As the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of a medium sized financial company, you have limited resources and marketing budget. After you have stood out from the competition, you will have to accept that unlike the larger companies; your marketing efforts have to be targeted and effective with lesser room for errors. One approach of creating such effective marketing strategy is to stand in the shoes of your client’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO).
Crafting The Right Message
A recent Oracle survey provided a powerful insight into the shifting role of the CFO. In today’s digital world, CFOs place priority in the capturing, measuring and reporting of company’s data in real time. For instance, for 76% of CFOs, customer satisfaction is their top business value priority but only 25% of them are able to capture measures of customer satisfaction effectively.
64% of CFOs put emphasis on the quality of their business process but only 33% have captured sufficient data on it. In such an environment, for your marketing materials to land with your client’s CFO who will be deciding on the facilities provider, it must emphasize the integration with their system (e.g. API), real time data analytics and your relationship with cutting edge technology.
In other words, the key message of your marketing materials would be to help them to identify future priorities and opportunities instead of looking at the rear view mirror. The shift in focus from strict expenditure control (‘bean counters’) to being forward looking reflects the changing customer preferences which financial institutions must grasp.
Client Preference For Direct Communication
This coincides with the HubSpot survey of salespeople which agreed that changing preferences is a sales disruptor. In particular, one of them wrote this:
“There’s a generational change away from personal service and direct communication fed by a growing preference for technology—not people.”
In today’s generation, marketing efforts would take the front side while salespeople would take a back seat in defining the sales revenue of a company. For customers, this is reflected in the related ranking of trusted information as presented in the chart below.
Source: HubSpot
Both business software and financial products are long term and weighty decisions to be undertaken by companies. In today’s environment, they are least likely to trust sales people compared to word-of-mouth, customer references and media articles. This means that the marketing strategy has to evolve into a multi channel approach to reach out to customers to build the sales momentum needed to break into the bigger playing leagues.
Team Work and Alignment
A targeted and effective marketing plan requires a process of discovery and detailed planning. Alchemise Consulting is the marketing expert in this field and we can help you to define a customized strategy to appeal to your target audience. For the financial sector, we recommend that the CMO and the CFO come to the table. The CMO can explain the organization’s target audience and the results of previous marketing campaigns.
Internally, Alchemise will also aid you to align your marketing and sales efforts. This has been the missing link in most companies which means that even the strongest marketing efforts go to waste. For instance, if your marketing effort results in a query in your webform, how long does it take for your sales people to contact them?
Source: HubSpot
Alchemise will provide the strategy and the CFO would contribute the viewpoints of his counterparts from the client’s side. Based on the CFO’s input, we will refine the plan further for your consideration. We will not rest until we have an effective marketing strategy for your organization that fits your goal and budget. This can be achieved starting with a monthly budget of S$25,000.
See The Results In 6 Months
Our consulting director, Chak Ng, will form the working team with your CMO and CFO to reach out to your target audience effectively and skip the pitfalls. You will see actual results after 6 months and pull ahead of your competition. This will be an investment that will be worth your time and money.
