CULytics created digital marketing maturity model and a self-assessment survey that credit union leaders can take to get a view into their existing digital marketing practices and guidance on where to invest.

We have some credit unions take this assessment and here are the aggregate results.

Where Is The Industry Today?

1. The industry as an overall is at Basic Level (Level 2 out of 4) as far as their digital marketing maturity is concerned. Of all the credit unions, who have taken the survey, none of them assessed themselves to be at level 3 (Managed) or level 4 (Optimized). 40% are at level 1 (Ad-hoc).
2. 50% of the CUs are still measuring the performance of their marketing practice by counting the number of campaigns. 30% claim that they use the number of leads and 30% say that they use the lead quality in addition to the number of leads.
3. 40% spend less than 15% of their marketing budget on digital. Only 10% spend more than 60% of their marketing budget on digital marketing.
4. 30% outsource their digital marketing and 20% have dedicated staff for digital marketing with well-defined roles.

Where Is The Industry Heading?

In terms of priorities for the next 12-24 months. Here are the top priorities.

1. Highest priority for most credit unions is to get better at market segmentation and targeting, closely followed by marketing data integration, business intelligence and data science.
2. Lowest priority, as per survey is affiliate marketing and proximity marketing.

Technology Needs

In terms of technology needs.

1. 80% of the respondents still use disparate point tools instead of integrated digital marketing platform.
2. Only 10% have data that is integrated and shared across applications and their marketing technology stack.

Challenges

We asked the respondents, what are the top barriers in driving and executing on digital marketing strategy and here is how they responded.

1. "Inadequate Marketing Technology infrastructure" is seen as the number one challenge.
2. Closely behind this is "Lack of digital skills".
3. This is closely followed by "Lack of Funding" and "Lack of understanding of digital Trends".

What is also interesting is that only a very small percentage of respondents see the following factors are barriers.

1. Lack of executive support - 20%
2. Lack of formally defined organizational priorities - 20%
3. Lack of data - 30%

This is very preliminary analysis and I would share more details as I get a chance to think through the survey data.