B2B financial services (FinServ) firms are sitting on a winning lottery ticket.
The industry’s slow adoption of digital marketing has left an open door for any brand that embraces online channels and adopts the right technology to deliver high-impact, data-driven campaigns. In fact, McKinsey research has proven that introducing marketing tech and analytics propels market share growth for B2B FinServ.1
This article explores how your company can capitalize on that opportunity – using HubSpot to unlock a range of benefits and outcompete other firms.
Expect to learn:
- The key factors that limit FinServ digital marketing efforts
- The top three elements that make HubSpot a perfect solution for financial service
- The four most powerful tactics to improve financial services marketing with HubSpot
Why Do Financial Services Firms Miss Out on Marketing Technology?
There are three common reasons for financial services companies’ relatively limited digital marketing efforts:
1. Legacy Solutions
Most FinServ companies have plenty of technology – it's just outdated and poorly integrated. Rather than overhauling their systems, executives focus on slowly upgrading existing solutions. This explains why firms spend more on new technology than other industries – yet see fewer positive gains from it.
Marketing teams often find they have lots of tools, but a lack of integration. They are forced to spend a lot of time navigating data silos and trying to import information from one system to another. Not only does this often mean their data may be inaccurate and untrustworthy – it makes the whole process confusing, frustrating and ineffective.
2. Legacy Marketing Skills
Many financial services marketers are brilliantly skilled with traditional “off-line" channels, such as networking events and print media advertising. But their companies often do not sufficiently value digital marketing, which limits marketers’ freedom to innovate.
This creates several common difficulties:
- Poor Foundations: Financial services marketers are often forced to assemble their digital marketing stack in a piecemeal fashion – even if they would prefer to invest heavily in digital channels. This can leave teams without many of the basic building blocks, such as centralized data and analytics capabilities or accurate behavioral tracking.
- Hiring Challenges: 75% of financial services firms say they have a hard time hiring for roles with digital skills, which means many marketers struggle to build the right team to support digital efforts. They are left to cover all digital bases themselves, which is an overwhelming task for even the most skilled marketers.
- Lack of Attribution: FinServ companies tend to be very invested in bottom-line results, expecting to see clear evidence of marketing’s impact on sales and revenue. But many businesses still lack accurate digital marketing attribution, which makes it hard to demonstrate how online marketing channels impact revenue.
3. Lack of Strategy
Digital marketing technology is almost always a product of strategy; you cannot know a better CRM is required if you haven’t identified customer data as a key strategic tool. But over 70% of firms either have a fragmented digital strategy – or no strategy at all. This extends to digital marketing, where nearly 50% of firms lack a clear plan to leverage digital channels.
The problem is exacerbated by ever-changing B2B buyer behavior. Financial services companies that want to deliver effective digital marketing need to track growing buyer teams across more than 10 different channels. Building such a strategy from scratch is no small task – and requires more support than many marketers have at their disposal.
In summary: Financial services firms struggle with poorly optimized tech stacks, a lack of digital marketing support, and limited strategic planning. But our experience working with FinServ companies suggests these problems can all be effectively dealt with by implementing a single platform – HubSpot.
How HubSpot Solves These Problems
HubSpot is a comprehensive marketing technology platform that unites customer relationship management (CRM), content management system (CMS), marketing automation and data analytics capabilities within a single product. It features specialized “hubs” for Marketing, Sales, Services and Operations – and they are all interoperable and built on the same centralized source of customer data.
As a result, adopting the platform empowers financial services companies to:
1. Eliminate Data Silos
Data is oil for digital marketing, but most financial services firms lack the capabilities to effectively generate, store, analyze and use data across their marketing efforts. Their legacy tech stacks mean data is stored across multiple different systems that lack interoperability, and research shows how this problem manifests across multiple areas:
- 89% of firms are unable to leverage marketing automation and personalization
- 80% see data infrastructure and accessibility as a problem
- 86% believe their data analytics tools and capabilities are limited
HubSpot solves these problems by creating a single centralized store for all marketing, sales and customer data. The platform integrates with key financial software, including Discovery, AdvizorPro, Fintex, Salesforce, Zoho, Wealthbox and Snowflake. Equally, it features robust security to ensure you can store sensitive information without creating compliance risks.
The net result? Financial services marketing teams gain full funnel visibility and can easily track all digital marketing, sales and customer service activities and their impact on pipeline and revenue. This makes their tech stack far more efficient and eliminates many of the common challenges associated with legacy solutions.
2. Onboard Users with Ease
Most financial services marketing tech is difficult to use; your team requires extensive training or experience to generate value from these platforms. But HubSpot is truly user-friendly, enabling your team to get to grips with the full range of tools within weeks.
Some of the most popular features include:
- Drag and Drop: Your team can build emails, landing pages and a range of other content with zero technical ability. Equally, there are a range of templates available for those without the time to create their own designs. Once you learn the basic HubSpot interface, the barriers to creating and deploying digital content are eliminated.
- Custom Dashboards: You don’t need to spend hours learning complicated data analytics techniques; HubSpot enables you to build custom dashboards with ease. This ensures your team (and executives) can immediately assess key data points, measure performance and prove marketing ROI.
Features like this ensure your teams can focus on generating value – not learning how to use the platform. Campaigns can be launched more quickly, enabling you to be more responsive to market trends and recent events.
Equally, HubSpot promotes a partnership program which means you can always hire a HubSpot agency to offer expert support. From accelerating onboarding to identifying tools that are relevant to your team, an expert partner will make it even easier to start using HubSpot.
3. Unify Digital Marketing Tools
Many financial services firms struggle with limited or non-existing digital marketing strategies, but this is often due to the complexity of the digital landscape. It is extremely difficult to build a plan from scratch when you are jumping between 10 different platforms to leverage marketing emails, build landing pages and track performance data.
HubSpot brings all these tools in once place and enables marketing teams to visualize, plan and execute campaigns with confidence. You can therefore develop a digital strategy far more easily – and begin leveraging sophisticated digital marketing tactics.
4 Ways to Drive Higher Marketing ROI with HubSpot
HubSpot offers a wide range of use cases for FinServ marketers, but our experience helping a range of companies suggests four tactics produce particularly powerful (and fast!) results:
1. Segment Your Audiences
B2B FinServ buyers are often hyper-focused on specific metrics your services can improve – or particular regulations their industry faces. A generic marketing message will not “cut through” and grab their attention – which means you must be more precise with your targeting.
Create custom “Lists” within HubSpot to segment prospects, leads and customers into separate groups based on their behavior, demographics, psychographics, role in the buying team and more. This enables more carefully targeted digital campaigns, with more tailored messaging and ultimately greater marketing impact.
2. Automate Email Campaigns
Digital marketing involves sending a massive volume of content, especially if you use email marketing. But this presents two problems:
- Resource Limitations: Most marketing teams at financial services firms cannot scale their efforts to handle this manually, as it is too labor and time intensive.
- Timing Challenges: Marketing messages are most impactful when they are deployed at the exact moment they are most relevant. But few teams have the availability or responsiveness to achieve this manually.
Use HubSpot Workflows and Sequences to automate marketing and sales email campaigns. Create content for a specific context, and program HubSpot to send the email immediately when your leads take a certain action or pass a certain threshold in your scoring system. This will dramatically increase the relevance of your messages, as well as enabling you to scale email marketing across your entire buyer journey.
3. Use Data to Optimize Campaigns
Digital marketing can feel like a “black box” for marketers at financial services firms. Their relative lack of experience makes it hard to determine which channels should get the lion’s share of their budget – and it becomes difficult to assess ROI or optimize campaigns.
Deploy revenue attribution models and custom dashboards to identify which marketing channels produce the highest ROI. This helps you understand which forms of content actually move your buyers through the funnel, and ensures you quickly pinpoint and minimize wasted budget.
4. Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
Given the relative immaturity of many financial services firms’ digital marketing, it’s unsurprising that sales and marketing alignment is generally relatively weak. This means many digital leads are not properly scored or fed to sales – and sales may take too long to follow up.
Use HubSpot’s full funnel visibility to assess how sales and marketing collaborate – and where you can increase alignment. From mapping your funnels to automating lead handoffs, there are a range of tactics you can use – all of which are covered in our popular RevOps guide.
Unlock the Full Power of HubSpot with ProperExpression
ProperExpression is a Platinum HubSpot Partner that has helped numerous financial services companies transform their marketing using HubSpot. From technical development to daily management, we can help you migrate to the platform and use its full range of tools to generate, nurture and convert more high-value leads.
Want to explore how we could help improve your digital marketing?
