How Data Driven Marketing Drives Growth, Builds Credibility and Gets Marketing a Seat at the Table

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Steve.

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He is a marketer with over 15 years of experience.

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He's worked for two very large financial institutions and he's helped those organizations with growth, marketing, customer marketing and business insights.

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Welcome to the show.

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Awesome, Eric.

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Thanks so much for having me Really excited to be here.

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So before we jump into your story about some of the marketing you've done that you're most proud of, why don't you start by giving everyone just a minute or two of context about who you are and what you do?

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I've been with Morgan Stanley for almost 10 years now and in my current role it's very much focused on leading off on a B2B equity compensation marketing for Morgan Stanley at work on the retail front, thinking a little bit about B2B as well as B2C, but more so when I think about the future.

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It's how could I take all those experiences, those insights and those learnings and apply that forward and not just share with all of you who are listening today, but also be able to share with a broader team as time goes on?

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Very interesting.

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So let's jump right in.

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Tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done, that you're the most proud of.

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Some of what I've focused on in my experience over the last 15 years has been on growth, customer and business intelligence marketing, and I want to focus more on the latter being business intelligence marketing.

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And some may say why does this sit within marketing, if it's really meant for the business?

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And I would actually turn around and say why wouldn't it?

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Being able to hear insights from the marketplace, whether it's from prospects or clients, is incredibly important as, from a marketing function, right, being able to adjust much of those insights into what we do, while also supporting your business partners and providing insights on what's working well, what competitors are doing, what we could be doing better.

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So in the story that I'm going to tell, it's more so a high level on business intelligence and then how it's helped to inform some of the marketing that we've done.

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Now what I think is really interesting and I have a quote from a recent podcast I was listening to from one of the big four and specifically one of their senior leaders, and she was talking a little bit about business intelligence from a different angle and what she had noted leaders have to stop the siloed approach to problem solving and understand the interconnections, the ripple effects of each decision on the broader organization.

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Think of it as business clairvoyance, and when I think about business intelligence, it is business clairvoyance, right, it's being able to obtain diverse perspectives to unlock value, and that could be value for the business that drives growth and addresses challenges, but it could also be for marketing, to enhance value proposition and optimize the way that we connect with clients.

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At the end of the day, think of it as a multiplier effect.

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We're hearing all these insights.

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We're multiplying it across the business and then we're taking it forward, and I'll pause in just a second to say some of the ways that we've used it, and by we, over the course of my career, has been some of the insights that we hear.

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How do you apply that forward to prospects?

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If you hear that a prospect has a challenge with, let's say, technology or, let's say, global expansion, then how do you create a campaign that addresses those specific needs?

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Think a little bit about account-based marketing and then making sure that you're connecting with them in a way that they not just ingest content, but also it's connecting with that, with their specific challenge.

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On the client front, it's providing or using those insights to provide them with content in a way that they again consume it.

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Think about the format.

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So what we've done, or some of what I've done over the course of my career, has been creating webcasts that speak specifically to the topics that are top of mind for them, and then, from a marketplace perspective and zooming out what is the competitive landscape doing and using that business clairvoyance as a way to differentiate from them.

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So long word, the way of saying business intelligence has been a big part of what I've done throughout my career, but it's also been a really big addition to not just marketing but also the business itself.

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The technology behind business intelligence has been evolving over the last 20 years pretty rapidly.

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What you mentioned is it's really getting feedback and insight from customers and then doing something practical with that right again on those specific challenges, then, how are you able to identify key accounts that may have that challenge as well?

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How are you connecting with them across a variety of channels, whether it's paid, and then thinking about do you go on social or do you use direct partnerships?

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Do you use organic channels?

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Do you use those that are homegrown, based on the data that you have being email and email nurture campaigns?

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But, eric, you actually made a really good point.

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Over the last 20 years, there's obviously been a really big advancement in technology and, dare I say, the digitization and the data expansion has really, I think, helped pivot marketing from being more of a subjective partner to more of an objective partner that could really help lead the business forward rather than coming from behind, and you probably know this better than anyone from being a CMO.

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It's marketing is certainly guilty sometimes of having our fingers in the air and thinking here's what we would do to address X, y or Z, but rooting that in data is actually a great way to turn marketing into a strategic partner that has a seat at the table.

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Yeah, I think data-driven marketing is the most important aspect in B2B marketing, and getting to things like attribution, or I like to call it getting fingerprints on the weapon, can sometimes be very hard because of the buyer's journey is often complex, right, but a lot of business intelligence, as you're mentioning, is how do people want to buy?

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Like, a lot of people don't want to buy via Google paid ads, they don't want to buy via webinars, they want to buy via meeting in person, and I'm just making this up, but you get the idea Different people like to buy different ways that have different jobs, and understanding those insights is, I think, part of the data-driven marketing and business intelligence.

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Let me ask you the question is has there been some insights that you've gotten that really surprised you, that were completely different than your original thesis and that changed the direction of the business and the marketing that you were doing?

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Sure, one of the insights that we've gotten through these business intelligence surveys across the two financial institutions I've been at is that there's been a divergence in the type of content that clients are looking for, maybe not just the type of content, but the type of format and the way that they want to receive it.

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And I'm sure everyone that's listening and, eric, you definitely know this as well there's so many emails that we receive on a daily basis.

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I think we could all say we would love to avoid getting spam emails as much as possible, but actually what our initial hypothesis was clients want to receive less emails from us, but really what we're seeing, that's actually the preferred channel for them to want to receive communications and content.

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And then, similarly, we think a little bit about how the last few years have evolved.

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Obviously, we had COVID, we were all on lockdown, we came back out and being in person and providing that one-to-one interaction is still the key way for clients to want to receive insights and also engage with partners.

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So I'd say those are some of the big I'd say the big insights that we've gotten, while low hanging fruit from a marketing perspective has challenged that hypothesis of hey, let's send less emails, let's dial up, let's say more on the video side of things, which is an area to index to, and maybe on the podcast side of things, but really what we saw is one to one inone in-person interactions, and emails still come up on top, which was really surprising.

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Yeah, I think the email is a bit surprising because of the dynamic you mentioned, but also not surprising after you think about it, because who wants to get stuff in paper these days?

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I don't want to get anything in paper myself, so I don't want to get anything in the postal mail.

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Just email me, okay.

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That really makes sense.

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But I wouldn't also naturally think people want more emails, like you said.

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So I think that those are interesting examples of understanding what customers want, really want, right?

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I think people just don't talk to customers enough and get those sorts of details, and then they don't provide a great experience and then it creates everything from churn to people not being as engaged or not being as big of a fan, right.

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Totally and right.

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It's also, then, how right?

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How can you provide a more segmented experience in terms of engaging with prospects or clients?

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And the point on email, right, we'll go down this rabbit hole a little bit.

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It's yes, the volume, the quantity, is a problem to figure out, I think, anywhere.

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But if you're providing them more quality communications and hitting on their needs and their challenges, that is such a great way to differentiate amongst the sea of sameness, whether it's financial services or elsewhere.

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So I think that blend of listening to the marketplace, prospects or clients, implementing those insights from a marketing perspective, understanding the way that you could be more targeted in the approach and then, obviously, providing them more of what they're looking for, half of the battle when it comes to marketing is connecting with clients, and you'll connect with them in a way that you connect with them in the best way possible by understanding where they're coming from, and I think that's a little bit of a change for marketing.

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Again, you know it's easy to make all the.

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It's easy to make or it's easy to be subjective, if you will, but being more objective is really the path forward.

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And again, in a recent article that I had read, it was talking about the role of CMOs and how marketing and CMOs have evolved over the course of the last 20 years and how it's going less from just marketing being marketing to more marketing helping to lead the business forward.

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And I think that's a really nice shift that you're really driven by, that digitization, that data expansion, those insights that you hear and applying it to the marketing and evolving on the marketing front with account-based marketing, account-based experiences going from one-to-many to one-to-one.

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That's the path forward.

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I often tell marketers that are looking for advice on how to get the growth.

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They need is to get out there and talk to customers.

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Just make it a process to go out and talk to X number of customers every week, every month, and I think some of the feedback and business intelligence tools enable that sort of repetition.

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That is really good, and so I think that that's the biggest piece of it is getting out there and getting direct input from customers instead of just sitting in the ivory tower.

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Don't just sit in the ivory tower.

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That's like the recipe for disaster is what I tell people.

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But what has been the impact of having this data-driven approach in the organizations that you've worked for?

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So I'll look at close to home from a selfish professional perspective and then I'll look at the impact within the organizations.

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Half of the challenge is always just making sure that marketing has that seat at the table.

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It's a theme that I've been focusing on throughout this conversation, by providing insights and uncovering the unknowns and the unseen, if you will.

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That's such a great way to be able to build a partnership with the business beyond just the fact that marketing is there to support them, and I'm really proud of the work that's been done over the last 15 years to really pivot the way that marketing is seen by the business.

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And I remember one of the key leaders that I worked for in the past saying that some of the insights that we had given him had helped to validate much of his hypotheses and that's helped him tell the story to his senior leaders.

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So that was a really great validation.

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But when I look at it from an organization and marketing perspective, man having insights to really understand what the marketplace, our prospects, our clients are doing and what competitors are doing, has really allowed us, I think, to pivot the way that we engage with our different audiences.

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I think we were talking right before the podcast had started and we were talking a little bit about that shift in how folks engage with long form versus short form content and how some of the social media that's out there has really pivoted or has, I think, really challenged folks in thinking about the way that we market.

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Do we go long form, do we go short form?

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And some of those insights that we've gathered throughout these business intelligence programs has really helped to help to identify and validate the hypothesis that content consumption behavior is shifting.

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Where we all engage with social media platforms from a personal perspective and we're swiping through, let's say, 60 second reels, that hasn't necessarily permeated into the professional aspect, but at the end of the day we're still the same person.

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What our hypothesis is?

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Those short form videos, those 60 second videos, are now permeating on the professional side.

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So my feeling is you're going to start to see more of that, especially as competitors across the financial services institute, across the financial services landscape, start to dial in and listen more to the marketplace.

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So you're saying that being data-driven in your career over the last 15 years has made you a lot more credible to other people in the business, because it wasn't just your opinion or your gut as a marketing guy.

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You were out there talking to customers, getting data and insights from others.

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Is that right?

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100%.

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Marketing can be very subjective, but if you take a data lens to everything, whether it's looking at data from a campaign and you're looking at performance metrics, click through rates, dare I say open rates, and I know that's a whole separate story.

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Or if you're looking at data from that which comes from business intelligence programs, that helps you be not just a subjective marketer but an objective marketer story.

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Or if you're looking at data from that which comes from business intelligence programs, that helps you be not just a subjective marketer but an objective marketer and, to your point, eric, that has really helped to shift the dial to be a more credible partner that can help the business achieve their goals, and the second part you mentioned was just being more credible, and the whole team doing that has really helped the organizations you've work for just be more competitive and win more with customers, broadly speaking, because you're closer connected to them.

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I really appreciate you spending time with us today.

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Thanks for sharing these insights about data-driven marketing.

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Encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends.

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They should hear these great insights.

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If anyone wants to learn more, we'll link to Steve's LinkedIn in the show notes so you can easily connect with him and learn more about this topic if you desire.

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Thanks so much for being with us, steve, today.

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We appreciate it, definitely.

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Thanks so much.