Fractional CMO + Marketing Team · Credit Unions

A chief for lending. A chief for tech. A chief for ops. Who's leading your marketing?

You're investing six figures a year in marketing. It's spread across vendors who each own a piece, and nobody owns the result.

That's the job we do. We come in, find what's broken, clean it up, and point the whole thing at what your board actually asked for this year. Membership. Loans. Products per household.

Led by someone who ran marketing inside a credit union, then went and did it in industries where nobody grades on a curve.

Start with an audit A full look at your marketing, your market, and where the business is actually leaving money.

Is your marketing actually working? Do you know?

$300K–$1M

a year, at most credit unions. That's members' money.

It's going to a website agency, a digital agency, a print shop, a direct mail company, and a stack of sponsorships nobody has measured since 2019. Maybe you have a small internal team. Maybe you don't have one at all.

Marketing activity is happening. But are those the right initiatives? Is any of it moving toward the goals of your credit union? Who is aligning all of it toward what your board actually asked for this year?

If the honest answer is nobody, that's not a vendor problem. It's a structure problem. And you can't fix a structure problem by hiring another vendor.

Most credit unions are stuck in one of two places

01

You have a team of doers, but no driver.

Your marketing manager or coordinator is talented, hardworking, and completely buried. They're checking boxes. Newsletters, social posts, the branch grand opening, whatever lending asked for on Tuesday. Nobody is steering toward the things that actually matter, like products per household or what it costs you to acquire a member.

That's not their fault. Nobody ever gave them the altitude.

02

Or there's no marketing team at all.

Maybe it's one person wearing six hats. Maybe marketing landed on an executive's desk because it had to land somewhere. Maybe it's three agencies who have never been in the same room, each sending a report that says things are going great.

Are they? You don't have the marketing background to challenge them. And asking an agency to grade its own homework has never gone well for anybody.

We're not an agency

Some agencies sell you senior people and staff you with junior ones. A lot of the time you're one client of who knows how many their team is juggling. And some of them send vanity reports full of metrics that mean very little when it comes to driving ROI.

Plenty of agencies are great. We'll tell you if yours is one of them.

What we are is a team that works inside your credit union. A marketing leader who has sat in your chair, senior specialists who do the work, and a system that turns strategy into output faster than a small department can manage alone.

We only take on a limited number of credit unions. Never two that compete with each other.

That's not scarcity marketing. It's the only way to get close enough to your business to be worth anything. It also means your peers in other markets can hear about us from you without it costing you a single member.

Why credit unions need a fractional CMO + marketing team

Because the money is already going out the door and nobody senior is accountable for it.

We find what's broken.

The marketing problems at a credit union are usually things that were ignored or never done in the first place, quietly, for years. Compliance gaps sitting in your email platform. Analytics that were never set up, so nothing has actually been measured. Automations that stopped running and nobody noticed. Nobody meant for any of it to happen. That's exactly why it's still there.

We clean it up.

Not a list of problems handed to you with a sad face. We fix them.

We evaluate your agencies and partners.

Read the contracts. Look at the work. Tell you what's earning its money and what's coasting. Then manage the ones worth keeping.

We lead the strategy and we do the work.

Membership, loans, products per household. The plan, plus the campaigns, emails, and content that make it real.

And the whole point is for you to outgrow us.

We're not building a dependency. We're building a marketing function strong enough that one day you can staff it yourself.

Knowing where to look and knowing what good looks like are two different things

01 The half almost everyone has

Seven years inside a credit union

I led marketing at a large regional credit union in Virginia for seven years. I ran the department, the team, and every outside agency and vendor we worked with. So I know how a credit union actually runs.

The board packet The compliance review The branch politics The vendor nobody remembers signing
02 The half almost nobody does

Then years where nobody grades on a curve

I left and spent years leading marketing for brands where you produce or you're gone. Trucks, filters, gym equipment, and frozen dessert do not let you coast on being the friendly local option. I was also head of marketing for a startup with five brands in its portfolio. Five brands, one small team, everybody wanting to go first. If you've ever watched lending, credit card services, and the branches all need the same three weeks of your team's time, you already know how that goes.

Volvo Trucks N.A. NAPA Auto Parts MATRIX Fitness Lindy's Italian Ice

Most people in credit union marketing have the first half. Almost nobody has both.

The numbers, from real campaigns

$19M

in home equity closings. Built the campaigns that drove it.

#1

lender in the market, with 14.94% of indirect loans financed, after building the material that made the dealership relationships actually work.

$21M+

certificate campaign that blew past its goal at a 1% rate. Try that today at 4%.

50K

impressions on a member lifestyle brand built from survey data. Six guides, a three-minute average read. Focused on budgeting, every day life savings. Members loved it.

240%

more demos in a single quarter. Different industry, same job. Find what's actually working and pivot hard.

Is this you?

The CEO or COO

You get a monthly report that says things are great. You don't feel it in your numbers. You suspect you're paying premium rates for basic execution, but you don't have the marketing background to prove it, and nobody in the building does either.

I'm your CMO. Marketing starts generating ROI and make the marketing budget an investment that drives organization growth.

The executive who inherited marketing

You run HR. Or operations. Or lending. And somewhere along the way marketing landed on your desk because it had to land somewhere. Now you're approving creative you're not sure about and managing vendors you didn't hire. It's the part of your job you think about least and worry about most.

I'll take it. Not the fun parts. The whole function.

The one-person marketing team

You have somebody good and they are drowning. They cannot be strategic and produce everything at the same time. Nobody can. That's not a them problem, it's a math problem.

Give them a leader and a team. They stay. They get better. And they finally get to do the job you hired them for.

Every engagement starts with an audit

Not a proposal. Not a sales call with a deck.

Every vendor and every contract. Your analytics and your martech. Your competitors, using data most credit unions never bother to pull. Your positioning. Then a marketing strategy, presented to your leadership team.

Most audits find more than they cost.

And it's yours whether you ever work with us again.

Questions, answered straight

What's a fractional CMO? +

Senior marketing leadership without the full-time salary. You get the strategy and someone accountable for whether it works. With us, you also get the team that does the work.

Do you replace our marketing person? +

No. They get a leader. Most marketing people at credit unions are talented and stranded. That's a structure problem, not a talent problem.

Will you work with our existing agency? +

If they're good, yes. If they're not, we'll help you find a better agency partner.

How much of my team's time does this take? +

More at the start, because we can't lead what we don't understand. We'll be asking a lot of questions. After that, regular check-ins to stay aligned and approvals on the work. We collaborate, we communicate, and we keep you in the loop. You will not be babysitting us.

How fast do we see results? +

No magic pill. It depends on your budget, your goals, and what comes out of the audit and strategy. Anybody promising fast results before they know those three things is full of doo-doo.

What does it cost? +

We start with a full audit, discovery, and a high-level marketing strategy. What comes after depends on what that turns up. A $250 million credit union and a $900 million credit union are not the same job and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Let's talk.

Our goal is for you to fire us.

Not today. But eventually, when your marketing is strong enough that you can invest in hiring a full marketing team. That's the win. For both of us.

Until then, somebody has to own your marketing.

Let's talk

No deck, no pressure. Just an honest look at where your credit union is and where it needs to be.

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