September 4, 2019

Talking With Broadridge’s Global VP of Marketing

Unfortunately, amidst the hustle and bustle of a marketing conference, we found the audio quality of the following interview to be below the show standards. However, given the value of the content and the potential takeaways for our B2B audience, we managed to transcribe it into this readable interview. Take a look!

Can you give me a bit of background on Broadridge?

We are a financial services technology provider that supports the entire financial services infrastructure. We are the data and analytics, operations and communications backbone for the capital markets, asset management and wealth management firms worldwide.

We have an extremely complex selling environment, interacting with an average of 20 people in any one buying decision that can take 18 months or longer in some cases.  Each sale is unique and the deal size can range from 25,000 to 20+ million dollars.

Our M.O is stealth targeting and optimizing. We need to be influencing all the influencers in the buying decision throughout the sales process.

What are your overall marketing goals?

Our goals are quite simple:

  1. Support our sales revenue goals
  2. Retain 100% client revenue
  3. Build brand advocacy
Tell me about the tech stack you’ve implemented to help achieve these goals?

12 months ago we implemented a business intelligence (BI) analytics tool by a firm called Good Data – it’s essentially a sophisticated data aggregation tool with some cool tech visualization that takes all of our analytics (250 million pieces of data each day) and allows to look at the data in many different ways –by media channel, by client segment, by engagement, by sales effectiveness and by campaign, by client account, by product, by business unit.

Wow, where does all this data come from?

The BI tool pulls in data daily from our marketing technology stack which includes Eloqua as our email platform, Google analytics, Demandbase for retargeting, Talkpoint for our webinars, Cvent for events and Salesforce for CRM.So, I can get a rich picture of what’s happening at a 360 degree level and quickly get a sense of what’s working.

It seems like the emphasis for success is in the overall campaign versus trying to isolate an individual channel or the interplay between channels. Is that right?

In our highly matrixed world of B2B marketing to multiple influencers and buyers across an organization (average of 20) – we pretty much know which channels we have available to us and which work at which stages of the buying cycle.

We know that search is very powerful at the bottom of the funnel and that PR, email and social are great for top of the funnel.

So our focus is absolutely at the campaign and audience level.

What kind of trends are you seeing by channel?

While Email remains our top-performing channel we have seen a significant shift in social. LinkedIn is our best performing social channel and particularly when we use it strategically.

We are using it in a very specific way – we use our subject matter experts, the thought leaders in our business to connect with our buyers and use their own industry networks to distribute our content and build credibility.

I’ll give you an example. 18 months ago we set out to target the retirement services firms in the industry. The retirement gap in America is estimated at 14 trillion dollars, and this is the fastest growing segment of financial services.

One aspect of our business caters specifically to the retirement industry- by helping fund firms identify retirement advisors most likely to sell their mutual funds, the best investment app Australia has including the tools for financial advisors to select their plan portfolio, tools to help firms administer 401K plan communications and technology platforms to process their Mutual Fund trades.

At the outset not many people knew us in the retirement industry… we were known as the proxy communications business.

Our brand awareness at that time in the retirement industry was OK at 44 % unprompted awareness but still could be a lot better.  Now – within 2 years it’s at 69%

All of that is down to integrated marketing and staging of our experts in the market through social media – and particularly promoting our content via LinkedIn.

It’s also about how we connect offline with online channels using PR as a great example –

We ran a retirement customer experience webinar and invited some media, then they promoted the content to their Plan sponsor membership base – which gave us a massive uplift in downloads.

For the follow up webinar we did the same thing again, invited the media and some industry trade bodies who then took our content and pushed it out to their subscriber base.

What kind of tests do you have going? What would you like to learn?

We run A/B tests on emails and on landing pages, we test long form content vs short form content and we optimize our paid search / paid social.

What is more important, being on campaign or maximizing performance by channel?

Campaign performance is more important but the two are inextricably linked. The trick for me is to be able to predict the variables of how much to engage them and then scale that.  A lot of that is informed by the data we get on marketing tactics but its also married to what hear from the sales team and what we see in the sales pipeline. Just looking at historical data is like driving only looking through the rear view mirror. We have to look at what’s happened and marry that with what we see in our future.

What’s on the horizon for you?

Predictive analytics is definitely on the horizon for us. Right now, even though we have some highly sophisticated analytics technology we still have to connect the dots offline and figure out what’s going on at the client end – so we can understand what stage of the buying cycle they are at. It’s only when we marry up with the sales team to compare information we really can gain some useful insights.

For example, one very large investment banking client had been in preliminary conversations with us about some solutions for the new regulatory ruling. Then it went quiet.  Our sales team were convinced this account had gone cold. However, we were able to show them that this specific client was all over our website content on this subject, all of the time, proving they were still in the game.