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:
There are three common reasons for financial services companies’ relatively limited digital marketing efforts:
Most FinServ companies have plenty of technology – it's just outdated and poorly integrated.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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
Digital marketing involves sending a massive volume of content, especially if you use email marketing. But this presents two problems:
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.
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.
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.
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?