Marketing at a credit union should be accountable for performance.

A lot of the time it isn’t. It’s treated as something you need to have. There’s a budget. There’s a person or a small team. Campaigns go out. And nobody can tie any of it back to loan growth or product penetration.

That isn’t always somebody’s fault. Sometimes the tech stack can’t do it. Sometimes nobody in the seat has had to do it before.

Either way you end up with marketing as a nice-to-have. And a nice-to-have is the first thing cut and the last thing believed.

So that’s what to hire for. Not the big campaign. The accountability.

What should credit union marketing be accountable for?

Loan growth, product penetration, and member growth. The same things you’re already measured on. If marketing reports in impressions and engagement while you’re accountable for loans and deposits, there’s no way to hold marketing to anything, and no way for marketing to prove it did anything either.

This sounds obvious written down. It’s rare in practice.

Here’s a quick way to check. Put your last three marketing reports next to the goals you’re actually accountable for this year. If they don’t share a single number, you’ve found something.

Why can’t we connect marketing to loan growth right now?

Usually one of two things. Your systems don’t connect marketing activity to account and loan data, so the line can’t be drawn. Or nobody in the marketing seat has built that connection before, so nobody asked for it. Different problems, different fixes, worth knowing which one you have.

• The tech stack can’t do it

Marketing tools and core systems don’t talk to each other. Attribution isn’t set up, or it’s set up wrong. Nobody has the admin rights to add the properties that would matter. Campaign data sits in one place, account data sits in another, and nothing joins them.

This is a project. It has a cost and a timeline, and somebody can scope it.

• Nobody in the seat has done it

Plenty of capable marketing people have never had to tie their work to a loan number, because nobody ever asked them to. That’s a skills gap, and it’s a fair one.

It turns into a problem when it goes unnamed. The reporting stays at the level the person knows how to produce, and over time everybody agrees that’s just what marketing reporting looks like here.

What should you ask before you hire one?

Five questions, and you don’t need a marketing background for any of them. How would you tie our marketing to loan growth. What would you need from our systems to do that. What would you tell us to stop doing. Who does the work every week. What does failure look like at 90 days.

1. How would you tie our marketing to loan growth?
   Listen for whether they ask you questions back. What’s in your core. What’s in your marketing platform. Whether those two things talk to each other.

   
   Somebody who answers this confidently without asking anything about your systems hasn’t done it.

2.  What would you need from our systems to do that?

   A real answer names things. Specific access, specific data, somebody internal who can grant permissions.

   A vague answer here usually means vague reporting later.

3. What would you tell us to stop doing?
   

   This one sorts people faster than anything else on the list. Anyone who can’t name something either hasn’t looked at you closely or isn’t going to tell you the truth once you’re paying them.

   They don’t have to be right. They have to be willing.

4. Who does the work every week?
   

   The person pitching often isn’t the person on the account. That’s a normal structure and good work happens inside it. The problem is only ever not knowing.

   Ask how many other clients that person carries, and who picks up the phone when something breaks.

5. What does failure look like at 90 days?

If nobody can describe failure, nobody’s going to recognize it. You’ll be a year in, vaguely unhappy, with no agreed standard to point at.

Should you hire fractional or full-time?

Fractional fits when you need the decisions more than you need the seat. Usually that’s an institution with a coordinator or a small team, maybe an agency, and nobody senior setting direction or defending the budget. Full-time fits once marketing is complex enough to need somebody in the building every day.

The one worth watching for is under-leveling. You need direction, so you hire execution, because execution costs less and the job description is easier to write.

Then you’ve got a capable person doing good work and nothing strategic changes.