,000 entries in 2013.

Focus in on personal interests of young people. If everything is about money it can get pretty boring. We’ve held a Sound Off Music Competition in Maine for the past three years and it’s one of our most successful contests. If you do something like this, the prizes have to be amazing. The grand prize at Sound Off is a recording session and a main stage spot at a major music festival.

And finally, don’t be afraid to sell to young adults online! In the early days of social media, sales were taboo, but it’s far more acceptable to provide a mix of helpful information and the occasional sales message.

We’re now in our seventh year of Young & Free Alberta and we’ve been experimenting with increasingly more direct sales promotions and have had great success in attracting new young members. We recently ran a geo- and demo-targeted online loan promotion that resulted in a 21 percent increase in the number of loans compared to the same period one year earlier. The paid media mix included Google network ads, YouTube pre-roll ads and Facebook boosted posts combined with free messaging on Twitter.

The Path Ahead

It will be a tough road ahead for smaller financial institutions to compete with the top 100 banks. But with hard work and focus on the next generation, credit unions can carve out a viable future. I will leave you with five ideas to implement. 1) Think long-term program vs. short-term promotion. 2) You need a big, appealing and versatile concept. 3) Use all available media. 4) Keep at it—it’s never really over. 5) And, you need dedicated resources.

Tim McAlpine is president and creative director of Currency Marketing. He is a credit union advocate best known for developing CUES Next Top Credit Union Exec and the Young & Free program that credit unions from around North America are using to connect with new young adult members. Subscribe to his blog and follow him on Twitter.

Photocredit: Dollarphotoclub.com/Syda Productions