Situation

The bank was encountering intensified competition from major banks such as JPMorganChase and neobanks like Mercury and Brex. A new positioning was needed to standout from the competition and a customer acquisition nurture program was needed that would synchronize marketing with sales activities.

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Task

Hired to overhaul marketing for SVB's largest segment: pre-series A life science and technology startups, I encountered a legacy marketing team who were demoralized and frustrated that previous efforts to revamp the marketing function had failed.

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What I did

After interviewing multiple people across the company, conducting ideation workshops, and assessing the marketing maturity of SVB, I developed a roadmap to tackle major gaps in marketing capabilities while also identifying some "quick wins" to allow marketing to gain some credibility and momentum for further change.

 

One of the first steps taken was to develop stronger data analytics in order to track the performance of various marketing initiatives. Simultaneous to that, the team synthesized quantitative and qualitative marketing research, competitive analysis, and performance assessments to forge a new positioning and messaging strategy ("champions of the game-changers").

We subsequently built out an industry- and fundraising-status-specific nurture program, revised the content strategy to provide more sophisticated content to the target audiences, and launched ad campaigns to generate awareness and drive traffic to the revamped website.

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We also applied the same positioning to develop existing customer marketing, including a hyper-personalized nurture program that amplified the assigned banker to each account's outreach and applied customized up-sell and cross-sell offerings, which boosted NPS by 7%, generated a 23% increase in cross-sell conversion rates, and contributed to a 5% increase in customer lifetime value (CLV).