Daniella Moiseyev – On Embracing Digital Engagement Strategies, LinkedIn Ads & Investing in Marketing Automation & Data

Marketing trends are changing every day, and marketing leaders around the world are adapting to the changes. They are looking at new ideas and figuring out the best ones to help them grow their business. Many new companies popped up during the pandemic, the reason — improvising and adapting to the changing times. In this week's episode of Rediscover Marketing, we had a one-on-one with one of the marketing leaders from the US, Daniella Moiseyev.

A Little More on Daniella Moiseyev:

Daniella is passionate about building marketing strategies that amplify brands based on a deep understanding of the wealth management and retirement marketplace and extensive knowledge of advisors and how to position products effectively for them. As a proven leader and award-winning strategic marketing professional, Daniella helps partners and clients develop marketing programs, tools, and services that help them advance their business.

Prior to starting her marketing consulting firm, Daniella served as the Chief Marketing Officer of PCS Retirement, LLC, a small and rapidly growing retirement recordkeeper. In this role, she was responsible for overseeing the planning, development, and execution of PCS Retirement's marketing strategy and brand initiatives. Daniella was previously the Chief Marketing Officer at the American Retirement Association (ARA). Prior to joining the ARA, Daniella was the Retirement Segment Marketing Leader at T. Rowe Price. Before that, Daniella was the Retirement Segment Marketing Manager for RidgeWorth Investments. Earlier in her career, she spent 11 years at Prudential Investments in various roles supporting institutional clients. Daniella earned an M.B.A with a Marketing concentration from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is a FINRA Series 7, 24, and 66 registered principal.

Daniella is an active volunteer in the financial services industry and an advocate for empowering women in the workplace. Daniella has served on the Women in Pensions Network (WIPN) Board of Directors for the past six years and is always available to help women in the industry connect and learn from one another. She has also served on the steering committee of the NAPA 401(k) Summit.

Helping Startup Companies, Embracing Digital Engagement & More:

In her consulting work, Daniella works with financial services companies of all types and sizes to develop a marketing strategy, oversee marketing implementation, and design product positioning and launch. One of her current clients is a challenger brand bringing an exciting new product to market, and she has worked with them on developing their overall marketing strategy, tone, voice, and tactical calendar.

In our interview, we asked Daniella about how she feels the pandemic has affected business. She says that it has been a monumental shift to digital engagement. Traditionally, on the business-to-business side, financial services companies have relied on face-to-face interaction through wholesalers. She adds that while marketing does a lot of brand building, most sales activities and conversions happen face-to-face.

With travel and in-person interactions restricted, Daniella shared that the pandemic allowed marketers to embrace more digital engagement strategies and has given marketing a role beyond only brand building. Moving marketing's role further down the sales funnel into evaluation, conversion, and even into sales support has allowed a more strategic version of marketing to emerge. In addition, both as she has personally witnessed and anecdotally from peers in the industry, revenue throughout the pandemic has been increasing across the board for many companies, providing a strong proof point for marketing's value.

Daniella observed that when things were shutting down last March, everyone paused to figure out what it meant for their business long-term. She mentioned that through the pandemic born of necessity, marketers embraced new ways of reaching out to clients and prospects. She further added that it also increased productivity and lowered costs. With a face-to-face sales model, wholesalers and travel are key drivers of cost, and deploying some of the savings into digital marketing activities has been a critical driver of efficiency and ROI. Not to say that the face-to-face sales model is gone for good – it is essential and financial services remain a relationship business. But augmenting those efforts with digital strategies is going to be table stakes in the future.

Targeting Clients via LinkedIn and Investing in Marketing Automation & Data:

We asked Daniella to share how she shifted focus and what she did to be ahead of her goals. She shared that the companies she has worked with have made significant investments in marketing automation and data. Due to the pandemic shift, they redeployed the money from travel and canceled events into significant investment in marketing automation and data, architecture, data cleansing, and governance to create better targeting. These types of investments allow companies to create deep segmentation, better, more relevant prospect and customer journeys, and ultimately drive revenue.

Talking about LinkedIn and targeting, Daniella stated that her company had had much success with LinkedIn. She says that since Microsoft bought LinkedIn, the social media platform, which has always had a business focus, has become even better at micro-targeting and segmentation in a very cost-effective manner. Daniella recommends this to many of her consulting clients. She shared that Facebook and Instagram have many of those same targeting capabilities; she doesn't use them much because her focus has always been B2B.

Daniella's Take on Future Plans, Social Media and Customer Retention & Acquisition:

We asked Daniella to share her plans and vision. She is watching the rise of brand-based social communities, which she hasn't worked with in her past. Despite the risks of doing something new/something she is less experienced in, she maintains this is an exciting and intriguing way to create more targeting. She shared that she is assessing and looking into LinkedIn groups and forums on websites for potential opportunities.

Moving to the topic of customer acquisition and retention, Daniella says that in financial services, "churn is death" due to the cost of acquiring new customers versus nurturing and cross-selling to existing customers. She says that retention is significantly more cost-effective, and it behooves marketers to place equal focus on retention in addition to growth marketing.

Daniella mentioned that social media marketing, especially organic posting and responding, can be difficult in a highly regulated industry such as financial services. Most posts or post replies must be reviewed by a compliance professional for adherence to industry advertising rules. This takes away the immediacy when one must wait two days to respond to a client or prospect on social media. She adds that their regulatory bodies have begun to relax some of those rules because they were written long before social media, which is promising for the future and only continues to highlight social media's importance going forward.

 B2B Space, Targeting the Right Data & Data Sharing:

We moved ahead with the discussion and asked her what she thinks about the significant advertising platforms becoming less effective than they were previously? Daniella says that potentially in her industry, print has been declining, which has been a part of their advertising mix for a long time. She thinks perhaps they've gone too far in that direction because people still like to get mail.

She mostly does trade industry advertising, and those publications are well-targeted. She adds that she wouldn't spend on traditional consumer media because it wouldn't meet her targeting needs. She believes that if one is getting better data, they're getting better attribution.

Daniella says that with the rise of social media, traditional advertising has become less relevant than it used to be.

We asked her opinion on the amount of data one shares daily with advertisers. From a marketer's perspective, Daniella says that the more data, the better. She adds that the more she knows about her prospects, the better she can target relevant messages at the right time. That said, there are concerns over the lack of privacy and how much information various platforms have. As a marketer, more data means that you do not send irrelevant messages to people who are not interested in your product or service; and as a consumer on the other end of that, one doesn't want to receive messages that aren't relevant to them. But too much data can make a consumer feel stalked, and you do not want to cross that line.

We moved to our final section, where we asked Daniella the three things she would recommend other marketing leaders to keep in mind in this new economy.

Daniella emphasized that targeting is critically important and that one needs to know as much as possible about their clients and prospects to target well. She then went ahead and recommended marketing automation which makes marketing much more cost-effective. Finally, she suggested that scalable data solutions are essential as they help one ensure that they have the correct information and that data is good, clean, and accurate.