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Meet Tink, a market leader in Europe’s open banking platform scene. Enabling banks, fintechs and startups with the necessary infrastructure and intelligent data products vital to crafting financial services and products of the future. Tink has built one of Europe’s most robust open banking platforms with connections to over 6,000 major banks across Europe in at least 18 markets. Tink’s transformative journey from a consumer-centric mobile application towards a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model positioned them at the center of a teeming B2B marketing zone, necessitating the immediate formulation of a powerful, data-driven strategy for marketing and lead generation.
The shift in Tink's business model from B2C to B2B called for the inception of a scalable, predictable lead generation and marketing automation strategy. The challenge was twofold to my experience; to create this strategy and to simultaneously apply it to the designing of powerful lead and growth programs. This strategic pivot was targeted at expanding Tink’s sales teams. Furthermore, Tink needed to generate qualified leads using a blend of online and offline channels, and engaging content. Tink’s chief projects were classified into three broad areas:
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 Tink, I chose 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 to getting everyone on board. In parallel, I integrated Hubspot with the Salesforce Sales Hub for handing newly generated qualified leads and insights over to the sales development teams.
Leveraging the power of advertising networks such as LinkedIn, Google Adwords, and Facebook, Tink was able to quickly track acquisition costs and revenue data for leads, sales opportunities, marketing campaigns, and events.
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:
Being responsible for Tink’s new lead acquisition and marketing automation strategy across Europe, I evaluated and introduced Inbound marketing methods as the underlying concept and marketing automation as the enabler to streamline and scale marketing programs. I started by rethinking and mapping out the customer journey, creating buyer persona descriptions, which I then matched to each step with the customer needs and Tink's 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 in their lead gen, at scale?
Provide value and build trust to extract value at the right point.
Relationships are key. However, to enable Tink to grow faster, it would have been impossible to maintain these prospect 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.
Regularly, Tink released relevant and insightful lead magnets like industry insight or survey reports such as “Inside the minds of Europe’s bankers”. These fed the 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, I built the framework to provide one-to-one relationships and create valuable experiences, at scale.
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.
As a result of these efforts, Tink experienced a tremendous increase in efficiency (Return On Marketing Investment) and improved its acquisition channel strategy for all paid advertising campaigns. This led to a recurrent 22% monthly increase in inbound ICP leads. The marketing programs contributed significantly to Tink's customer pipeline, generating trackable revenue. The KPI framework I developed helped Tink optimize its marketing automation and lead nurturing strategies across email, content, and social channels.
Tink was founded in 2012 and was integrated into Visa ten years later, in 2022.
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