Fixing Fintech Marcomms 5 - Going Digital

So, thanks to everyone for reading this series and for your likes and comments so far. Today we are going in a slightly different direction and I would like to introduce you to?Loreta Bahtchevanova,?who runs marketing at?Rapid Addition Limited. Having collaborated with her on a number of projects, she has demonstrated that she is a more than capable Fintech Marketeer (especially in digital). It seemed only natural therefore to get her insights on this subject so, read her guest article for Vision57 below :)

The Digital revolution has impacted the marketing industry perhaps more than other. If marcomms is about reaching and communicating with an identified audience, then the digital domain presents an amazing panoply of opportunities.? Unfortunately, firms often confuse making digital noise as digital marketing and ignore the traditional rules still apply.

So, let’s look at best practice for marketing in today’s digital domain.

1. Listen and Align

Whether you report to the CEO, COO, or CRO of the organization, the ultimate purpose of marketing is to tell a great (and truthful) story that results in more sales. Thus, your best friends are your manager and the sales team. Proactively ask the leadership team for the company annual goals, OKRs, financial models and when you work on a marketing plan, always start from them – drill down into which marketing activities would support the business growth plan and shape all other initiatives around them.

For example, if your business needs to generate 2x the revenue of last year – will you generate 2x leads or will you focus on improving conversion rates, or both, or something else? Then think about which can happen with the least effort and outline the path to achieving that goal. It’s important to identify what you will need to achieve that and raise it with management.

Your annual plan needs to be agile, evolve and adapt on the go when conditions change, in order to be a powerful strategy driver.

2. Measure What Matters

Most of the common marketing KPIs are predominantly vanity metrics from the days of traditional marketing and the early days of digital marketing adoption. This is exactly why business owners sometimes struggle to believe in the impact marketing can have on hitting those vital sales metrics that their PE lords (rightly) care so much about.. If they met a couple of marketing gurus who told them how reach, impressions and social media will transform their brand and then spend tens of thousands of dollars with no answer to the question ‘how many deals did this bring’, I couldn’t blame them either. When you work on your marketing plan and KPIs, make sure you include measurable metrics that really have an impact on the result you want to achieve.

For example, if you want to track how your spend on advertising will affect marketing-sourced revenue, don’t set up CPM as a metric (like it would be intuitive for most marketers to do, as pushed by advertising platforms). Instead, track website visits from ads, form submissions on ad landing pages and the conversion of those leads into MQLs and SQLs.

It’s a good idea to have dynamic reports/charts for all your key metrics, which you can pull instantly in every meeting when you’re asked a question. It shows that you have control over your domain and know what affects what and how.

3. Own The Process

The most important thing you need to focus on is the process and setup. If you don’t have the logic and tools, you won’t be able to set the proper KPIs and measure them. Don’t dismiss the strategic thinking and martech selection and integration as the foundation of all your initiatives. Make sure you visualize exactly what happens to your audience, visitors, leads, contacts, MQLs, SQLs, and deals. Often marketing involvement stops at the stage of delivering an MQL and you have no visibility on how it progresses and converts. Outline and own the whole process in collaboration with business development and sales teams and ensure that tracking covers it from end to end.

Evaluate the tools you’re using and the capabilities they provide. Ensure you have the proper technical support to connect your website, analytics and advertising platforms, CRM and email marketing automation tool as well as the peripheral systems like an SEO platform, prospecting application and reporting tool. Ideally, all the data should be visible in the CRM. If you’re not lucky enough to have a tech on the marketing team, ask for help from engineering and system administrators, or hire a contractor.

There are many setups that can get you the automation and tracking you need, so there is no silver bullet you can just read about and implement directly. However, there are a couple of examples you can use to get you thinking in the right direction.

4. Digital Marcomms Setup Examples

If you use a product suite like Salesforce or HubSpot, make sure you have the hubs for sales and marketing, despite that many companies choose just one because they don’t want to pay for overlapping functionality. You can always negotiate custom packages with the providers but make sure you have lead scoring automation, custom objects and the option to set relationships between them, custom fields that match your database segmentation, and automatic triggers for campaigns as a minimum.

If you use different systems for CRM and email marketing automation, they need to be fully integrated in a way that all data is instantly fed into the CRM and properly synced between the custom fields in both systems. The sum of capabilities should cover the ones outlined above as a minimum.

This will allow you to track and record precisely which channel each lead comes from, which are the touch points along their journey, which was the conversion event and monitor the follow-up communication that led to winning a deal. Being able to see and report on this can help you outline best practices, improve processes and report accurately on marketing ROI.

Conclusion

In the end, it all comes down to being able to deliver value through improving and adapting based on experimentation and hypothesis validation – the essence of agile marketing. In addition to marketing science knowledge, you need to focus on understanding the causality of activities and relationship building. Last but not least, you need the right team to be able to achieve this. In my case, I was lucky enough to be able to learn from a brilliant COO who I reported to and a brilliant strategy advisor whose vision allowed me to think of marketing not as a stand-alone discipline, but the beating heart of your business..