Bob McKinnon

Principal Analyst

Forrester Bio

Author Insights

Blog

The Three Essentials To Optimizing B2B Marketing Orchestration

Bob McKinnon January 6, 2023
When it comes to getting the best out of a marketing organization, what you do and how you do it are equally important. Discover three keys to optimizing marketing processes and workflows.
Blog

Four Steps That CMOs Can Take To Prepare For An Economic Downturn

Bob McKinnon August 24, 2022
Marketing leaders should focus on what can be done to combat an economic downturn without damaging the long-term capabilities of the marketing organization.
Blog

Keys to Overcoming Regulatory Hurdles to Creating Demand in Financial Services

Bob McKinnon May 1, 2017
  • Financial services marketers’ reluctance to embrace non-traditional marketing channels diminishes their ability to create demand
  • Audience-centric messaging helps alleviate the lack of establishing suitability in demand creation efforts
  • Thought leadership is the cornerstone of a best-in-class demand creation strategy in financial services
Blog

Financial Services: The Foundational Elements of Customer Experience

Bob McKinnon March 10, 2017
  • Thirty percent of financial services marketing leaders stated in our survey that creating a customer experience function is their top priority over the next two years
  • The customer experience function represents the customer’s perspective with all customer-facing functions in the organization
  • The five foundational elements of a successful customer experience function are useful insights, aligned strategy, lifecycle mapping, measurement and communication
Blog

Marketing Dashboards for Financial Services

Bob McKinnon January 5, 2017
  • Interviewing key stakeholders helps better understand the needs of the dashboard audience
  • Summarizing key findings facilitates better readability and analysis of dashboards
  • Dashboard data should flow logically from activities to outputs to impacts
Blog

Capturing Insights from a Disjointed Tech Stack

Bob McKinnon October 27, 2016
  • Only 32 percent of marketing organizations in financial services can access a BI tool
  • Conducting an inventory of data existing across the platform yields new insights
  • Aligning and prioritizing measurement goals with sales helps to focus efforts and limit requirements
Blog

Key Considerations for Impactful Cross-Selling and Upselling in Financial Services

Bob McKinnon August 24, 2016
  • The challenges for marketers to impact cross-sell/upsell are uniquely linked to the structure of the sales organization
  • Marketing’s strategy should be determined by whether the.company is targeting an existing buying center or a new buying center in and existing account
  • Evaluate marketing’s access to client data points prior to developing an approach to supporting cross-sell/upsell efforts
Blog

How to Alleviate Content Overload in the Financial Services Advisor Channel

Bob McKinnon May 9, 2016
  • Content overload is a common problem in financial advisor channel communications
  • Measurement of advisor channel communications should expand beyond activity metrics to include output and impact metrics
  • Streamline communications and content delivery by developing advisor personas and mapping content to the stages of the buyers’ journey
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Financial Marketers: Questions to Ask Tech Vendors

Bob McKinnon December 23, 2015
  • Ask about regulatory compliance as early in the process as possible
  • Data security should be evaluated before piloting any new tech and should include an audit of the vendor’s security features, processes and procedures
  • Be certain that the vendor’s offering can be fully integrated with your existing archiving platform
Blog

Different Drivers of Change for CMOs in Financial Services

Bob McKinnon November 5, 2015
  • Marketing leaders in financial services have to comply with an additional level of regulatory scrutiny
  • Thirty-seven percent of CMOs in financial services said “economic conditions” is the biggest driver forcing change in the way they market
  • Seventeen percent of CMOs from industries outside of financial services cited economic conditions as their greatest driver of change
Blog

Economic Health of the Financial Services Industry is Improving – So, What’s Next?

Bob McKinnon July 22, 2015
  • The path for financial marketing leaders appears to be shifting from defensive and tactical to long-term and strategic
  • We currently see three areas of focus among marketing leaders in financial services
  • Planning and alignment, technology and customer marketing are now possible strategic initiatives for executives to buy-into