Is your financial marketing worthy of C-Suite status?
It can be argued that no area of banking has seen more changes in the last decade than marketing. Beyond the utilization of data, leveraging advanced analytics and deploying technology to personalize marketing, the talent pool remains limited. With these challenges, is marketing ready to play an important role in the C-Suite?
According to McKinsey, 83% of CEOs globally believe marketing can be a major driver of growth. This is obviously a new phenomenon, given that marketing traditionally was viewed as a “cost center” that would spend resources on advertising, branding and other mass media options. Unfortunately, despite the raised status of marketing, 23% of CEOs do not feel that marketing is actually delivering the growth needed by the organization.
Financial marketers need skills and a mindset that is vastly different from marketers of the past. Winning or losing is happening almost instantaneously, and will be determined by how well marketers embrace change, are willing to take risks, and will disrupt themselves.
In a world where information, devices and technology are all interconnected, where data is collected wherever the consumer is, and where marketing performance is reaching perfection, marketers have an opportunity to be at the epicenter of the customer experience. Despite all of the technology and digitization, human traits like creativity, imagination, intuition and ethics will be more important than ever. But the application of these traits will need to be done with a future sense three-five years out.
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