Last week, I was on a bit of a road show, presenting three different sessions at two different conferences. I had a great time talking with credit union marketers in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in Schenectady, New York! Presenting new ideas to financial marketers is one of the favorite things about my job.

I presented three different topics to these marketers over the two days I was traveling. As I boarded my plane back home from New York, I found myself reflecting on the sessions and trying to pull out the main themes of the two days.

Through presentations on data analytics, digital marketing, and consumer trends, I kept returning to one central theme:

Relevancy

Relevancy is keeping your database clean and up to date. Remember the phrase garbage in, garbage out?

Relevancy is keying the right message to the right audience on the right platform. Have you ever seen a search ad that didn’t apply to what you were looking for?

Relevancy is paying attention to what your consumers want. Whoever thought to log into Mobile Banking with Touch ID and/or Face ID would be an expectation of consumers?

Are you still not buying the power of relevancy? 55% of those in the 22-38 age group told Entrepreneur magazine that brands that spam their email inbox with irrelevant messages lose their loyalty. 34% of respondents to a Forbes study found that irrelevant messages are actually, truly, annoying.

Gone are the “good ‘ol” marketing days of sending every email to everyone in the database, broad targeting digital ads and, yes, even point-of-sale displays in your branches. The more relevant your consumers find your messages to be, the more relevant your brand subconsciously becomes.

But practicing this type of relevant messaging is tricky, right? The C-Suite still focuses on the Marketing department sending out as many messages to as many people as possible as a success metric. Which means our conversation around success metrics needs to change in a relevancy-based world.

So what’s the rub? Where does the shift take place?

The other key takeaway from my sessions this week was focusing on ROI. As marketers, our primary goal is to show justification that our plans are working. Focusing on the true, ROI building, success metrics means that our plan of relevant marketing is working. That’s where the shift is taking place.

Happy marketing!