Tech-Driven content strategies for investment banking industry

Oskar: Welcome to Around the Product Development, our weekly 25-minute series on digital product creation. We cover every stage, from ideation to monetization, offering actionable insights and knowledge from industry experts. This series is powered by our Agile Product Builders community, supported by Boldare, digital product creators, and consultants. Today’s special episode features two extraordinary guests from Objective Investment Banking & Valuation, who will share how to leverage tech-driven content and storytelling to scale your businesses.

Welcome, Cathy and Chanie. Cathy, could you start with a brief introduction, followed by Chanie?

Cathy: Hey, everyone. I’m Cathy. I started my career in marketing over 13 years ago in financial services. Back in the day, that really meant putting together pitch decks. Maybe email newsletters were just becoming a thing. Fast forward to today, I’m in digital marketing, which I define as the intersection of brand storytelling and technology.

I get to play in that intersection every day as Vice President of Objective. Objective was founded in 2006 as an investment banking and valuation firm specializing in advising closely held middle-market businesses within our industries of focus, helping them sell—also known as getting acquired. I’m so fortunate to be at Objective and to have my partner in crime, Chanie Smith, who, by the way, just got promoted to Director of Marketing at Objective. Congratulations, Chanie!

Chanie: Woohoo! My debut webinar with the new title. So thank you, Cathy, and thank you, Oskar, for having us.

I’m Chanie. I am the Director of Marketing at Objective Investment Banking & Valuation, which Cathy has given you a bit of background on. I’ve been with the firm for almost six years, and I’ve seen a significant evolution in what a marketing department can look like, from something that doesn’t have a ton of investment or resources to today, where it’s one of our business pillars. It’s been really exciting to be a part of that transformation. I actually started my marketing career in consumer products and eventually found my passion in financial services.

Oskar: I’m excited about today’s discussion. Let’s dive straight into the main topic. Could you share some insights on Objective’s go-to-market strategy? How do you tailor your approach to different segments within the investment banking industry? Cathy, I’d love to hear your perspective.

Cathy: That’s a great point. And I’m glad that Chanie mentioned her background in consumer products before transitioning to investment banking, because it all starts with the data. At Objective, one of our famous sayings is,

What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done.

So when we look at our data, we’ve always targeted successful business owners and developed insightful content that cuts through the noise. We saw data trends around hyper-targeted content specific to our practice areas, so our managing directors come with expertise specific to their fields.

For our go-to-market strategy in financial services, I also have a background in real estate and financial services. It’s about making sure that what you’re delivering to your target audience is what they’re engaging with. Our data shows that our highest engagement came from hyper-targeted, industry-specific content. This led us to shift from having one content calendar, with some practice-specific content sprinkled in, to six very unique marketing calendars.

That’s where we saw the opportunity to leverage technology instead of just adding more people. We wanted to speed up the go-to-market of content development itself. The emergence of generative AI was a perfect fit, along with already having very developed marketing automation platforms like HubSpot. We were able to speed up our content development process by almost seven times while maintaining quality by rethinking the process. What was previously driven by just human effort is now driven by incredible marketers leveraging the tools of generative AI and automation.

Oskar: Thank you. And Chanie, given that the B2B sales process is way longer than B2C, and considering your background from consumer products, how do you approach the chaotic, crazy market we’re facing right now? What are the key factors you consider when designing a marketing campaign? Cathy mentioned six calendars—that’s a lot of work. I know leveraging technology helps, but what are your top priorities throughout the process?

Chanie: That’s a great question. In investment banking, specifically, we focus on sell-side M&A, helping business owners sell their businesses. You’re right—the sales cycle is very lengthy, sometimes from a few months to years. We’ve worked with business owners for three to four years before getting them ready for an eventual sale. Not only that, the decision to hire a specific investment bank happens even earlier, and that can be a lengthy process too.

So on the marketing side, it’s almost industry-agnostic. You start with a foundation of strategy by segmenting as far down as you can, getting the messaging very narrow, and trying to meet someone at the right time, in the right place, with the right message. That’s what marketers do regardless of the industry. Applying this to investment banking just takes longer. You meet your audience multiple times, compared to consumer products where you might only need to meet them a couple of times with a specific message or discount.

In investment banking, it’s very different. For these business owners, choosing an investment bank is one of the largest decisions they’ll make in their life. So we employ tactics like a nurture flow. An email series could be five to ten emails over several months, in which we provide them resources that meet them at the right time with the right assets. We walk them through a journey—if they’re just now thinking about selling their business, here’s a downloadable guide to help them start. The following month, we continue to guide them with content that might be valuable.

From a marketing perspective, we use a mixture of owned, earned, and paid media, but on a longer timeline and in a more tactful way. With financial services, it takes the perfect message to get them engaged and make sure they understand that you know them, their business, and their industry, so they feel that a half-hour or hour-long call is worth their time.

Oskar: I believe these are the goals of every marketer—to reduce the amount of spam you send or receive in your inbox while increasing your ROI. It’s always a balance between finding that narrow, direct, clear message that resonates with your audience. It’s tough, but I’m very interested in the particular tools or platforms you use to make it effective.

Cathy: Definitely. On the generative AI side, we’ve looked at a few different tools like Phrase.io, Koala.sh, and Jasper AI. I’m sure some of these are familiar to those listening. They’re super helpful in everything from brainstorming and SEO research to drafting the first version of the content.

But the human touch is so important, especially in the editing process. As Chanie mentioned, it’s about being really tactful with the final asset we deliver. The human needs to go through and add specialization, expertise, and rework the language because most of the time, generative AI is just summarizing. We need to ensure that busy business owners, if they take a few minutes to read an article, walk away with something that can impact their business. Ultimately, months or even years down the line, we want them to remember us because of the powerful content we’ve created.

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Oskar: This brings us to the storytelling part of today’s topic. Storytelling is an extremely powerful tool, not only in marketing, sales, and PR, but also in customer relations. How do you incorporate it? Is it the first idea, as you mentioned with generative AI, to remove the initial friction when starting something new? Or is it more about the human touch that you emphasize, making the message very specific to the target audience? How do you incorporate storytelling into your content strategy to resonate with the exact segment you want to reach?

Chanie: When it comes to storytelling, you really have to put yourself in the shoes of that specific business owner. Getting narrow with the message for us means being industry-specific but also considering where they are in their journey. Objective has six industry practices, with managing directors and teams who are experts in those industries, focusing only on investment banking or valuation within those fields.

We use our subject matter experts (SMEs) and our knowledge of what a business owner needs to hear at that time. What are the emotional challenges they’re facing? What are the physical things they’re dealing with? How can we provide them with educational information to help them through that process? When telling that story, it needs to come from the perspective of what that person is going through at that given moment in that specific industry. That’s why, as Cathy mentioned, we now have specific content calendars and campaigns tailored to each industry practice—because it’s the only way to achieve that.

While we bring in generative AI and tech resources for efficiency, research, intelligence, and scalability, having a human touch at the front, middle, and end of the process is required. It’s not just important—it’s essential for making something perform well. The human creates the strategy and story on the front end, uses generative AI to build the foundation or target keywords for SEO, but then comes back in to add real intelligence, edit, and ensure everything is on the right platform, at the right time, for the right audience. So, while we use tools wisely, the human element isn’t going away anytime soon—it’s crucial to the process.

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Cathy: To build on Chanie’s great point about the three stages where the human touch is essential, upfront work is where we did a lot of mapping the journey that Chanie mentioned. While technology can help make things visually appealing and easy to digest, it took humans connecting with the SMEs to dig into the pain points, etc. There are great frameworks out there to visualize this, from experience arcs to empathy mapping, and then plugging it into automation software like HubSpot to think through not only the customer experience but also the actual experience of the content.

Oskar: And talking about optimization, first, we’re looking at metrics, right? We’ve covered the journey and the process, but how do you measure success? What do you measure? How do you describe the success of your content marketing strategies? Is it per segment, or does it vary by part of the customer journey? Cathy, could you elaborate?

Cathy: Definitely. I love marketing software because it can measure down to every little niche you’re talking about. You have segments within a persona, and you can see how content converts in one part of the journey versus the whole journey. But with so much data at your fingertips, it can be overwhelming. We find it easier to have a “true north” metric. We use the analogy: if we were stranded on an island, what’s the one metric we would take with us? That becomes our leading indicator of whether a campaign is heading toward success or if we need to intervene.

Overall, when I think about content strategy, I look at the upward trend of organic search. I liken it to a company website being like a brick-and-mortar store—organic search is your foot traffic. You want to make sure your store’s location is getting more popular; in digital marketing, that’s domain authority. We want to see our domain authority increasing, which is the leading indicator we track. Several SEO tools out there track domain authority—SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz—they all do it a little differently. So whatever platform you choose, stick to it because you want to see the trend. The numbers might fluctuate, but it’s the trend that you want to keep an eye on.

Oskar: Thank you. Chanie, do you have some metrics or a different approach, a different angle from Cathy’s perspective?

Chanie: I completely agree with Cathy, as always, but I do think each channel has its own kind of “North Star“ or set of KPIs to consider. For example, social media feels different from the website, right? You measure different things to gauge performance. I think all those things tie into the website, your organic search, and your domain authority because everything should build on each other. But if you’re looking at specific channels, yes, there are different metrics to consider.

For social media, it’s really about engagement. For us, since we typically share educational content, we’re more concerned about impressions and clicks—how many people we’re reaching and how many are truly engaging with the content and then being directed to the website to spend time on that article. Once you look at website analytics, you can focus on metrics like how long people stay on a page, do they make it to the end, do they click the CTA at the bottom? These metrics help you see how your content is performing with your audience.

But overall, what Cathy said is spot on. The true north is how your domain authority is doing, how your foot traffic is growing, and how many new people are finding you. That’s what we’re trying to do, right? Grow the network, grow exposure, and grow credibility. That’s a great way to measure if you’re doing it well.

Oskar: Absolutely. It’s important not to just copy-paste the metrics you see from your competitors or similar companies. You need to think outside the box, focus on the unique selling proposition of your business, and present it with the right metrics. All right, three last questions because time is running fast today.

If you could share one or two tips, tools, or resources you always go to—the foundations you trust—what would they be? Cathy?

Cathy: I’ve shared some great tools during our conversation, but where do I go to find new tools to try out? Marketing Brew is a really great email newsletter for marketers. They cover a wide range of subjects, from storytelling and brand communication to the MarTech stack. I highly recommend reading that newsletter.

Oskar: Thank you. Chanie?

Chanie: The question could go in a lot of different directions, but as far as something I always recommend, it’s actually more of a project management software like Asana. You could use any type—there’s Trello, Monday, Basecamp, and other options. But when it comes down to it, the marketing department has to execute and perform, and to do that, you need to project manage well. In order to do that, you need software.

So I highly recommend getting on that bandwagon sooner rather than later. It’s extremely helpful for keeping the team together and maintaining efficiency.

Oskar: I love that you said the question could go in 100 different directions, and you each covered completely different topics. I appreciate that. Last question for today: Since you evaluate companies all the time and help their owners sell them profitably, how do you feel about a well-executed content strategy? Can it actually boost a company’s value in terms of investment banking and finding a potential buyer? If so, how? What part of the content strategy, or what in general, would help do this most effectively and optimally? Cathy?

Cathy: Chanie touched on this earlier, and I’ll dive deeper into how content strategy is about elevating the brand and brand visibility. In our valuation practice, we specialize in intellectual property, and one of the biggest pieces of intellectual property is your brand equity.

Making sure that your content strategy turns into a successful business means ensuring that everything you develop builds towards that bigger brand story. This includes tools behind the brand, such as different trademark elements, logos, and symbols—so many components of a brand that can have value. It’s crucial to be strategic about this.

Content strategy covers more than what we talked about today, which is text and words. It also includes video and various communication mediums, so being thoughtful about the channel, the final asset, and the delivery is essential for impacting your brand equity.

Oskar: Thank you. Chanie, last 30 seconds to you.

Chanie: When we evaluate a business’s value—granted, I’m not the expert on valuation or investment banking—but we look to ensure that marketing is a key pillar for the business because, when you really boil it down, that’s how you get new customers and keep the business going. We apply that to our own business, and as Cathy detailed, it’s essential for us at Objective. Marketing must be one of the three pillars of the business to keep it standing, growing, and enabling it to scale, using all the wonderful things we’ve talked about today.

Oskar: Thank you for your time and for waking up early today to join us. Here in Poland, it’s 3 p.m. Next week, same day, same time—3 p.m. Monday—we’ll be discussing another fascinating subject. We touched a bit on how AI could replace Scrum, how it can help or mitigate risks, especially considering project managers, project triangles, and staying on budget. I’ll discuss it with Kate Hobler from Brass Willow.

So please be aware that the future of team management is coming and will be discussed next week. Thank you once again, and I hope to see you at other events.