By Roy Urrico
The importance for credit unions to generate credible, appealing web content has never been more important and necessary. Providing self-supplied and timely material, however, can prove burdensome for financial institutions.
Beaumont, Texas-based DuGood Federal Credit Union ($347 million, 32,000 members) deployed FinancialFeed in July 2019. “Creating your own content takes an incredible amount of time and money,” said Rebecca Schexnyder, DuGood’s marketing communications specialist. “We were looking for a provider that offered professional, customizable, affordable content and we found that with FinancialFeed.” Schexnyder added FinancialFeed’s flexible licensing made it the ideal solution. “We have the FinancialFeed portal on our website,” she said, “but we’re also using individual articles as blog posts, as well as social media posts.” Added Schexnyder, “FinancialFeed has already been extremely helpful. We can easily customize the content and use it wherever we need to keep our members engaged.”
Roughly four years ago, DuGood completely redesigned their website. During the process, Schexnyder discovered the importance of providing helpful educational subject matter to the credit union’s members. “I started out trying to produce all of that content myself, but we all wear a lot of hats,” she noted. “I discovered to create and produce a really well written blog and make sure all your facts are checked and all your sources are good, can be pretty time consuming.” She determined it was not feasible to continue doing all
that background research based on the other projects on the board. At the same time, they wanted to remain faithful to members and provide them with that financial edge through educational content and updates at least weekly. As a result, they searched for a content provider.
“FinancialFeed came very well recommended and gave us a chance to preview their dashboard and all the blogs they work on. It was a great fit for us,” Schexnyder said. Moreover, DuGood found it effective in providing current, educational content for their website and social media posts.
“We can set it up through our web platform for our blogs to be immediately pushed or automatically pushed to social media,” Schexnyder said. She explained how easy FinancialFeed makes content available through a dashboard and a frequently updated blog library.
“It’s really helped our digital marketing ranking because Google sees that as fresh content. We're always hearing how Google prefers the site updated regularly and producing new content,” the DuGood marketing communication specialist said. Whenever DuGood publishes a blog through FinancialFeed, it also goes up on Facebook and Twitter, so members can engage through those channels as well. “We have quite a few social media followers and even email subscribers that have our blogs available to them.”
Schexnyder explained the updated website is appearing first or very close to the top in searches just though organic traffic. “That's not even through paid ads or anything on Google. We're very happy about that.” The DuGood website has also received many positive reviews and high rankings including a 4.9 out of five rating based on 1,550 reviews by review platform, Trustpilot.
When we caught up with DuGood in January before the COVID-19 outbreak, Schexnyder said the credit union’s focus was on content to help members get their finances in better shape, mortgages, auto loans, and security measures to keep their member accounts safe.
FinancialFeed leverages a content delivery system developed by nationally recognized cybersecurity expert Jim Stickley, founder of Stickley on Security. Standard FinancialFeed licensing grants financial institutions non-exclusive rights to use the content outside of the FinancialFeed portal at no additional cost.
Kelsie Papenhausen, national sales manager, OmniChannel Communications, Inc., said there are several important facets that differentiate FinancialFeed content from other providers. “Our content is interesting and engaging. We’re not trying to give anybody a Ph.D. in macroeconomics and our articles are designed to provide actionable information that members can use today.” Papenhausen pointed out FinancialFeed content is fresh with three-five original articles added weekly, the information portal resides on the credit union’s website and the platform is fully social media-enabled for an ideal content marketing tool.”
Papenhausen maintained, “Our goal is to help credit unions engage with members and potential members by providing content they simply can’t get anywhere else.”