“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
—James Clear, author, Atomic Habits
Marketing is creative. Marketing is branding. Marketing is sales. While all those are true, marketing is also something else.
Marketing is a system.
As noted in the James Clear quote above, goals are great but it’s your systems that will determine your success. Clear goes on to say, “Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there.”
If you want more marketing success; if you want to achieve more of your marketing goals, then you must systemize your marketing for success. But how do you do that?
Here are four ways to systemize your marketing.
Gather testimonials
Your greatest marketers do not work in your marketing department. Your greatest marketers are your raving fans (to steal Ken Blanchard’s term). While we all know that principle, what are you doing to systematically gather testimonials from your members/customers?
For a financial institution, when are your consumers most happy with you? Probably when you just approved them for that loan or when you just solved their problem. If that is case, make getting a testimonial part of the loan closing process. Or in the call center make getting testimonials from once angry and now happy members a part of the call process. By gathering that type of data on a routine basis, then when you go to market your credit union or community bank's products you will have a treasure trove of information from which to pull.
Use a content calendar
There are so many ways to communicate your message in today’s digital environment. While that’s great, it can also make your head spin. As a marketer, one of the worst feelings is staring at a blank screen and having to create a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or {insert other social channels} post today.
The best way to avoid that trap is to calendar out your content. Match that content calendar with your overall strategic and marketing plans (don't just throw anything up). Whether it is monthly or quarterly, you need to systematically communicate your content. You can use tools such as Hootsuite, Loomly, Monday.com, Buffer, SocialPilot or several others.
Implement Power Hour for your salespeople
There is marketing and then there is sales. One will not work without the other. One of the absolute best ways to grow your credit union or community bank is to turn your reactive salespeople into proactive salespeople. This means rather than them taking care of the business as it comes in, they carve out an hour a day to do outbound calling and follow-ups.
These people include your loan officers, service representatives and any other consumer facing positions. These touches could include check-in calls (“how’s that new truck we financed doing?”) to sales conversations (“what are you looking for in a new checking account?”) to writing thank you notes (“thanks so much for your business.”).
This type of contact will not happen on its own. It must be scheduled systematically. What gets calendared gets done. One tip we coach our member experience clients on is making sure every sales position has a regular “Power Hour” time to do those touches.
Customize your tools
You must adjust your marketing messages to the various channels you are using. We see this trap all the time in our marketing assessments: credit unions and community banks will post the exact same thing on Facebook as they do on Twitter or Instagram or Pinterest. But those are completely different mediums with completely different audiences.
One way to avoid that trap is to systematically customize the tools you are using. Just like you don’t use a Phillips screwdriver on a screw that requires a flathead, you don’t want to use the wrong marketing tool for the wrong audience. And here is a bonus tip when it comes to tools: you don’t need to use them all. Rather than having a toolbox full of 27 social tools or channels, narrow that down to three you can actually maintain.
Systemization is the key to achieving your personal goals. Systemization is also the key to your marketing success. You must systemize your marketing if you want to get sustainable results.
Not having success in your marketing? Maybe it’s not your marketing. Maybe it's your systems.
