TAMPA-GTE Financial here saw a nearly 800% increase in its viral reach during its "Lucky 13" awareness campaign.
For 13 days in January, the 192,000-member, $1.5-billion credit union ran a campaign promoting a different service it offers each day, such as focusing on free checking one day, shared branching another, or 28,000 free ATMs on another day. The campaign was marketed via banner ads on GTE Financial's webpage, Facebook and Twitter posts, online banking, ATM screens and digital billboards.
Financial incentives were part of the promotion. Members who visited the CU's homepage and clicked on the Lucky 13 banner could read information on that day's featured benefit and then fill out a short form with a keyword that entered them into a daily drawing for $100, as well as a $500 grand prize selected from all entrants.
All tolled, 3,684 unique visitors participated in the campaign for a total of 14,193 entries during the 13-day run. Nearly 1,100 members played daily, and the CU saw a 286% increase in Facebook engagement during that time-including 211 new "Likes" on its Facebook page-and a 349% increase in consumers discussing the CU and the promo. Those stats were measured by Facebook analytics.
A Common CU Struggle
"Every credit union struggles that the membership doesn't understand our products and services," explained Jennifer Maxfield, AVP of marketing. "Yes, we want to encourage people that aren't members to become members, but it's also an education piece to help onboard some of our current members to some of the services they didn't know we had."
The promotion was similar to another that GTE ran in late 2011. That push, "The 12 Days of GTE," was only open to members and did not involve a financial component. Maxfield said that those two changes made a big difference this time around, even if the overall participation was fairly similar.
"It definitely helped with the social side, because people got excited about a daily prize," she said, "but I don't think it showed a humongous lift in entries per day."
Rather than the possible financial reward for participating, Maxfield said that the gamification was a big part of the draw. "It's fun; you're learning at the same time that you're also playing a game, and it's something to look forward to."
She conceded that money was also an appeal for some people, but believes that gamification played a larger role, evidenced in part by the significant lift in engagement. At one point, more than 300 people shared the CU's Facebook post.
Tracking The Effort
GTE has not yet looked deeply into any lift the campaign might have provided, and does not expect to do so until mid-March at the earliest. It did not have a method to track engagement during the "12 Days of GTE," but included a "Lucky 13" line in the "How did you hear about us?" dropdown form for new memberships and loan applications that it hopes to use to measure the recent campaign.
Maxfield stressed that while a social media campaign of this kind is low budget, it was extraordinarily labor intensive. Employees had to update the website and social media sites every day, update forms associated with the campaign, and more.
"Even though the main cost was associated with the prizes, it takes a lot of resources to implement something like this on a daily basis," said Maxfield.
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