Marketing Automation: From startup to scaleup with scalable lead generation for Tink

Ready, set, grow! Starting from the ground up and with nothing in place – find out how I helped to build the foundation for a scalable lead generation machine.

Tink is Europe’s leading open banking platform that provides banks, fintechs and startups with the necessary infrastructure and smart data products that are needed to build financial services and products of the future. Founded in Stockholm in 2012, Tinks partners include Nordea, BNP Paribas Fortis, Paypal, ABN AMRO and SEB. Within only 2 years Tink grew from 15 to 300 people.

Transforming from a mobile consumer app providing financial insights into a SaaS business selling the platform behind, Tink needed to take its first steps towards a fully data-driven B2B marketing organisation. I was employed to build a scalable, repeatable and predictable lead generation and marketing automation strategy. In addition, the main mission was to apply the strategy into building lead & growth programs and setting funnel management processes in order to scale out the sales organisation. While my main focus was generating new qualified leads for Tink, through various online (and offline) channels with relevant and engaging content, the main projects can be grouped into 3 areas:

1. MarTech Integrations

Working data-driven requires a full understanding of each step in the customer journey and alignment of the visitor-to-revenue funnel between marketing and sales. To enable a trackable 360° view, the marketing stack had to be reviewed, extended and implemented. In hyper-fast-growing environments like at Tink, I choose Hubspot based on a contemplative evaluation and analysis. Hubspot is the most powerful and extendable marketing automation platform for fast-growing businesses serving as a hub for all lead generation and marketing programs. It empowered the various marketing teams from content production, campaign management to traffic acquisition to work on the same goals and was fun to use for everyone – which was the key for getting everyone on board. In parallel, I integrated Hubspot with the Salesforce Sales Hub for handing new generated qualified leads and insights over to the sales development teams.

By connecting advertising networks like Linkedin, Google Adwords and Facebook we were quickly able to calculate and backtrack our acquisition costs and revenue data for leads, sales opportunities, marketing campaigns and events.

2. Inbound Marketing, the Lead Acquisition Strategy

The goal was to craft a scalable, repeatable and predictable lead generation and marketing automation strategy. At its core, we had to answer 5 fundamental questions:

1. How to create valuable experiences – at scale?

2. How to generate qualified leads in a scalable and predictable way to support the sales organisation?

3. How to create trust and gain thought-leadership in our space?

4. How to automate the lead qualification and handover process?

5. How to reach operational scale and quickly ramp up marketing automation across the organisation?

Responsible for Tink’s new lead generation and marketing automation strategy across 13 markets, I evaluated and introduced Inbound marketing methods as the underlying concept and marketing automation as the enabler to streamline and scale marketing programs. We started by rethinking and mapping out the customer journey, creating buyer persona descriptions, which we then matched to each step with the customer needs and our USPs. The key was providing guidance and relevant resources for each step of the customer’s journey to create value, gain interest and build trust, while at the same time being able to position the company as the thought-leader in the industry. Trust is essential to build successful and lasting relationships. But, how would Tink be able to create highly personalised experiences, at scale?

Create valuable relationships at scale.

Relationships are key. However, to enable Tink to grow faster, it would have been impossible to maintain these relationships manually and at scale. Most of all, they wouldn’t have been personalised or unique experiences. The solution was to use Hubspot to automate the communication in marketing and sales programs, which bridged this gap by taking the grunt work out of the end-to-end communication.

On a regular basis, we released relevant and insightful lead magnets like industry insight or survey reports such as “Inside the minds of Europe’s bankers”. These fed our content library for blog posts, webinars, event speeches, panel discussions, and social media channels. Together with a powerful and automated lead qualification tree and simpler nurturing programs in place, we built the framework to provide one-to-one relationships and create valuable experiences, at scale.

3. Account-Based Marketing Campaigns

Having the acquisition framework in place, I started creating localised marketing programs for selected verticals and strategic target accounts. Depending on the segment and awareness of Tink in the target market, I crafted multi-channel advertising campaigns on digital channels such as LinkedIn to increase awareness, capture interest, and generate leads. Either to gain new leads to new accounts or to build out the network of relationships within existing accounts. Interesting personas automatically were followed up with an orchestrated series of drip emails or chatbot messages to provide guidance and create value in the first place.

+2+3

This approach helped increase the efficiency (ROMI) and improve the acquisition channel strategy for all paid advertising campaigns, which led to 22% more inbound web leads month over month. Tink could also make sure that marketing programs were contributing to the customer pipeline and trackable revenue. I developed a KPI framework that helped to optimize its marketing automation and lead nurturing efforts through email, content, and social channels. This included the mapping of the right content to the right channel in the buying cycle and ensuring the conversion across the whole customer journey.

Tink was acquired by Visa in June 2021 for 1.8 billion euros.

Photo: Kai Pilger on Unsplash