Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to Episode Two of the Content Machine podcast with LeAnne Bentley, who’s the CMO for Leader’s Credit Union. All right, so since coming to Leaders, what are some of the things that you’ve learned about marketing?
Leigh Anne Bentley
What I’ve learned about marketing since coming to leaders? I know I talked about getting in the weeds more, but really getting into the data has been great. Because you can really see people what their needs are, how to help them. I think it’s been a lot more smart marketing. And I think in the past, we had a lot of TV campaigns, and I still buy tons of TV. I love TV. But if you’re buying broadcast, you’re marketing to the masses. You’re doing cable, you can market to much more select targeted groove for the golf channel or the fishing channel or common, you know who’s watching those channels. But when you get into even the digital, which is the more trackable now, which is great, or when you’re trying to get to your data, you can really pinpoint what their needs are. I love the fact that I don’t want to send a checking account campaign to someone who’s had a checking account with us for five years. And so you do a TV campaign, you’re targeting people who… Everybody, in a sense. And so I love how deep you can get into the numbers to make sure you’re targeting the right people, that your message is the right, because I always tell our team, My job is to make sure it’s not just pretty, but it’s effective.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Do you have your right call to action on there? Do you have the right headline on there? And they do a phenomenal job. I mean, I’m not… That’s something that comes natural, but it’s being able to really get deeper in the data into the numbers. I love how you can track things now because again, we’ve even been trying to tracking some TV. We put some QR codes on some television. And so they have we’ll say, hey, that came from… We actually had an ad in Super Bowl. And so we had several come back to our ITM tracking and says, hey, this person watched it in Memphis. This person watched it in Jackson. And so it was fun to see where those came from. Now, broadcast is still a little different. It’s harder to track that still. And I wish I want that magic wand. This is how many came through this. Now we do ask those questions. When you join later, our questions at the end. How did you hear about us?
Kevin Adelsberger
Do you think those are accurate statistics?
Leigh Anne Bentley
I think some of the information is. They’ll say, I mean, it shows where they saw it. I think.
Kevin Adelsberger
It’s a magic wand. Or when they self-report.
Leigh Anne Bentley
And.
Kevin Adelsberger
So- Do you feel good about those?
Leigh Anne Bentley
I like seeing them. The ones that I like to see are the ones that we pull in from our Google tag manager. Oh, sure. I love seeing them on our dashboard. We know this media brought in X number and actually seeing the funnel. We were looking at here’s how many people actually may have clicked on our application and this number actually completed it. But what happened in the middle? And so why are they falling off? Where’s the hard spot that… What do we need to fix? Is there something that’s keeping them? So getting in those nuances and those little details is the fun thing that I wasn’t able to do on the agency side.
Kevin Adelsberger
Well, and probably something that’s changed.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Since- Oh, it’s changed quite a bit.
Kevin Adelsberger
What have been some of your big successes, you think? Big successes. That you can talk about here, I guess.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I don’t think I can take credit for any just really big success. I think it’s been such a team effort. I think we’ve got a great leadership team that works well together. I think we’ve got a great marketing team. We do a lot of things that I’m proud of that’s a little different than agency worlds. Like I said, everything was billable hours and so my mind still thinks that way. But every Friday morning we have a marketing huddle. And so we read a book together and try to learn from that, or we have somebody come in from outside and come talk to us about something. And so I think it’s being able to be interested to have continuous improvement, not constantly being right at the computer, constantly productive. So I think we’re being more productive by bringing those things in. By sharpening your ax. Exactly, by sharpening your ax. With the first two hours sharpening your ax instead of cutting down the tree, exactly. So I think the successes have been really coming together. We’ve done a lot of great things. We’ve had great campaigns. We’ve launched our new website. We’ve launched a new CR-M.
Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve brought in different… We’ve opened up new branches. Merchandising is something that’s fun with us that we do a lot of our places. But I really just think it’s coming together as a whole and seeing a single vision. Our IT department has really enhanced and we work really well with them. And I think the last couple of years, especially operations, marketing, and IT, including analytics, has just been we meet frequently, making sure that right-hand knows what left hand is doing, that we are maximizing our efforts. And it goes back. Instead of a one big success, it’s those small incremental things that makes a bigger difference in the long run.
Kevin Adelsberger
That makes a lot of sense, especially an organization your size. There’s so many things that could go wrong.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I think that’s one thing. That’s something else I’ve had to do a lot with, is there is a lot more crisis management, I guess, in this. You think about it when an ATM goes down or something else happens or there is some data issue. Stuff happens. Things happen all the time. We have to make sure we’re on point that we’re communicating with our members. I think communication is key. I think that’s one thing I love about marketing is the more you communicate, I think it’s just if people know what’s going on, it’s so much less nerve-ing than being left in the dark.
Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, because if you don’t have a good reason for something, you’re going.
Leigh Anne Bentley
To assume the worst. Our online banking goes down and we don’t have something posted that they can go and go, Oh, that’s what’s going on. Then they start getting on Facebook and then it’s like, Oh, something’s happened. Also my team is really good if it’s nose on a white day and we’re responsible to get up that morning, know, we work with operations on what’s going on. And then we’re putting out those communications, putting out our social media posts, our email, what’s going on in online banking, our in-app messages. So there’s more ways to communicate now than ever. So many more ways. So I think that’s something that’s changed a lot. There are so many ways to communicate. Sometimes there’s too many. Because sometimes I’m like, I know someone sent me something, but is it on my email or is it in my team or is it in my Slack or Facebook Messenger or they text me? Oh, yeah.
Kevin Adelsberger
So we actually… For our team, we have a standard of communication about what you use to communicate about what, because I was tired of getting text messages. I was like, No, only send me a text message if something is on fire or I’m not at my desk. Because yeah, there’s so many channels.
Leigh Anne Bentley
And it just keeps growing. We have 70,000 members right now. So you think, Okay, so how am I communicating with them? And what is their best method? Texting right now is one of the best methods, but you also have to make sure you’re compliant. So the hell goes back. Because one thing at agency world, because I did do bank marketing before, my area that I specialize in was professional services. I basically did banks, insurance, real estate, and then B2B. So I was already used to the compliance side on the banking side, but you still have to dig in even deeper and different things. And can I do this? And we have a great compliance officer that is not a, No, you can’t do it. There’s this. You can’t do that, but let’s find a way that gets you- Which.
Kevin Adelsberger
Is a great quality of the compliance- Fantastic. -is fantastic and not super common.
Leigh Anne Bentley
It’s not common. I’ll go to conferences and they’re like, Oh, don’t you hate working with compliance? I’m like, No, they keep me out of trouble. They’re like, Make sure if you add this on there, if you add this disclosure, then you’re good. I love working with our compliance department.
Kevin Adelsberger
Well, what are some of the challenges that you think you face in your role?
Leigh Anne Bentley
Challenges? Well, things are changing drastically. You have to constantly stay up what is the latest thing. Obviously, TikTok is one of the biggest things. But for security, we’re not on TikTok. You can’t do it right now. There’s different trends from that. I do think I talked about AI earlier, just got back from a conference where the whole conference was talking about AI. And so… And the changes with that. And everybody loves ChatGPT and everybody loves the programs, but people think of that one. But people think of that one, but AI is going into so many different areas. And so I will say the one takeaway, because the biggest question that we kept on being asked over and over again, Well, is AI going to take over? You’re going to have to cancel all marketing jobs because of AI? Absolutely not. But the marketing people who are not using AI are the ones that aren’t going to be long term. You just have to incorporate that and make sure you’re utilizing it in the best uses. And I would say the biggest threat to us coming up in a good and bad way is AI because so much fraud can happen in the AI aspect.
Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve already talked about that. How can we look for different ways to thort fraud through different services. It’s very prevalent. Every day text messages going out, people spoofing emails. It is so prevalent that we’re actually doing a fraud campaign as we speak. We’ll be launching it. We’ve already launched it digitally. We’re actually even doing postcards. We understand this is not a money maker for us, obviously, but we want to make sure our.
Kevin Adelsberger
Members- increases trust with.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Your members. Well, I hope so because we want them to be taken care of. We want the ones… We don’t want them clicking on a link in the text that’s going to a fraudulent aspect. We don’t want people getting phone calls from leaders that didn’t sound like us, but they’re saying, Hey, I need your username and password. We will never ask for your username and password on the phone. We tell our members, and I hope everybody listening here, no matter what institution you’re using, if you get a phone call from one and you’re not sure or even if you just want to be careful, say, You know what? I’ll hang up and call you from a number I know. And what’s your name? I’ll ask for you. We tell our people that all the time. If you’re concerned about who you’re speaking with, hang up. Don’t call this number back, because they spoof our number. And they said, Just get online, find a number that you know is us, and ask from me. And so we try to do that all the time, making sure people are talking to the right people and not getting scammed because it’s very prevalent.
Kevin Adelsberger
I am a citizen of the internet, and I am probably less prone to being phished or manipulated than most people. And someone hacked one of our customers’ emails a couple of weeks ago, and they got me. And I tried to log in to something that wasn’t the right link because I was chasing business. And then a couple of hours later, he’s like, Sorry, we got hacked. And I was like.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Oh, no.
Kevin Adelsberger
I had to tell my team that I got phished.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, no, I understand. We have very stringent security or IT department. I’d put them up against anyone, but things still happen. And so we’re trying to be so proactive. We also are reactive. We have services that we use that if you’re traveling, let us know you’re traveling, or you may get denied until we call you and say, Are you in Boston? Are you in Texas? Or did you make this last charge? And I think members really appreciate that. Sometimes it can be frustrating. Like, My car got denied. Yeah, you’re just trying to buy gas. I’m just trying. But in some foreign place, they weren’t not supposed to be, but we didn’t know they were. And so it can just happen that way. But we try to be proactive. I do think fraud and marketing against fraud and toward fraud and safety is a huge thing, and how AI is going to.
Kevin Adelsberger
Increase that. Oh, yeah. It’s going to get way more dangerous here.
Leigh Anne Bentley
You have voice. People can replicate voices and everything else. It’s going to be wild.
Kevin Adelsberger
So other than AI, what do you think the future of look marketing looks like? Which I know AI is a big part of it, but I didn’t want your answer.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Just to be AI. Just to be AI? Well, I think we don’t know what it’s going to be like in five years, because I think the transition has been so fast. They talked about the Internet took what, four years to hit 100 million people, and AI has taken four months, one of those types of things. So I don’t know what’s going to be next because I think it doesn’t exist yet. And so I think looking at big picture marketing, I still think it all goes back to knowing your… It goes back to the basics. Who is your target audience? How do you reach them properly and how do you treat them? It goes back to the whole umbrella, back to that see, smell, taste, touch, hear, experience. It goes back to treating your members or treating your customers the way you want to be treated and putting them first and smart marketing. Again, like I said, not marketing a product to them that they’ve already had, or don’t market a student loan to an 85-year-old. I might say that my 85-year-old doesn’t need a student loan somewhere, but that’s not- But statistically. Specifically speaking, know your audience.
Leigh Anne Bentley
And I think people want to be heard and they want to feel, I guess, one of the buzzwords that’s been around a little while that we use frequently and we talk about a lot in marketing, is the personalization, that marketing is not for the masses anymore. I mean, it is personalized and it’s personal. And so it goes back to that connection. I mean, two-way communication is here. People constantly posting stuff to you through email, through through chats, through all social media platforms, anything public, anything’s out there. And so we want to make sure that our members are heard and that we’re providing the services that they want and that we’re growing with them. Because some products we have now may not be needed a couple of years from now. So don’t- So it’s not just the marketing, but it’s what you’re selling. So don’t always hold on to something just because you’ve always done it. And that’s one thing we do say a lot in my department is just because it’s always done that way. That’s a pet peeve-like. And so we’re always, after every event, we sit down and have a continuous improvement meeting.
Leigh Anne Bentley
After something else happens, we sit down and go, We have done this better. And then that’s the first thing we look at when we start working on the next project.
Kevin Adelsberger
All right, one last question. If you had a little change in your pocket… Just kidding. We work with you guys on producing the pocket change podcast.
Leigh Anne Bentley
You did a.
Kevin Adelsberger
Great job. You guys ended that question. And so I was just going to set you up for that one. But LeAnne, thank you for taking the time to join us on the Content Machine podcast.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Can I just stay on that? Yeah. Watch the pocket change podcast.
Kevin Adelsberger
That is- That’s right. Anything you want to pitch? And then where should they find out more about the Leaders Education Foundation?
Leigh Anne Bentley
Leadersgives. Org. And please join, $10.
Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. That’s hard to argue with. So thank you for your time.
Leigh Anne Bentley
Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.
Kevin Adelsberger
Thank you for listening to the second episode of the LeAnne Bentley podcast. If you missed the first one, go back in the feed and check it out. Thank you for checking out the Content Machine and we hope to catch you on future episodes.
