“Digital transformation” has drastically changed the financial services industry over the past decade. And as digital technology integrates into every area of business, the pace of change isn’t slowing down. 

First, Fintechs disrupted the industry. Now it’s “techfins”—technology companies like Amazon and Apple—elbowing their way into banking as the next disruptors. Add to that the revolutionary potential of AI, biometrics and other technologies, and it’s easy to understand why credit unions are searching for ways to adapt, thrive and stand out from the crowd.

Digital marketing, when done holistically, gives credit unions plenty of opportunities to grow their business. But what is digital marketing for credit unions? Which digital marketing strategies actually deliver results? 

In this article, we’ll answer those questions and more, all with an eye toward helping your credit union embrace digital marketing strategies and tactics to enable your CU to keep pace in an ever-changing environment.

What Is Digital Marketing for Credit Unions?

WebRanking’s 9th Annual Toy Drive is a Wrap!

Since 2012, WebRanking has happily participated in the Toys for Tots annual toy drive. This year was our 9^th annual visit to our favorite local toy stores, where we bought bags full of toys to gift to children in need.

“Your ads have been disapproved…”

Many credit unions are receiving ad denial emails after attempting to enhance their Facebook ad campaigns. These denials are part of a settlement reached between anti-discriminatory groups and Facebook resulting in new policies that took effect in August of this year.

While your current ad campaigns might still be approved, once you make any changes to them, or create new ones, they will immediately fall into the special “credit opportunity” ad category and will not be approved.

That’s a Wrap! WebRanking’s 8th Annual Toy Drive

Since 2012, WebRanking has happily participated in the Toys for Tots annual toy drive. This year was our 8^th annual visit to our favorite toy stores, where we bought bags full of toys to gift to children in need.

*December 2017 Update for gtag.js

Event tracking is important on a website. It’s the only way to track user engagement. There are certain links that don’t naturally trigger any kind of tracking via Google Analytics, whether you’re using async (ga.js) or universal analytics. The most common are:

• PDF Downloads – <a href="someurl.pdf">Download my PDF</a>
• Mailto (Email) Links – <a href="mailto:[email protected]">Email Me</a>
• Phone Links – <a href="tel:+18885556792">Call Me</a>

There are a couple ways to track these. You can use Google Tag Manager to create a tag then make a rule. I’m not yet a GTM expert. I personally like good old fashioned jQuery.

How It Used To Be Done

We all know by now that it’s important to put your keywords in as many places as you can, within reason, to get the most SEO value out of them. But are there any places that work, that shouldn’t? I decided to find out.

I placed a made up word in various parts of the source code of several different pages to see if I could get my pages to show up in search results for that term in Google. Here are the places I tried:

• Image Alt
• Class or ID Attributes
• Title Attribute
• Meta Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• < !–comment– >
• A Hidden Element
• A Javascript Written Element
• Words that are part of an image

I used each of these only 1 time per page. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any skewed results. Let’s see how they did!

GoTo.com, a ground-breaking pay per click search engine from the Dot Com era, launched a new Alpha version on March 28th, 2017 with a nostalgic design but to little fanfare.

This time it’s billing itself as “A human-powered search platform” with Organic search results instead of Paid listings.

GoTo.com Searches Again!

The WebRanking crew plays Santa!

Run the PageSpeed Insight Tool on a page on your website, and you’ll see how well your page scores. But what you won’t see is how certain things really affect your site…like by how much they’re truly affecting the score.

We’re going to take a look at how different scripts affect it. Let’s see!

SMX Advanced has long been regarded as the mecca for search engine marketers. Its known for being the source for “advanced” level content and breaking search news. This year I was given the honor of participating in not one session, but two!

James Svoboda presented at SMX Advanced 2016 in Seattle.

 
While I was originally there to present for the 9 Billion Ads of Paid Search session, the nice folks at Bing Ads asked me to join their Search Hacks session with some of my favorite PPC people Melissa Mackey and Christi Olson. They podcasted it and I’ll be sharing it with you when I find a copy.

9 Billion Ads of Paid Search session at SMX Advanced 2016.

 
The venerable Matt Van Wagner moderated the 9 Billion Ads session for which my presentation is titled “The Changing Landscape of Paid Search“. It’s a detailed look at the recent changes in search marketing and how they affect pay per click search ads.