Marketing in financial services - an agent of change

Changing role of a marketer

Flash back to the mid-noughties when as head of marketing at Platform my main focus was on getting PR coverage in the top three main trade titles, agreeing advertising deals with the publishers in these same titles, booking sponsorship or attending industry dinners, lunches, conferences and roadshows: plus, building – then maintaining – a website and some basic email marketing to brokers. Partnership marketing with our packagers and distributors was also key, although at that time it was mostly contribution focused rather than me supplying much content. Oh, how simple it was back then…

Over the last ten years, the role of a marketer in our sector has changed dramatically. Not only because of new media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn, but also how technology and data can now help marketers communicate with specific intermediaries operating in particular sectors more effectively than ever before.

Partnership marketing is also very different, and content is now king. With so many channels to use, the challenge is now creating content for each one that is tailored to both the media type and the audience – not an easy task. For example, video formats differ on many social media platforms and have you considered how a video filmed in a portrait or landscape mode is viewed on different platforms? If not, you should.

Social media engagement

Social media is still a challenge for many businesses, and we must not forget that in B2B marketing to intermediaries, it has an important role to play. It’s great to see some brands embracing this channel and the likes of Precise’s Roger Morris has to get a name check as its activity has built a personal online brand that is personable, broker friendly and one that encourages two-way conversations with its customers, i.e., brokers.

So, if you don’t have a Roger, how can you build your social media engagement and your personal online brand? This can be done via one-to-one or team training sessions and/or educating colleagues on the basics of creating an online persona.

You can also include sharing business case studies of social selling, bringing in quotes or using fellow colleagues as ‘star pupil’ examples, and demonstrating how they’ve made a real impact on the success of maintaining their activity.

Tools are available that allow social media managers to provide pre-populated content for employees to share, and this helps ease teams into social as well as building their confidence in using a range of platforms and demonstrates the benefits of social media as a whole.

Content is king

Much of this comes down to content, and if you don’t think content is important: GE has its own in-house editor-in-chief who manages the GE reports business. This is a digital news hub covering business, technology, innovation and runs opinions from leading thinkers on everything from robotics and AI to the future of water and energy. I’m not saying that every lender needs to go as far as this, but it does highlight the importance such an organisation places on ‘one version of the truth’ and I applaud this stance.

Is PR dead?

Robert Phillips (a former EMEA president and CEO of the world’s largest PR firm) announced the end of PR. I feel that he has a point, and it is a further example of how your audiences (consumer or B2B) perceive you. His book PR is Dead charts the rise of what he calls ‘individual empowerment’ – the continued shift from state to citizen, employer to employee, corporation to citizen-consumer. He argues that the age of command-and-control hierarchies and carefully manicured happy endings is over.

His view is that the public relations industry has abused and exhausted trust, often sought as the holy grail of many brands and organisations. Trust is not a function of PR. It is an outcome, not a message. Trust is deeply behavioural, complex and fragile and hard-won every day, by actions, not words. It is no accident that some institutions have recognised this and have been very successful – the likes of First Direct and TSB, for example, do not give their call centre teams scripts, thus encouraging authentic conversations and building trust.

I am sure I am not alone in witnessing, first hand, organisations that treat journalist questions and enquiries with contempt if they do not fit with the ‘message’ that they wish to portray to the outside world. The ability to speak to the press (national, local or trade) is restricted to a few top honchos who are too far removed from customers; and social media is so controlled that any initial authenticity is eventually strangled.

Similarly, you see that customer-facing employees who are trained to within an inch of their lives are warned that any deviation from procedures and rules will be met with harsh measures and are asked to report almost daily on their activity. Despite these businesses claiming to be customer centric, they couldn’t be further from this and their customers will cotton on, thus undermining any credibility and so building an inevitable downward spiral of their own creation.

Empowering people

I strongly believe that we need to empower people and teams to do the right thing and organisations just need to provide a framework to enable them to do this. A recent survey conducted by B2B Marketing and the Octopus Group asked 190 senior B2B marketers various questions about how ‘brave’ they and their organisations were, and the findings highlighted how difficult it can be to be different, try something new or challenge the status quo.

The results were:

• 93% of B2B marketers said they would be more willing to make a brave decision if they would not suffer consequences in the event of failure
• Only 35% of marketers said their organisation accepted failure as a part of the innovation process. Only 40% were actively encouraged to take brave decisions
• 95% agreed that being brave in business is influenced more by company culture than external economic factors
• 83% of B2B marketers believed leadership that supports brave decision-making is the most important characteristic of a brave business

Financial services is not renowned for its brave marketing or innovation (it is a fact that the financial services sector uses video the least in social media, despite this medium being the most effective in driving engagement via this channel).

Becoming braver

How do you become braver though? Here are some things to consider:

1. Stand up for yourself

This is the most obvious characteristic of bravery, but it can be intimidating when stepping up to senior stakeholders. Businesses discourage conflict and most people feel uncomfortable with conflict and don’t want to hear the word no. Also, your stakeholders probably don’t understand marketing like you do, so it’s your responsibility to outline the potential that a brave decision might bring.

2. Change how bravery is perceived

Anyone as old as I am will remember with fondness Yes Minister/Prime Minister and a quote in one episode sums up how bravery can be construed in many organisations:

Private Secretary: Prime Minister, isn’t conscription a rather courageous policy?

Prime Minister: Courageous, oh my God, is it?

The key to changing mindsets is to communicate bravery as an essential component within the marketing team and to highlight the negative consequences of retaining the status quo. Let’s face it, customers and competitors won’t wait for you.

3. Think big, but start small

When a small initiative or project goes well, it could give you the perfect opportunity to scale up your ideas. Momentum will be behind you; colleagues will be enthused, and stakeholders will be more willing to back it. Be careful though, as internal politics and bureaucracy could kill it and so protect your initiative from rules and regulations that will hinder its agility and bravery.

4. If you do fail, fail fast and fail early

It is worth studying pretotyping which is simply the art and science of faking it before making it. It is an approach to developing and launching innovation that helps you to determine if you are building the right thing before you invest a lot of time and effort. Pretotyping helps you to fail … but fast enough and cheaply enough that you have the time and resources to try something different.

A pretotype is a partially mocked-up version of the intended product or service that can be built in minutes, hours or days instead of weeks, months or years. The art and science of pretotyping is aimed to help innovators:

• Decide what features can – and should – be mocked-up (or dramatically simplified)
• Use mock-ups to test and collect feedback and usage data systematically
• Analyse usage data to determine their next step.

The father of pretotyping, Alberto Savoia, has come up with a Pretotyping Manifesto, which I think is useful and sets out some core principles:

• Innovators beat ideas
• Pretotypes beat product types
• ;Building beats talking
• Simplicity beats features
• Now beats later
• Commitment beats committees
• Data beats opinions.

5. Support brave ideas

A brave culture undoubtedly starts at the top of the organisation and has to be supported by the wider business to gain traction. Of course, it takes time, but the rewards will be reaped over a long period.

A basic step should be to celebrate failure as well as winning. I can hear you already saying ‘really???’, but such a stance will prove that the culture really does support improvement through trial and error. It’s crucial that every failure is communicated as being a means to take the team one step closer to success. Share what was learnt during the process and get the team to generate more ideas on the back of it.

Most of all, this is about being positive and sending a message that there is no shame in not hitting the mark first time. This should be communicated at a local team level but for company-wide impact, ask the CEO to take the same approach at town hall meetings.

Marketing to add value

Hopefully this article has given you some food for thought and as someone who has recently left the comfortable existence of employment to become a freelance consultant, the value of reading widely and attending events that broaden your mind are invaluable to a marketer.

As marketers, we must stand up and be counted and to truly add value to our organisations, we must not fear failure, but embrace it and be bold. This is the future – don’t be left behind.