Staffing a marketing department isn’t just about filling seats. It’s about assembling a team with the right blend of skills, perspectives, and leadership to navigate the evolving marketing landscape. There are very successful marketers who didn’t start out in a traditional marketing role, but rather came from member service or technical positions. Your career may have led you along a circuitous route, but looking back you find the skill you developed or most enjoyed at one role led you to your next. If you’re lucky enough, over time you get the privilege of doing more of what you love.
The first ten years of my career prepared me for leadership challenges to come. In one role, working on the front line in branches and call centers helped me to understand consumers’ pain points; in another, leading a staff of 20, many of whom were single parents, helped me see working parent challenges first-hand. Later, ensuring sales employees had the tools to do their job and earn a robust incentive showed me the variety of ways people find motivation.
I brought those frames of reference with me when I moved away from operations and into marketing. Personally and professionally we all have different challenges, different perspectives, and different inspiration. It’s marketing’s job to make emotional and practical connections with members and prospective members.
Today’s marketing leader
Today, a marketer’s toolbox is overflowing – there’s a tool for every need. When CEOs go looking for their next marketing leader, are they looking for the SEO expert? The PPC copywriter? An award-winning graphic designer? None of the above. They’re looking for someone they can count on for marketing strategy and leadership of the marketing team.
A marketing leader ensures that all the marketing pieces are doing their part to reach the company’s goals. They know which tools to use, and when. They know which tools in the toolbox need to be always-on (social media, for example), and which are used less frequently (streaming ads). Your marketing leader has a plan for elevating email marketing, so that it’s not spray-and-pray but instead adds value when your member reads it. They are using the ads feature in the online banking platform to target members who don’t read emails.
A marketing leader is a few steps ahead of the rest of the team and looks ahead to avoid surprises. Of course, every now and then something unexpected will happen that requires priorities to shift. Think of your marketing leader as an expert juggler. Every so often someone throws a chainsaw into the mix, but experience allows them to address it without letting anything fall to the ground.
All of those juggling skills didn’t happen overnight. It’s taken years of learning, testing, measuring, and re-testing to recommend just the right cadence for your marketing. Whether you’re old school and called it a marketing mix or in today’s terms a tech stack, once again it’s the tools in the toolbox that make marketing magic happen.
Changes to marketing talent
It’s inevitable that your marketing team’s makeup will change. When this happens, your marketing leader should use it as an opportunity to regroup, reframe priorities and review the skillset needed to execute the marketing function most effectively. This could mean the remaining team members need to learn new skills, or strategically it may be time to stop doing some things altogether. Perhaps your compensation budget is bursting at the seams and you’re finally ready to start using outsourced talent. Just like a member-facing marketing campaign, the internal process is research > execute > review > make changes as needed > execute again, each time fine-tuning for greater efficiency and results. What hasn’t changed? The person leading the strategy to keep you on a steady path to success.
Can you afford to NOT have a marketing leader?
Over the past two decades credit union marketing has become more complex than ever. For credit unions whose org chart has the marketing department reporting up through lending or operations, I recommend you take a closer look at the variety of functions that marketing oversees. A team that used to design branch posters, statement stuffers and write newsletter articles now manages multiple channels and mountains of data. Can your CLO or COO tell you how much of the budget should be spent on social media ads, or if the marketing budget is being spent wisely? It’s important to have a marketing leader that not only sets the strategy, but is held accountable for results.
What’s best for your credit union? Given that the average CMO tenure in 2025 is 4.3 years, forward-thinking executives are thinking about how to ease the disruption that comes with turnover in the marketing department. The best way to do that is to “operationalize” your credit union’s marketing, with a process and a cadence for each channel. That way you have a road map that ensures marketing continues without a hitch, independent of future changes that are simply unavoidable.
Summary
A credit union marketing leader can tell you the ROI of your lead generation investment, knows how to allocate the marketing budget to retain existing members vs. attract new members, and most importantly understands marketing metrics alongside credit union ratios. If you’d like creative ideas for staffing your marketing department schedule a discovery call.
Jennifer Burns is a financial services industry veteran who directs credit union marketing teams to work more effectively and with greater impact. She provides marketing and sales leadership to credit unions as a fractional CMO.
Photo by Patrik László on Unsplash