Opening the Diary of a Fintech CMO

2020 has been quite the year, and for all the good and bad, it has allowed much time for reflection. To that end, today is the launch of my LinkedIn newsletter — Diary of a Fintech CMO — a reservoir of thoughts and experiences that I’ve accumulated over the last 20+ years of my career. I intend to share ideas, compelling narratives, and some marketing and life hacks that you might find not only interesting, but worth sharing or discussing with myself and others.

My career has covered a lot of ground, from nearly a decade in mobile device marketing to being a part of the parade for the 2005 World Series Champion Chicago White Sox (despite the fact I’m also a Cubs fan -- yes, I’m both). But, as the title of this newsletter states, I now work in fintech, and I recently had my five year anniversary in the industry. The fintech space (particularly capital markets) is a fascinating world of high stakes and cutting edge innovation, but it’s also an industry where the quality of a particular company’s technology usually is far better than the marketing campaign created to support said technology. It has provided not only an interesting challenge for me as a CMO, but also a blank slate for us to use to test, refine and execute new strategies.

So much remarkable change has taken place during my fintech tenure, but here are three fundamental things that I’ve learned in these past five years:

1. Just as in consumer marketing, 360 degree marketing is a must for fintech, but know your limits.

Bringing a cadence of holistic marketing naturally made sense, but you need to do this on a consistent basis and with coordination for maximum effectiveness. A drumbeat of social, public relations, email marketing, advertising, sponsorships, events, digital platform communications, internal communications, etc. helped elevate our messaging at TT. It enabled us to “box above our weight class”, made our marketing spend more effective and made our presence larger than ever before.  We were also able to expand our audience as we were getting into new areas of business.  As a result of this consistent effort over these years, in my opinion we are best-in-class in social, media relations, internal comms, branding and events marketing in our sector. We now share our learnings with peers and clients in the industry helping them improve their communications.  But you need to know your limitations. 

For example, we employed a hyper-targeted digital campaign direct to traders. It was very successful in driving top line awareness and even consideration bringing thousands of hits to our free trial landing page and sign-ups for the free trial were off the charts.  However, in the end, we did not have a direct and easy e-commerce method for converting trial users to paying customers. Therefore we only had an attribution ROI to trials, not real revenue.

2. Established companies must embrace a startup mentality, starting  with “The 3 Cs”.

Having a mandate to build a communications strategy from the ground up is ideal when coupled with executing a company transformation. That’s exactly what we did at TT. Change starts with the 3 Cs:

1. Craft (taking immense pride in your product or service and its delivery to customers)
2. Communications (Never stop keeping your people informed and included)
3.  Culture (It’s the bedrock on which company success is built).

The key learnings from ‘Craft’ are: 

• Be user-centric. While it may seem intuitive, at a large global company (or even a small one), it’s easy to get away from accurately anticipating your customer’s/user’s needs;  
• Set a vision, but if need be, don’t hesitate to pivot with your leadership to drive it across and through your organization; 
• Obsess on the details in pursuit of that vision (a software bug in fintech could cost a user dearly, as opposed to other types of applications where the stakes are not has high)
• Organize internally first, so teams and workflows can be as nimble as possible.

The Key Learnings from refocusing “Communication,” are: 

• Establish and live by the company vision and goals; 
• Embark on “listening tours,” where leadership hears first-hand about concerns, challenges, wins, etc. and share vision and goals in-person with as many employees as possible; 
• Launch regular (in our case it was monthly)  “all-hands” meetings (for virtual meetings, make sure you tested your comms systems in advance)  to share product updates, challenges that are being addressed, customer successes, team wins, and financial updates. 
• Put more focus on effective internal comm channels such as  internal newsletters, Slack or email updates direct from leadership, daily social media feeds, etc. 
• Most importantly, no matter how you communicate, make it consistent, make it authentic (address the challenges too) but make it fun. 

Key Learnings from nurturing Culture are: 

• Continually evaluate and support talent. Identify where you can close gaps by fostering growth and professional development from within, but also by bringing in fresh eyes and perspectives;  
• While modeling culture is everyone’s responsibility, leadership can only drive lasting change by living their words through action;  
• Create a work environment that is conducive to supporting your company’s personality. This includes everything from office spaces and common areas to flexible work schedules and benefits. From our experience, making this a focus really helps to cultivate happiness, engender loyalty, and generate greater creativity and fulfillment. 

3. Know your environment because fintech is truly its own unique form of “tech”.

Marketing any technology is about taking a complex system and culling a message down into a clear and actionable takeaway for the audience. But not all “tech” is the same and fintech has its own unique sets of challenges. This may seem intuitive but it is essential keeping up the the rapid changes in competition and the clients’ acceptance and adoption of technologies. In addition, you must keep up with other externalities on technology. In fintech’s case, increased regulation, the fact you are talking about a finite resource, money, and consolidation of players in the industry also play critical roles on how to focus your messaging that resonates with customers.

Thanks for checking this out. Looking forward to sharing more on these learnings in subsequent Diary of a CMO entries and I welcome your thoughts.