As I read through industry publications and listen to thought leaders present case studies I find that they often overlook one very important piece of the financial services business. Many examples cite the customer engagement success of banks and the enablement techniques used to engage advisors. But in the world of marketing, the B2B case studies can be hard to identify. Perhaps because many financial institutions still rely heavily on their sales organizations and influencers to carry their value message?
But with the longer and more relationship-complex sales cycles, strong marketing initiatives in the financial services B2B space are essential. Below are 3 financial services companies finding great success with B2B digital marketing.
Wolters Kluwer Financial
Every year, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services reviews their Sales Representative Alignment to insure they are meeting customer needs and demands. With over 15,000 Bank, Credit Union, and Mortgage Company customers, it is impossible for their sales teams to visit each of these institutions on a quarterly basis. Sales challenged the marketing team to come up with a way to facilitate a personal communication on behalf of the sales representatives for the segment with many customers.
They developed what they call a “Priority 2 campaign” to meet that challenge. Using dynamic content the customer experience includes: 
- A monthly personalized message from each sales team, including their photos and contact information.
- Customized thought leadership content that generates interest and interaction from these customers. The campaign is updated monthly with the development of additional content including webinars, case studies, white papers and videos. Emails are sent on a monthly cycle, each highlighting industry topics important to the audience (by capturing the contact’s Digital Body Language) as well as new content to keep the users engaged.
- A way for customers to sign-up additional contacts for the campaign.
- A way for customers with no current emailable contact to sign-up for the campaign.
- A way for customers to generate a lead if they are interested in engaging about a need or question.
Results: Bottom line, a 42% Year to Date increase in revenue ($673K) from this group of customers with only a $15,000 investment for creative and campaign set up.
A quote from their Vice President of Sales really says it all: “It’s allowed our reps to focus on our most valuable customers who spend the most with us and at the same time have marketing programs who go after other customers who will eventually spend more with us as well.”
Broadridge Financial Solutions
Broadridge Financial targets Corporate Issuer Customers and Prospects (Publicly traded companies in North America). They engage with job titles inclusive of Corporate Secretary, Legal Counsel and CFO’s. 
At Broadridge, they used digital marketing technology to replace a manual lead routing process that benefited their client services team, sales, finance, marketing, and clients. Often times when the client service team is speaking with a client they uncover an up-sell opportunity or need with that client. The client service team used to manually give a lead (email or walk) over to sales. Manual lead routing could take up to 48 hours. Finance had no visibility into opportunities that were closing and had difficulty paying out quarterly incentives. Marketing had a difficult time targeting clients with the proper message and value proposition. The client was not engaged and had zero visibility as to when they would receive a response to their inquiry.
Using an internal form page to capture the opportunity they could automate lead routing, inform finance in real-time about the status of an opportunity, report on quarterly incentives in record time, and achieve higher accuracy when reporting. With this, sales management could gather deeper insights into client services performance, more intelligence about the market served and make smarter business decisions. Sales teams received qualified opportunities which in-turn reduced follow-up time with the client. Client services’ incentives rose as close rates improved and they received compensation faster. Client satisfaction also improved due to quick follow-up calls and triggered confirmation communication post-call.
Results: With this new process they now save $400K annually and reduced processing times by 92%. 60% of opportunities created are closing the same business day.
Crowe Horwath
Crowe was challenged with nurturing opportunities through long complex sales cycles. They were pushing content and sales was re-actively calling on anyone who downloaded the content. They wanted to better educate and nurture their audience, and better enable their sales team.
Using what they knew about their target prospects/clients, they developed a whole new content strategy based on both the buy cycle and key personas. They developed 48 pieces of content for this program – compelling, issues-based content that would give insight into stages of the buy cycle as prospects/clients engaged with it. The content fell into 4 topic tracks. 
Once a user was in a track, they would get an email every 3 weeks that offered a compelling early-mid stage piece of content. But the sidebar would offer a late stage piece and if a user engaged with that, they were immediately put on a trigger report that was reviewed with sales. Interactions with content, answers to polling and progressive profile questions, interaction with links, and sharing of content (including email forwards) were carefully monitored. 2 primary reports are reviewed with sales weekly – people who clicked on the late-stage sidebar in emails and those that engaged with three or more pieces of content. Answers to progressive profile and poll questions were also taken into consideration and they collectively decided which opportunities should be followed up on by sales and who should follow up.
All the information aggregated on users enabled sales to be more effective because they can customize their messages and inquires based on the content prospects/clients have interacted with and the information these users have provided through polls and progressive profiling. They are now much more selective in who they attempt to engage, versus their previous “call everyone and hope” strategy.
Results:
- Improved inside sales efficiency: They have been able to focus the efforts of their inside sales organization, reducing the number of prospects called as a result of downloading content by 90%. This has allowed them to be more strategic about follow-up and focus on those prospects likely to be further along in the buy cycle.
- Significantly higher unique open and unique click-through rates: By allowing users to select the topic they were most interested in (and change that selection as their needs change), they experienced a 232% lift in unique open rates (from 14.1% to 46.9%) and a 150% lift in unique click-through rates (from 5.9% to 14.8%).
- Engagement rates: After only two months, they had 16% of their target users engaging with them through this program.
What B2B marketing success have you had in the financial services space?