Millennials on a Mission to Learn About Financial Literacy

Millennials have been the most attractive generation for all financial services for a while. And, as has been widely reported, they will – if they haven’t already – overtake baby boomers in 2015 as the largest living generation.

For the majority of marketers, this generation remains mysterious because the proven ways of engaging and connecting don’t apply to these technology natives.

Almost a year ago, during the THINK 14 Conference, CO-OP Financial Services launched a Millennial campaign on Twitter, FaceBook and a dedicated website; supported through paid media and search. The first few months were dedicated to testing and experimenting. Over time, three common themes emerged:

1. Millennials are visual: This generation is highly visual as learners and communicators. The credit union story needs to be told visually through videos, quizzes, infographics and enticing imagery.
2. Millennials don’t react to push marketing, but will engage with pull marketing: Content is king. Pushing the credit union message directly might get some reaction initially but attention will be blocked for future attempts. So, the CO-OP campaign dedicated itself to be a valuable helper for the audience through a combination of owned and curated content.
3. Use Twitter to build your community, Facebook as a paid reach platform. Twitter still offers 100 percent organic reach, while Facebook delivers on its promise of reach through its advanced targeting opportunities. Both social platforms require paid media support to reach, engage and connect with people; engaging content helps to keep the media investment as low as possible.

And the results speak for themselves: The CO-OP campaign has 99,500 followers and 9,200 fans on Facebook (as of May 1, 2015).

Based on progress during year one, CO-OP is evolving the campaign to a state-of-the-art financial literacy platform with the goal to spread the credit union message to a bigger audience. The last year showed us that Millennials are open to listening to our message and a fire was ignited. CO-OP intends to keep it burning.

Bill Prichard is senior manager/public relations and corporate communications, for CUES Supplier member CO-OP Financial Services, a financial technology provider to credit unions based in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. He can be reached at mailto:bill.prichard@co-opfs.org and 800.782.9042, ext. 3450.