Why Legacy Marketing Practices Are Ruining Your New High-Potential Brand

Arun had been a marketer for 20+ years at a top finance house in India and was responsible for the success of some of its most popular brands. Yet, he was unable to do the same for the company’s three-year old fintech brand. Despite relatively strong marketing budgets, detailed market-specific strategies, and strong digital partners, the growth was not seeing a hockey stick curve.

Here’s why:

• Digital natives could not relate to the aspirational tone that came with the brand personality.

• Their non-linear buying journeys could not keep up with the non-consistent brand narrative across touchpoints.

• Digital was being treated as a format upgrade; but it’s a universe with its own style and systems that don’t fall under labels.

• Spontaneity was missing from the brand voice; every creative and communication was going through multiple rounds of approvals (read feedback).

• Their partner mandates were focused on checkbox exercises instead of moving the needle on larger brand and marketing goals.

• Multiple vendors meant limited ownership and fragmented perspective of the customer journey.

Here are the 4 key recommendations we shared with Arun to turn things around for their promising fintech brand:

#1 Invest in an integrated marketing strategy

Stop treating digital as a separate channel. Also, having different strategies for organic marketing and sponsored digital marketing campaigns only dilutes the efficacy of both. Instead, build a single integrated marketing strategy that puts Brand Experience (BX) at the centre. 

Is it overwhelming? Quite likely. But as native brands forge strong, direct connections with customers, you cannot expect to win with fragmented narratives and limited ownership. You must consider a marketing partner who gets how the new customer journey is messy, collaborative, and immensely powerful.

It demands you to not fuss over formats. Instead, prioritize your brand personality and the narratives you want to bring alive, across touchpoints, throughout seasons. Move over aligning scope notes to specific exercises; sign up for impact, not deliverables.

#2 Don’t treat content distribution as a layer

“Arun, you may have the most powerful content sitting inside that expensive campaign film. But unless you prioritize how exactly it is going to reach and engage your audiences across channels, you are doing your content investment a great disservice.”

Saying this to one of your highest-paying clients wasn’t easy. But it was important. Unless you consider how and where your content is going to be distributed, you haven’t address the content marketing iceberg.

Here’s why it is important to have a content marketing and distribution strategy in place right at the start:

• It allows you for complete budget visibility and ideal allocation for content production and marketing.

• It paves the way for informed RoI; content creation is expensive. When you know the sweet spot between creation, repurposing, and channel-wise marketing beforehand, you get to optimize instead of spray-and-pray.

• Native content formats and consumption differs basis channels. This makes it important to know your primary distribution channel. It will impact the entire content creation process, from the narrative style you choose to the core story idea. For instance, a YouTube-first distribution strategy allows for micro-dramas while a content marketing strategy that leads with Reels may mean cut-to-the-chase story arcs.

#3 Partner to drive end-to-end marketing ecosystems

The biggest gap Arun experienced was this – he was working with multiple vendors to drive his content – a creative production partner, an SEO agency, a social media marketing agency, and a paid media campaign partner. This resulted in major silos and limited ownership of the content funnel. If a particular content asset did not perform well, the creative team would blame it on the campaign manager and the marketing team on the other hand, would question the relevance of the content produced. Additionally, the entire workflow was cumbersome and winning at spontaneous, on-trend content became a challenge.

On the other hand, native fintech leaders and marketers sign up for a single content marketing partner with end-to-end content ecosystem capabilities. This makes the entire process more aligned, efficient, and easy-to-recalibrate. Imagine producing and launching a follow-up content asset mere hours after monitoring the first asset’s performance.

#4 Set goals, track, and update

You cannot reverse engineer great storytelling and content; virality is one of the many wondrous things that cannot be explained, only experienced. But when you don’t align every content intent to a marketing or business goal, you risk burning cash. This calls for an approach that balances the power of storytelling with intent-led marketing and content optimization. Instead of treating your hero content assets and content-first campaigns as brand or product marketing spends, treat them as business contributors. This fundamental shift allows you to get more value on your content spends, addressing the eternal debate – when goes organic marketing and content deliver business value? When we let it! By aligning content to the right goals and tracking progress, you have the opportunity to scale more of assets that perform, tweak those that show promise, and pause promotions for content that seems off the mark. An AI-led content ecosystem especially makes this fluidity a practical possibility.

These recommendations served as a North Star for Arun and his team. They made the case for a single content production and marketing partner to their management; by building an end-to-end content management ecosystem with a team that was accountable and swift, Arun was able to drive these wins:

18% reduction in overall content production and marketing budgets

2x quicker turnaround, making it easier to deliver trending and hyper personalized content

Map content as a defining experience for quick-to-convert customers

24% increase in engagement across touchpoints owing to aligned narratives

Show up organically in AI search recommendations for 3 out of 10 priority keywords

40% reduction in time spent by team on feedback and approvals

Keen to understand how you can replicate the success experienced by Arun and team and turn things around for your new, promising brand? Let’s talk!