Fintech Archives

FinTech marketing challenges – insights from industry roundtable

We’re at a crossroads, it’s called H2. The numbers aren’t where they need to be, do you persevere or pivot. Persevere and have confidence in your current direction, pivot to respond to the immediate external pressures, or take a moment to step back and reassess. Re-evaluate your current state of play and your goals, and decide whether your strategy is supporting the business goals.

With so many pressures on FinTech marketing leaders right now, what’s your plan?

I recently attended an industry roundtable and wanted to share some of the insights into the key challenges FinTech marketers are facing right now.

Implementation of AI in Marketing

The roundtable discussed the implementation of AI, focusing on the “how” and “where” of integrating this technology. While there is a clear understanding of AI’s availability and potential, the main challenges lie in navigating its vast landscape. Data security and regulatory compliance are critical to any marketing initiative in financial services, given the importance of data access, data sharing, and the protection of proprietary information.

Adapting to Market Changes

Given the current turbulent market conditions, agility in marketing strategies was a key topic. There is a notable gap in the understanding of agile marketing, highlighting the need for education on proactive adaptation rather than reactive measures. The discussion underscored the importance of strategic decision-making—knowing when to pivot and when to persevere. Despite the necessity for immediate results, participants acknowledged that these expectations often misalign with market realities. Budget constraints for testing new strategies remain a significant challenge, but there was consensus on the need for bold investments and calculated risks, alongside smaller-scale testing.

Market Performance and Inbound Inquiries

The first half of the year has seen most businesses struggle, with a notable decline in inbound inquiries. This situation has led to a reassessment and realignment of targets for the second half of the year.

Adoption of MarTech and SalesTech

Adoption rates for marketing technology (MarTech) and sales technology (SalesTech) remain low. There was a robust discussion on the necessity of high-quality data and system interoperability. The group explored strategies to encourage sales teams to adopt new technologies, emphasising the need to clearly demonstrate the value these tools bring to their processes. One innovative approach discussed was the potential launch of a pilot campaign to align marketing and sales teams, ensuring a shared understanding of technology benefits.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

A recurring concern was the inefficiency of lead conversion. A significant proportion of leads handed over to sales teams fail to progress, raising questions about alignment between marketing and sales. With only about 10% of leads converting, the discussion centred on strategies to maintain engagement with the remaining 90% and the cost implications of generating these leads. Effective collaboration between marketing and sales is essential to improve lead nurturing and conversion rates.

At Bright, we help businesses who are at a point when they want to see improvements in their effectiveness, efficiency or engagement but not sure how to move the dial. We believe that it’s the way your teams work that underpins your ability to adapt to change and drive results. 

By adopting agile marketing principles and practices, you can transform marketing within your organisation to boost collaboration, ensure continuous improvement and the become more empowered to demonstrate the value of marketing to the rest of the business.

If you’re interested in learning how to upskill your marketing team, contact us about our FinTech Agile Marketing Training.

August 1, 2024 Lydia Kirby Agile Marketing In Practice, Fintech, Marketing Efficiency, Marketing metrics

Agile Marketing commentator John Case in discussion with leading VP & Head of marketing Mitra Roknabadi on the power of greater marketing agility for fintech OpenFin.

Listen to the podcast

Prefer to read than listen? Here’s a Podcast summary

Bright injects agility into cutting-edge FinTech’s digital transformation journey

Bright’s client, a leading financial industry operating system, set out on a digital transformation journey to pivot their focus from brand marketing to demand gen. Requiring an agile approach, we helped transform their marketing strategy and achieve their business objectives. Vice President and Global Head of Marketing of the FinTech client, Mitra Roknabadi, joins our Client Delivery Director, Lydia Kirby, to be interviewed by John Cass and share their experience of putting agile marketing into action…

1. Move fast, break nothing

In a digital world time is of the essence – Mitra highlights the importance to “move fast but don’t rush”. The qualities of an agile marketing approach align perfectly with the FinTech client’s company motto: ‘move fast, break nothing’. By beginning to work in a series of iterations, we developed a safe foundation to learn more about their digital audience through listening, testing, and optimising. Bright empowered the FinTech client team to “work at pace and learn, iterate, shift and deliver quickly.”

2. Experts, assemble!

There’s more to agile marketing than the methodology. Mitra recalls how her experience with Bright helped her to see “the full extent of what agile means”. As the campaign developed, both Mitra and Lydia as agile aficionados adapted the team’s approach and toolkit to suit the FinTech client’s needs. Demonstrating the ability to onboard and offboard expertise where needed was paramount to the FinTech client, enabling them to identify how and where they wanted to grow as a business.

3. Planning, doing, and reviewing

Keen to shirk the assumption an agile marketing approach is an impulsive one, Lydia emphasises the “planning, doing, and reviewing” that goes into a project. Bright often work in three-week Sprints to allow ample “time for learning, understanding the subject and iteration”. Project management and instant messaging platforms are key tools to unite siloed teams and enable them to collaborate and respond at pace. It’s the way in which we respond that sets agile marketers apart; having an open mind that something may work better than predicted. The review process of continuous self-reflection allows for iteration, optimisation and ultimately, the best of results.

Lydia described her experience with the FinTech client as a “dream, not because they’re simply new to agile marketing”… but because “their scale-up mentality embraced the agile methodology”. Mitra is also confident the campaign experience “will influence what we do as a company” going forward.

As Bright continues to work with innovative FinTech companies, we look forward to delivering fresh, iterative, and data-driven agile marketing approaches, leading the charge to better results, faster time to market, sustainable growth, and the ability to adapt and change at pace.

September 13, 2021 Alexandra Jefferies Bright Videos & Podcasts, Fintech

Achieving 12 B2B quality sales opportunities in 12 weeks

CMO point of view: Testing agile marketing to drive results

“Those who can best manage change will survive.”

Whether you attribute this paraphrased statement to Charles Darwin or someone else, it’s as relevant today as it’s ever been – particularly for Chief Marketing Officers and senior marketers.

To see why, just look around at unparalleled disruption from Brexit, Covid-19 and environmental factors such as climate change, combined with the pace of digital transformation. Technology and data are the catalyst for keeping pace and adapting. For those of us in the business of marketing technology and the products and services that surround it, campaigns have to be just as fast (and agile) to yield sustainable success.

I know it’s easy to say (or write) that CMOs need to leverage agility at pace. But we all know it’s not that easy to incorporate agility and run effective brand building and integrated campaigns. Sometimes it’s down to not having the right tools, not having the time to research what your competitors are up to, or how to change an internal culture used to waterfall ways of working.

Agile is no longer part of start-up thinking — but it’s being adopted by some of the biggest global players

Transforming all this takes time, and that’s a commodity few CMOs have these days. If this all sounds familiar to you, involving external experts (such as Bright), who specialise in agile marketing, can help you work out the best way to approach embedding new ways of working into your team and the wider organisation without impacting the day-to-day marketing tasks you still have to deliver on throughout transformation.

Getting started with agile marketing

Injecting agile might sound simple, but it involves a change of mindset in your team culture, new processes and sometimes tools or tech. If you don’t have the right skills in your team today, then seeking outside support accelerates that change, minimises risk and avoids the common issues that could undermine the transition. Use a Proof of Concept to research, test and learn what would work best for your organisation and team to start the journey, maintain momentum and embed the right model.

Fintech company injects agility to drive better marketing results

To give you a better idea of this all works, we’ve broken down the true story of how a CMO from a Fintech software and services company championed agile marketing transformation.

Specialising in providing real-time transaction control and enterprise integrity solutions, their sales cycle usually falls somewhere between six and nine months. However, they wanted to accelerate results over a three-month period, and with target accounts in the US and UK, they needed to drive results in both of these territories.

With all this in mind, the CMO wanted to understand if an agile marketing approach was the way to go. Our team needed to prove that it would help the organisation achieve the following:

1. Become more results focused

The agile method of testing, learning and iterating would let the team take more risks, try new approaches and know early-on if their efforts were working.

2. Achieve rapid time to market
‘Sprints’ had helped them get their software to market faster, so they wanted to apply the same approach to their marketing strategies.

[Marketing strategies] need to be scientific. CMOs need to set hypotheses and learn and optimise from every experiment – Zoe Merchant, MD at Bright

3. Become more adaptable
Knowing that software succeeds only when it’s been developed iteratively with a Proof of Concept (PoC), a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or prototype, they wanted the same iterative approach when going to market to cover the expected, and unexpected, over the three-month campaign.

4. Make data-driven decisions
The marketing team needed a steady source of data to quickly understand their performance and validate and share what they were doing.

The end game: 12 high quality opportunities in 12 weeks

On top of these results, the Fintech firm gained a framework that they can use to scale as they grow and build more campaigns. Alongside the results, this is a major value-add from the journey.

The client can now execute ideas, understand their needs, and meet expectations much faster. They get continuous feedback from marketing, sales, and their data, helping them align their teams with results and insight. What’s more, they now feel free to experiment with less risk, and confident that marketing with agility and pace will support their future business goals.

April 15, 2020 Lydia Kirby Agile Marketing In Practice, Fintech