When I was the VP Marketing for First Tech Credit Union I was in charge of the website. This is back in 1997 when websites were in their infancy. We paid an inordinate amount of money for the first one to be built (read, as much as my first home). My job was to keep the content fresh. We had pages and pages of marketing copy. But I wondered, was anyone reading it? When they land on the home page, where do they go next? Is our navigation working?
Microsoft (who was one of our SEGs) had just come out with some fancy software that could tell us just that. The guy in IT described it to me in this way “Imagine a field of freshly fallen snow, this software is going to show you the footprints in that snow so you can see the “path” people take when they go to your website. Yay! I couldn’t wait to see the results. I never could have imagined it at the time. There was a muddy trough directly to the home banking login. The majority of the pages were not visited even ONCE!
What an eye opener. Fast forward 20 years and here we have Kirk’s book telling us that members are probably still doing the same thing. That’s why most of us don’t dare bury the login to home banking for fear of losing them entirely. So how do we get our members to read our stuff? It’s so simple, make it relevant and compelling and local! Yes local.
Last week we talked about how the Google machine rules the world. If you want to be found you need to know how Google sees the world. Google loves local. Create local content that is hyper-targeted at an age group, a population, an experience or a region – whatever it is, target it in a way that Bank of America or other big banks can’t. I just looked at several credit union websites and few even have “content.” Most have copy, which isn’t the same thing. Here’s the difference.
Read more on The “E” in DREAM Big Contest: Educate and Excite!…
