Before Arlene Ingram picks a new addition to her marketing tech stack, she consults a substantial list of criteria. As JP Morgan Asset Management’s chief marketing officer for the UK and EMEA, Ingram is exacting in her requirements.
There’s the question of functionality – “does it do what we need and is it aligned with our marketing goals and objectives”. Easy integration is key; “will it fit within our martech ecosystem with minimal work”. Flexibility is crucial; “customising a tool to our specific needs is very important”, says Ingram.
She also wants assurances the data is there from analytics and reporting so Ingram can track performance and make data-driven decisions. Scalability is another must. Can the tech grow and evolve? Vendor support is vital too; “strong customer support and an intuitive platform is very important to our success”, says Ingram. Last, though not least, is pricing; “is it within budget and offering the required capabilities?”.
At the world’s largest banks, asset managers and insurers in 2024 such detailed checklists have become the price of progress. Martech can be a powerful part of an integrated distribution and client servicing solution. It brings businesses closer to their clients by providing them with targeted information based on their preferences, while helping demonstrate return on investment (ROI) on activity.
But as martech’s proliferation has given marketers extra tools, it has also created more room for expensive errors. Stuart Bridges cut his teeth as in-house marketing manager at global fund houses Ninety One and Fidelity, and is now an independent marketing consultant. He says he has “seen over the years how it is easy to be sucked into buying the latest tech, just because everyone else has it”.
It goes, he says, like this: “You’ve been to some senior marketing leaders’ forum or event, and everyone is talking about the latest platform they’ve onboarded [so you get it too]. Falling into this trap can unfortunately demonstrate that, as a marketer, you are out of touch with the most important part of your organisation – the client.”
Buying unnecessary tech incurs not only direct fees but also costs in additional headcount, new consultants, or time away from other projects for existing staff to onboard the system. Bridges says it can also create “a bizarre situation where you have to try and force people to use a solution inappropriate for your business, just because you’ve made the wrong investment decision”.
The marketing veteran recalls a simple example – a marketing department wanted its sales team to use a tracked URL link when emailing a document one-to-one to a client, rather than just sending a PDF. “It’s great that this URL can be tracked by marketing to demonstrate the number of engagements with the document and therefore why that document type should still be created,” says Bridges, “but it misses key limitations”.
Firstly, that the client prefers to receive a PDF, secondly, the salesperson has a long-standing relationship with the client so sending a link feels impersonal, and potentially thirdly the client’s company security blocks suspicious links, an increasing problem in larger organisations.
Marketers are under pressure to keep up with advances in their field, creating an impulse to adopt more tools in the hope of delivering results in an increasingly crowded marketplace across a wide variety of online spaces.
“The martech landscape is constantly evolving. We need to stay up to date with the latest development to remain competitive,” says Ingram.
Under her watch, JP Morgan AM has as many as eight components to its core martech stack; a client relationship manager (CRM); marketing automation platform; content management system (CMS); analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools to measure marketing effectiveness; a client data platform to collect and analyse customer data from multiple channels and drive personalisation; adtech; social media management platforms; and finally, a platform for the management end-to-end of in-person and digital events.
It is a similarly complex story at other financial institutions.
The latest addition to the martech rabbit hole among finance brands – as in so many other sectors – is the use case for artificial intelligence (AI). Jet Lali, head of digital marketing, measurement and operations at State Street, is experimenting with AI models to predict human versus machine activity on the company’s websites. “We’re looking for customer activity patterns that predict future outcomes, that help with revenue generation, marketing attribution and retention,” he says.
AI is tempting even the more traditional parts of the financial market. Royal London, a 163-year-old insurance and pension company, is currently testing and introducing AI tools into its marketing processes. Susie Logan, chief marketing officer at Royal London, says: “We’ve seen some exciting results so far and we’re pressing ahead with implementation across our ways of working.”
Royal London has a broad range of requirements across several marketing disciplines, and so avoids a one size fits all approach. Its CRM and marketing automation are run from Microsoft D365, whereas web, CMS, digital asset management (DAM) and workflow are delivered with Optimizely. Social media activity is managed through Hootsuite and Power BI and Google Analytics are used for measurement and reporting. Documents are produced via Smartcomms, but design and print services are currently outsourced to third party providers.
Logan’s focus through the deployment of all these tools is on how tech can “improve performance” such as efficiency in delivery and expanding capacity within her teams, plus promoting Royal London’s expertise and soft power, especially in light of Consumer Duty regulations introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority in 2023, which enshrines doing the best for customers in the rulebook.
“With Consumer Duty now in place, we are keenly looking at the impact improved communication experiences have on customer understanding to ensure we’re delivering positive outcomes,” she says. Royal London is likewise developing technology to give “a clear end-to-end understanding of customers behaviour and looking for opportunities to help them build their financial resilience”.
Yet the attraction of martech is often less sentimental. Chief financial officers can view it as an efficient way for marketing departments to prove their worth by providing a more direct ROI link between activity and sales than traditional, analogue marketing. Danielle Lee, brand and marketing director at Metro Bank, sees a clear case for getting the technology to demonstrate the value her team provides to the wider company.
“The business case for investing in marketing tech can prove itself quite quickly, for example with the right website tooling just a small uplift in conversion rate can quickly increase return on investment,” she says. “If you can link marketing activity to a unique customer ID you can become more sophisticated in measuring impact and return,” Lee adds. One thing she would like to see is more tech vendors offering to run proof of concepts – to help marketers prove the technology works to then secure funding.
But others are more circumspect about relying too much on the tech to justify their marketing spend. David Erixon, marketing director at Aviva, is among them. Marketing tech, he says, is often used to track what can be measured, rather than what should be measured, to companies’ detriment.
“Personally, I believe martech has taken the marketing community into too short-term optimisation lower down the funnel and forgetting how important mental availability and brand power is,” says Erixon. Companies, he adds, should probably make more investment in the longer-term impact of growing their market, instead of just capturing existing demand.
It is widely accepted that marketing is both an art and a science. martech is perhaps the most modern manifestation of businesses trying, with varying degrees of success, to combine those two very different disciplines. For Erixon, marketing is about being “positively present” in people’s consciousness and available at the right time for decision making. Something that is incredibly difficult to measure in pure numbers.
“All great marketing is about changing people’s behaviour. And that behaviour is never just rational. Humans are incredibly simple and complex, simultaneously,” he says. “And just as we don’t have a model for how consciousness and brains work – it’s a mystery to a large extent – so how could we be so naïve to think martech would either?”