By January 2024 Verve, A Credit Union had experienced stagnation: low, no, or negative growth for multiple years, despite providing measurably excellent products and service. Leadership hired STIR to provide a new vision and we began the relationship by conducting a comprehensive Future Scape Planning process. A plan was approved in early March by the corporate executive team and work began immediately to revive the brand’s growth potential.

Beginning With a Holistic Review

Our strategic review indicated that the brand’s health suffered on many fronts. Success on such a broad scale required the precise coordination of the following efforts:

• Refining brand positioning, developing new messaging and advertising with greater consumer appeal.
• On-page website SEO and developing new page content. Boosting site speed and enhancing user experience.
• Off-page SEO by standardizing and correcting online listings, connecting aggregators and directories.
• Conversion funnel and the form-fill process. This became the number one priority.
• Short- and long-term promotional strategies.
• Digital marketing strategy in the form of paid search, programmatic, and paid social campaigns.
• Terrestrial media, internal and in-branch activities.
• Integrated content, PR, and organic social media strategy where none had previously existed.

Keeping the Same Brand, Building a New Campaign

Verve’s original brand positioning, identity and graphics package were outstanding. They needed a new message and go-to-market strategy worthy of their name that enthusiastically leveraged these assets. STIR developed and implemented a comprehensive brand campaign which included PR, a website refresh, TV and radio ads, outdoor boards, email marketing, and sophisticated digital advertising.

Promoting Product Through Targeted Media

To drive leads and sales immediately, product promotions were quickly developed and launched, pushing qualified prospects to website landing pages for conversion.

Driving Credibility and Favor Through Community PR

STIR leveraged Verve’s ongoing community event activations through targeted local media relations, providing financial thought leadership and driving valuable positive impressions. Examples include:

Thought Leadership to Drive Perceptions and Leads

To build brand trust, demonstrating leadership in financial literacy is essential. Verve took the lead in fraud prevention with an appealing, yet educational campaign that created engagement and built trust among prospects.

• Verve Launches Don’t Feed the Phish Campaign – WisBusiness

Banking the Benefits

After the planning process was concluded, brand growth was restored and the turnaround had begun. Key results of our partnership: ​ 

• 4.5M+ programmatic impressions per month by April (up from 1.8M in February)​
• 18.23% paid search CTR at April peak​
• 175,000+ email opens in a single HELOC campaign drop​
• 81% new users to the website in April and May, strong top-of-funnel reach

Across STIR’s integrated marketing efforts, Verve’s website metrics proved our strategy and execution was delivering results:​

• April peak: 70,900 total users — up +19% MoM and +9% YoY​
• Application page views up +44% in March (driven by Credit Card campaign push)​
• Application page views up +21% in May (driven by HELOC and RV Loan campaigns)​
• May YoY traffic up +4.7% against a strong 2024 baseline​
• HELOC and Recreational Loan product pages were consistently top-visited pages during promotional months