Steven Gillen has seen a big evolution in credit union marketing. When he joined as Oregon State Credit Union’s Director of Marketing in 2013, there was a huge focus on brochures, signage, newspaper and radio ads. Today, his team spends the bulk of their time utilizing the digital sphere – search engine advertising, social media, email, push notifications and more.
“Understanding how to do digital marketing well, I see it as a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” he said. “When you understand digital marketing, you understand how to build a good webpage. You understand analytics. It’s a belief that I still have, that it’s something you need to understand how to do.”
Before joining the credit union, Gillen was a senior brand marketing manager of retail stores at Harry & David, the gift basket company. During his time there, he helped scale the company’s loyalty program using data – a project you can read more about further down. During an interview with image.works, Gillen shared what motivates him every day and why the credit union has been working with image.works for over 10 years.
What motivated you to choose this line of work for your career?
I’ve always been interested in credit unions. There’s a higher purpose. There’s a different way for the business to be run. We don’t have stock that we need to show return on. Every company I worked for previously was private, and sometimes they made short-term decisions versus actions that would have been more beneficial in the long term. I also like that the spirit of credit unions is to help people. I wanted to do good marketing that helps people.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
I love seeing people grow in their field of marketing. It gives me the greatest pleasure – when they learn skills and apply skills and can do things better than me. It fills me with joy to have people that are just awesome. That’s what motivates me, and then seeing how their work touches the team. For the results of a team, especially a small one like we have, if one out of four people aren’t firing on all cylinders, then we’ll all feel it. Getting everyone to do their absolute best in the channels they lead and then seeing the effect of the work on the individual – it’s rewarding.
What’s a marketing tool you can’t live without?
A smart person. People do marketing. Tools execute marketing, but people do the work. I can have the best tools on the planet, but if I don’t have a person to put them to use, then the tools just sit there. I put people first.
What valuable nugget of marketing know-how would you impart on your younger self?
Don’t spend as much time trying to sell your benefits as a marketer. Spend more time working on showcasing the success of the outcomes of the work you do, or team you lead. Earlier in your career, you’re trying to make your mark. Early on, you’re trying to show what you do and how you contributed to the results. But it takes a team, and it takes a business to make things happen, so if you present it as your personal success, you’ll offend other people. But no one can counter an outcome: “This Google ad brought in this many people – and I’m the one who happens to be doing the Google ads right now.” With that framing, it’s not about me; it’s about the work I do.
Is there a work project you’re really proud of?
When I was at Harry & David, I launched a loyalty program that was called the Preferred Customer Program. When I took over the project, it was a complete disaster. We grew our loyalty program from 10,000 customers to over a million customers, and we did it using point-of-sale information that would kick information over to a marketing database. That program materially changed how they were doing marketing, because we could measure changes in customer behavior based on the action we were taking.
Tell me a little about why OSCU has continued its relationship with image.works for 10 years.
We needed the help, and your team has an advantage, because you understand the credit union space and what trends are going on. Credit unions all try to do the same thing. Instead of having to second guess, we can confirm with you guys.
The other thing image.works does is just get it done. You deliver. We have a small marketing team, but we don't have to worry about how we’re going to get all this work done – with image.works, we know we’ll get our assets on time. And I can scale the number of projects we send you up or down based on my needs. And because image.works understands the industry, you can do it a little faster. You’re an extension of our team, and you can do work that we can’t get done.