How Financial Services and Healthcare Can Optimise Marketing Operations

Is Your Marketing Operation Fragmented? Here’s How to Rebuild it for Maximum Efficiency.

You’re starting the week, and the familiar frustrations begin to surface. Your sales team is slow to follow up on leads marketing has nurtured. Creative teams are struggling to get campaigns approved, and distribution deadlines are slipping. Meanwhile, leadership is asking for proof that your marketing efforts are moving the needle, but all you have are scattered reports, misaligned processes, and siloed data.

These inefficiencies aren’t just minor frustrations – they are costing your business time, resources, and opportunities. In financial services and healthcare, where compliance and regulation add even more complexity, marketing operations can feel like a minefield. But there’s a way to break out of this cycle. By addressing the fragmentation in your marketing infrastructure, you can streamline operations, align teams, and reclaim control of your strategy.

Maximising the Value of Your Technology Stack

Many businesses in regulated industries use tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Marketo to manage their CRM and marketing automation. These platforms are powerful, but the challenge lies in how they are integrated into your broader operation. It’s not enough to have the tools – you need them to work together seamlessly across marketing, sales, creative, production, media, distribution, and even senior management and finance.

When these systems operate in silos, inefficiencies multiply. Data becomes fragmented, workflows slow down, and cross-departmental collaboration suffers. While exploring tools like Segment or Zapier can help unify data and automate workflows, not every marketing manager has the time, resources, or permission to implement these solutions. In regulated industries, involving your IT team or consulting with experts in marketing infrastructure may be necessary to ensure that all stakeholders are working from the same data set and goals.

However, beyond unifying data, consider the broader benefits of a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. A DAM can centralise your marketing assets, ensuring that creative, sales, and production teams are all working from the most up-to-date materials. With features like version control and permission settings, a DAM can help you manage compliance, ensure faster approvals, and prevent outdated or non-compliant assets from going live.

Here’s what you can do:

• Audit Your Tools: Examine whether your existing tools are aligned with the needs of all your teams. Are they siloed, or do they support cross-functional collaboration? A collaborative audit involving IT, marketing, creative, and production teams can help uncover gaps in communication and functionality.

• Leverage DAM Systems: By centralising assets in a DAM, you can streamline approval workflows and ensure compliance across the board, reducing bottlenecks and improving campaign turnaround times.

Aligning Marketing, Sales, and Creative for Greater Impact

When marketing, sales, and creative teams operate in isolation, the result is often misaligned goals, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. But the issue goes beyond just day-to-day operations – it's about strategic alignment. If your teams aren’t collaborating on shared goals from the outset, your campaigns will struggle to deliver meaningful results.

In highly regulated industries, this lack of alignment can create even more complications, as compliance and legal reviews add extra layers of complexity to your workflows. To break down these silos, you need to focus on integrated processes that bring all stakeholders into the conversation early – whether that’s creative, sales, compliance, or finance.

Here’s how you can improve alignment:

• Establish Cross-Functional Meetings: Set up regular meetings between marketing, sales, creative, and other relevant teams to ensure alignment on both long-term goals and immediate campaigns. Include key compliance or legal stakeholders early in the process to avoid last-minute bottlenecks.

• Adopt Agile Marketing Practices: Consider incorporating agile marketing methodologies, which allow for greater collaboration and flexibility. This could include cross-functional sprints, where small, focused teams work together on short-term goals while maintaining a strategic view of long-term objectives.

Turning Data into Meaningful Insights

Intensely data-rich environments like financial services and healthcare, collecting data certainly isn’t the problem – but making sense of it is. Translating raw data into insights that resonate with leadership remains a significant challenge. Too often, marketing reports focus on metrics like clicks, impressions, or email opens – numbers that don’t connect easily and neatly with the bottom line. While these metrics have their place, the real power lies in identifying how long-term brand-building efforts feed into performance metrics lower in the funnel – ultimately driving conversions and revenue. Yep, money talks.

What leadership needs to see is not just how your marketing efforts are driving short-term outcomes, but how they are building long-term brand equity that translates into bottom-funnel success. Metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV), brand sentiment, and brand recall can be correlated with performance metrics such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Lead Conversion Rates. This holistic view helps connect the dots between sustained brand activity and measurable revenue growth.

Here’s how you might better demonstrate marketing value:

• Focus on Metrics that Matter: Shift your reporting to focus on KPIs that leadership cares about – Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Lead Conversion Rates. But don’t stop there – show how long-term brand-building activities, such as improving brand recognition or customer satisfaction, reduce CAC over time or improve conversion rates down the funnel. For example, if a strong brand campaign significantly increases unaided brand awareness, you’re likely to see stronger performance from bottom-funnel initiatives as brand trust and recognition increase.

• Connect the Dots Across the Funnel: Data is boring and useless until you shape it to tell the full story. Explain how a top-funnel brand campaign led to greater engagement and recognition, which in turn fuelled better performance in conversion-focused initiatives. By showing the connection between brand health metrics and lower-funnel performance, you can make the case that strong brand equity isn’t just a long-term play – it’s a driver of short-term results as well. Plus creativity and a decent, well thought out and large budget! I did say money talks. See above.

• Correlating Data for Full-Funnel Impact: Here’s the deeper insight: beyond immediate clicks or conversions, it’s the synergy between long-term brand equity and bottom-funnel metrics that truly drives sustainable growth. By measuring brand sentiment, repeat purchase rates, or customer loyalty, you can directly correlate how long-term brand-building translates into increased efficiency and effectiveness in your sales efforts.

In the end, the most successful strategies harness both brand-building and performance marketing, proving that a well-established brand not only attracts customers but converts them more efficiently, reducing the overall cost of acquisition and driving higher revenue growth over time.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Marketing Operations in Regulated Industries

As industries like financial services and healthcare continue to evolve, the demands on marketing operations are increasing. Data privacy regulations, compliance requirements, and the need for real-time reporting are reshaping how marketing teams need to operate. The businesses that succeed will be those that invest in a cohesive, agile marketing infrastructure – one that allows them to move quickly while staying compliant.

The future of marketing will depend on seamless integration between teams, efficient workflows, and real-time data visibility. As marketing continues to play a more strategic role in business growth, the ability to adapt quickly to changing regulations and customer expectations will be critical.

To wrap up:

Marketing managers in regulated industries face unique challenges, from siloed teams to fragmented tools to the complexities of compliance. But by streamlining your marketing infrastructure, integrating your technology, and aligning your teams, you can turn these challenges into opportunities for growth. The future belongs to businesses that can move quickly, collaborate efficiently, and demonstrate the impact of their marketing efforts with data that matters.