Given the privacy and regulatory issues endemic to the financial services industry (FinServ), it’s taken the industry a bit of time to figure out exactly how to leverage marketing technology (Martech) to reach, retain, and inform its audiences. In line with other sectors like education and retail, FinServ is investing in Martech, and it’s paying off.
What is Martech?
Martech refers to a number of digital tools companies and entrepreneurs deploy to market their products and services to consumers and other stakeholders, from bespoke project management and design software platforms to full-fledged campaign automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. This category includes some of the more well-known digital advertising platforms like Google Ads/Analytics, Microsoft Advertising, Twitter Ads, and YouTube Ads, as well as CRMs such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. All of these tools serve to streamline digital campaigns, collect and analyze data, enable automated scheduling, reporting and statistics, and produce website heat maps, schedule social media content, and more. Grouped together, these platforms are known as a Martech stack.
How pervasive has Martech become? According to online software marketplace G2, the Martech solutions marketplace has grown 27.8 percent year-over-year, increasing from just over 11,000 solutions in 2023 to more than 14,000 in 2024: this reflects both the evolving complexity of marketing requirements as well as the constant innovation in the space.
If we focus in on FinServ, recent investment activity by major industry players — like Citi, Chase, JPMorgan, and their competitors — underlines the growing importance of Martech stacks in the industry.
- In March 2024, StarTree, a cloud-based real-time analytics services company powered by Apache Pinot, announced Citi had made a strategic investment in the company. Citi uses the open-source Apache Pinot and StarTree to access trade and risk monitoring for its Markets business.
- In April 2024, JPMorgan Chase launched Chase Media Solutions, a new digital media business. This bank-led media platform, the first of its kind, enables advertisers to send relevant promotions to around 80 million of the bank’s customers.
Implementing Martech that’s Right on the Money
FinServ’s second-most important currency is, of course, data. Thanks to strategically built and implemented Martech stacks, FinServ companies can work with vast amounts of data to gain insight into the behaviors and preferences of their customers. By adopting a data-driven strategy, these organizations can design individualized marketing campaigns for their specific audiences and deliver them via the most effective channels at the best time. And, yes, AI is a huge contributor to the data-driven results and effectiveness of FinServ Martech stacks, given its ability to analyze and process massive amounts of customer data — effectively democratizing the use of marketing technology.
Implementing Martech that’s right on the money can transform your marketing efforts to produce tangible results, but it’s important to follow the right steps. Similar to the healthcare industry, FinServ is under strict regulations and requirements when it comes to marketing, largely for the protection of investors. There are several laws governing FinServ outreach to consumers, including the Truth in Advertising Act, the Truth in Savings Act and Fair Lending Laws, among others. In December of 2020, the SEC finalized reforms under the Investment Advisers Act to modernize rules governing advertising and marketing by investment firms. Although these rules remain in place today, FinServ organizations are expected to keep up with any changes in the regulatory landscape.
FinServ companies need to invest in the right Martech strategy to be able to follow these laws while still executing marketing campaigns that perform, simultaneously maintaining a seamless ecosystem of interconnected digital marketing tools via strategic integrations to help increase adoption and effective usage. To truly optimize a Martech stack and maximize ROI, these companies need the right roadmap, and the right talent, to get them there. But what is a Martech roadmap, particularly in the FinServ space?
The Martech Roadmap: Your Path to Success
According to Gartner, a Martech roadmap helps CMOs, Marketing Operations Directors, VPs of Strategy and Innovation – and other marketing executives – communicate current and future Martech capabilities to their teams and/or throughout an enterprise. These executives can leverage their roadmaps to plan, compile business and user needs for use-case development, review and acquire new technologies, build fresh capabilities, and predict and adapt to evolving technology, potential risks, and other marketplace disruptions.
What’s the best way to start building a roadmap and begin leveraging everything a Martech stack can do for your FinServ company? You need the right people to help you put the right stack together, experts with real depth in marketing and technology who can provide your organization with the solutions it needs, such as:
- Platform assessment and implementation
- Business setups for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) builds
- Workfront-to-Workfront project management configuration
- Integration of Workfront with Adobe Creative Cloud
- Impeccable, on-brand, user-friendly dashboards
- Salesforce operations, program, and project management, and administration
- And so much more…
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Bottomline
Martech strategy is, simply put, one of the most important investments a FinServ company — or any organization for that matter — can make. Thinking about putting together a Martech stack that drives measurable ROI and turns your FinServ organization into a formidable competitor? Need a team to activate, maintain, and/or evolve it? One that understands the myriad compliance issues innate to the financial services industry from investment banking and trading services to wealth management and beyond?
At Creative Circle, we have the talent and expertise you need to effectively leverage Martech and stay at its ever-evolving vanguard. We develop tailor-made, talent-driven solutions that meet your organization where it’s at today, and we can build out teams to prepare your brand for tomorrow. In other words, we’ve got Martech expertise and consulting-level support that you can bank on.
