Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Fabio Peyer, EMEA senior marketing manager at Morningstar, on leveraging multichannel marketing:

Carlota Pico 0:13
Hi everyone, and welcome back to The Content Mix. I’m Carlota Pico, your host for today’s show. And I’m excited to introduce Fabio Peyer, who is EMEA senior marketing manager at Morningstar, and he also leads Morningstar’s diversity and inclusion program. Welcome, Fabio, and thank you so much for joining us tonight on The Content Mix

Fabio Peyer 0:35
It’s my absolute pleasure, Carlota. Thank you for having me.

Carlota Pico 0:38
The pleasure is mine, Fabio. Okay, so let’s jump straight into the interview. Could you tell me a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are today?

Fabio Peyer 0:47
Yeah, absolutely. And well, it’s a bit of a wild and probably uncommon way to get into marketing. But yeah, let me give you my background. So I started my career back then in Switzerland by taking on an entry level role in the real estate management business, really, which I did for three years. And it was the perfect basis to really start my career in the commercial and corporate space, really, but never really a career path that I wanted to pursue. So by the time after, like three years, I felt like marketing is the thing everyone is currently speaking about, so that could be something interesting, as I considered myself creative and you know, international-minded. So, I was like, let’s give it a try. So I was lucky enough to get a fixed term contract for half a year from a pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, where I could make some terrific marketing experience really, organizing international events, traveling, meeting people from all over the world. And that was really the first time I had the chance to send marketing out really. Then the financial crisis hit, I couldn’t stay at the company, and took the opportunity to get some sales experience. So two years, I was heading, the account management, key account management business of another company, in the pharmaceutical space in Switzerland. Great experience, especially as a marketer, I feel like you have to know how sales works and how they think. But I always had that marketing thing in the back of my mind, and I wanted to go back there, because I knew that is the area I love. And that’s how I ended up in the financial industry really, by applying for a role at an insurance brokerage company in Zurich, where I had the opportunity to start as a marketing assistant. And fairly quickly, they gave me the responsibility and opportunity to take on the lead of Swiss marketing approach, which I was blown away by considering I was in the age of 22/23, I was absolutely excited to have this opportunity, really. And yeah, and that’s when I started to get an interest in, you know, working internationally. And I was keen to move to London, I always loved London, and I had the opportunity internally to come and join the international headquarters of that insurance broker in London. I got some wonderful experience their work there for many years before I was kind of keen to go back home back to Switzerland. But I had a wonderful job opportunity coming up at the Morningstar at the Morningstar company, where I currently work. But in Frankfurt, not in London, not in Switzerland. So I never worked in Germany. But I thought it might be an interesting market, especially given that it’s a financial hub in euro. And I always liked and enjoyed my time working in a financial industry. So my path led to Frankfurt, instead of back home to Switzerland, where I spent a fantastic 15 months driving the marketing approach for Germany, Switzerland and Austria, before another internal role, then came up the role of EMEA demand generation marketing manager based at our London headquarters, and again, I’m back in London now. So sorry, that was a long winded answer.

Carlota Pico 4:15
What an exciting story, though, Fabio. So you went from the real estate industry into pharmaceuticals, that into sales and now into the financial services. Okay.

Fabio Peyer 4:25
Absolutely.

Carlota Pico 4:26
Could you zoom into some of your proudest marketing moments to date?

Fabio Peyer 4:30
Yeah, no, absolutely. And there were quite a few so obviously, what I just touched on –having the opportunity to taking on the Swiss lead of marketing approach of such a big corporate company in such young age is something you know, I’m very proud of. But there are also, you know, minor achievement, smaller achievements, like, you know, what makes me always proud is when you start in a new role, and you know, you can build trust. You know, and a relationship really with senior leadership and sales. So often in the past, the marketing was considered as you know, those team that makes the PowerPoint presentation look nice, right? Or those that are organizing the event. But really making especially in a more conservative financial industry, making your stakeholders aware of what marketing actually is empowered and capable to do, really, to support the pipeline, and, you know, to to influence revenue, really, and making stakeholders around you understand this value, and build this trust. I think that’s what always makes me proud when I achieve that within a new company.

Carlota Pico 5:45
Okay, I totally agree with you the impact that sales has just in the marketing department, and how important it is to, of course, know about sales, because at the end of the day, we don’t do just PowerPoint presentations for fun. Everything that we do is link back to a business objective. And I think that’s so important for markets here to understand.

Fabio Peyer 6:02
I totally agree.

Carlota Pico 6:04
Okay, what about some of your biggest challenges, because it’s not always sunny out there, right? We do oftentimes have to go through a lot of challenges that eventually take us to where we are today.

Fabio Peyer 6:15
I couldn’t agree more. And I think challenges are always such wonderful learning opportunities, growth opportunities, really. I mean, I could name a few, but maybe to pick one, it’s a bit of a funny one. So as I mentioned before, I worked at these international headquarters in London, and my path led me to Frankfurt, in a small local office, where people didn’t really have this, you know, marketing mindset in how marketing can contribute to the business. And so with my background knowledge in marketing, I was keen to, you know, to take their approach to the next level. And so what I did was introducing a social media and video content strategy. And literally all the stakeholders didn’t understand the value of it. The question there, that that didn’t want to do it, it didn’t want to contribute to it. So it took me a lot of conversation and a lot of proving why it’s working. Why this is the the marketing of nowadays and putting emphasis on the fact that video content is the source, the way content gets consumed the most in nowadays world–making them understand all this you know, and proving it with figures, stats, performance, maybe even leads have been created through video content or social media content, made them ultimately understand. And that was definitely one of my of my biggest challenges in the new role.

Carlota Pico 7:56
Okay, very interesting. Spinning off of that response, do you have any tips or tricks for getting higher management to buy into one’s ideas as a marketeer?

Fabio Peyer 8:06
I think it’s really building trust, and having conversation on the same level. I think, you know, trust comes over time. But I think, you know, strong relationships with sales, with leadership are just really critical to ultimately succeed as a marketer. Does that make sense?

Carlota Pico 8:28
Totally makes sense. And what about languages? Because oftentimes, I feel like us, most marketers, we speak in a marketing language that’s not oftentimes understood across departments. What are your thoughts on that?

Fabio Peyer 8:40
Yeah, that’s a very good question. And then again, other stakeholders may use a different language that marketing doesn’t understand, right? So I fully agree, you need to be aligned, and you can only be aligned, you know, by really speaking to each other, attend each other’s meetings, you know, but also really understand the other, you know, departments workflows, and the way they work in order to really, you know, become, you know, to build a bond and to really become one team that understand each other and work hand in hand to make an impact.

Carlota Pico 9:17
Okay, so to summarize this conversation, basically, we are tasked with the job of understanding our audience and relating with our audience, right. So it’s equally as important to also understand our team members across departments, and relate to them according to their business objectives as well.

Fabio Peyer 9:33
I fully agree, and you phrased that very nicely. I always say that marketing is kind of the glue between departments, but also, you know, to the outside world, to our clients and prospects. So yeah, I totally agree with how you summarize that.

Carlota Pico 9:49
Excellent. Well, moving into Morningstar, just for audience FYI–what is it? Thirty second elevator pitch?

Fabio Peyer 9:56
Absolutely. So Morningstar is a company in the financial industry. We’re an independent research and data provider. So alongside, so we’re very well known in the industry for our fund ratings. But we have a whole load of capabilities really, in addition to our flagship software, Morningstar Direct, which is an investment analysis platform. We have indexes, products, manage portfolios, manager, selection services, all sorts of research capabilities like equity research, fund research, policy research, quantitative research. And then what I’m particularly excited about Morningstar did some major acquisitions over the last, let’s say, five years. So a company we bought a company called DBRS. They have credit ratings, and a company called PitchBook that’s in the process of being integrated with private equity data, which is a wonderful addition to Morningstar public data. But then also sustainalytics, which have a whole load of capabilities around ESG, research, ESG data, and obviously sustainability, sustainable investing is key in 2020 and going forward, so having made this acquisition is just wonderful, yeah. At the end of the day, our clients, our asset managers, institutional investors, advisors, but all the products we develop and sell through those channels are made to ultimately empower the individual, the end investor to reach his results.

Carlota Pico 11:36
Okay, so it’s a B2B2C company?

Fabio Peyer 11:39
Yes, yeah, absolutely.

Carlota Pico 11:42
Okay. Well, I was snooping around on your LinkedIn profile and I saw that you’re big in content lead to demand generation. So I’d like to define that for audience before we dive further into that subject.

Fabio Peyer 11:55
Absolutely. Yeah. So demand generation for Morningstar main products and services is really the main purpose of my role. So obviously, demand generation is creating an interest for, you know, products and services, really, not necessarily, you know, a lead that is ready to buy, but demand, right? And interest. And doing that in a content lead way, is just simply creating good content around your offering, that attracts people to make them, you know, want to learn more about your capabilities, rather than a pure product pitch, if that makes sense.

Carlota Pico 12:37
Okay. So demand generation is literally creating a demand for a product or service, but the audience doesn’t necessarily know that they need that service or product just at that moment. And then, that leads to the next step, right?

Fabio Peyer 12:49
Right, that’s exactly it. And how you create a lead is really by, you know, bringing, creating this demand bringing people into your ecosystem, and then start actively nurturing them, warming them up, to make them be interested in, you know, considering a conversation with sales or taking a trial.

Carlota Pico 13:11
Okay, so then Fabio, my next question would be the internet is full of channels, right? You can post your content anywhere and your audience can literally be anywhere–you don’t really know where to find them. So how do you do it? How do you know where your potential leads are at any given point in time?

Fabio Peyer 13:28
That’s such a wonderful question. Because I’m a strong believer in multichannel marketing. And I really feel like you know, you cannot be focused on you know, only advertising on only, you know, social media, it really needs the whole wheel of marketing and really need to multichannel driven marketing approach to really meet your customer, wherever they may be. So whether that is, you know, outbound emails to existing contacts you may already have in your contact database, whether there is obviously a lot of focus on inbound marketing, advertising, social media, both organic search, paid SEO, paid search. I really strongly believe in a multichannel marketing approach to ultimately meet your customer.

Carlota Pico 14:19
Okay, excellent. So then let’s put some of this theory into practical examples. Could you zoom into demand generation campaign that you’ve led that has really exceeded all of your KPIs?

Fabio Peyer 14:30
Yeah, absolutely. And I mentioned before Morningstar, flagship software, Morningstar, Direct–our investment analysis platform. So around this product, we really have a very industrialized approach in terms of how we generate leads, how you hand them to sales and how they follow up on them. And so this is all tracked, all measurable so we can exactly see what leads were coming from marketing, from what source, how and what stage they went to sales, how they followed up and whether they’ve been turned into an opportunity, ultimately into revenue, or whether they’ve not been, you know, warm enough and been pushed back to, to marketing for re-nurturing. And that whole approach is based on like three core tactics from a marketing perspective. And so again, multichannel, we have a monthly newsletter addressed to wealth management and asset management, very much leveraging the manager research to fund research from our team of 350 analysts that we have at Morningstar. We do a monthly webinar, a combination of you know, high funnel, again, research led content, but also mid funnel a bit more product functionality focused ones, and we create content guides. And you may wonder, when I say we have 350 analysts producing content already, why are you as a marketer creating content as well? Is there not enough out there? And yes, there is. But obviously, that’s very technical, and more for a niche audience in the industry, let’s say other analysts or you know, product managers, portfolio managers. But with our content guides that we are creating, you know, we want to reach the wider audience. Maybe also, you know, the marketing manager at another asset manager, or maybe the sales person, whoever may have an interest in that content. And then again, activating these guides with a multichannel marketing campaign. And these three core tactics hand in hand together, lead off fantastic volumes of marketing qualified leads, as we call them, that we are then handing to SDRs as we call them–sales development representatives–that are fully dedicated to follow up to follow up on marketing qualified leads. And all this process, as I mentioned, is trackable, is measurable, we can exactly measure the impact we make in marketing, we make in sales, what leads to revenue. And that’s outperformed–that program has outperformed over the last year. And so we’re now in the process of cascading down to the rest of the EMEA region and when I say that, I have to mention that we usually experiment in the UK, just because it’s one of the major markets in euro. And when things prove stop proving to work, we cascade to the rest of the region where we have fewer marketing resources, so they can leverage the stuff we do in London. So it’s very much scalable, the whole the whole lead generation approach. So again, very long winded answer, to give you an answer to your question.

Carlota Pico 17:48
Okay, one thing I am missing in our response are social networks?

Fabio Peyer 18:02
Well, I think you know, first of all, I think social channels are powerful, because you have a certain following already. Right? So those people have actively followed you. They are interested in your products and services. They want to learn more about you, right? So they kind of made the step to come into your ecosystem already. And well, hence they are engaged already. And I think, you know, social media is such a powerful tool, especially for us in the financial industry, things like LinkedIn, where you can target exactly the persona you’re after, in the field of their expertise in that country. And you know. It’s just a wonderful and such powerful tool. So, yes, absolutely. Social media is key, social media networks are key. But also what I have to what I have to put emphasis on is content is really king. So the way you communicate to your future clients, the messages you push out there. And I mean, you know that and many marketers know that you cannot communicate the same way on all the social channels, right? You really have to target your message, depending on the audience following you on a certain channel. But yes, very powerful tool. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah,

Carlota Pico 19:26
Content is only King if somebody’s actually reading you, right?

Fabio Peyer 19:30
Totally, totally.

Carlota Pico 19:32
Okay Fabio, again, as I was snooping around on your LinkedIn profile, I saw that you were recently promoted from EMEA marketing manager to EMEA senior marketing manager. So Fabio, beyond of pay grade, or pay upgrade–excuse me–what other things have changed in your day to day role?

Fabio Peyer 19:50
Yeah, so funnily enough, there was not even so much of a pay upgrade thanks to the pandemic, but that’s besides. It’s just a wonderful appreciation of the work and the success I could celebrate with this company in the past, right? And I think, you know, it brings more it brings more trust and more, you know, exposure maybe to senior leadership, the opportunity to work on more important–even more important projects– working even more globally, more internationally. I think it’s, yeah, it’s just, you know, a sign of trust between me, my manager, my team, which ultimately leads to, you know, yeah, more new challenges.

Carlota Pico 20:41
Okay, so exciting. Let me know if you need an assistant anytime soon, okay?

Fabio Peyer 20:46
Always need it!

Carlota Pico 20:47
Okay, and now let’s take a walk down memory lane. So let’s say you could do it all over again. Would you still pursue a career in marketing? And if so, would you do anything differently, now looking back on your experience?

Fabio Peyer 21:03
That’s a great question. And to be to give you a short answer for once, probably no, I wouldn’t do anything different really. I really love my, you know, international remit. I love marketing as such, I wouldn’t want to do anything else. You know, having worked in Europe’s largest financial hubs, Frankfurt and London, is what I absolutely love as well. So no, to answer your question, really, I wouldn’t do anything different, really, it was just the wonderful journey that I’m still on. So yeah, more to come!

Carlota Pico 21:38
Okay. We’re gonna be moving into our set of rapid fire questions now, which are basically your recommendations for audience. To get the section set off, I’d like to ask you about your source of inspiration. So a professional role model or an influencer, that you really admire?

Fabio Peyer 21:53
Yeah, so maybe that is the point when I should mention that in addition to my role of being the senior marketing manager for EMEA here at Morningstar, I also drive our diversity, equity and inclusion program for the EMEA region, which is something I’m very passionate about and I feel very honored that I can drive this program. And without that, there is a lady in the UK with a massive track record in the financial industry, Bev Shah, is her name. So she worked in the industry for years, has a massive network in the industry. So she does a lot of consulting and networking and brings people together in the industry, to learn how other companies, you know, are approaching these topics, brings people together, makes people learn from each other, makes people share experiences.

Carlota Pico 23:17
How inspiring! Fabio, would you like to zoom into any of the activities that you’re leading as part of the diversity inclusion program at Morningstar?

Fabio Peyer 23:26
Yeah, absolutely. So obviously, we know diversity is key, right? We know that companies with a more diverse workforce perform better with better business outcomes. So it’s absolutely a no-brainer that diversity is key and diversity goes hand in hand with inclusion, right? You cannot grow a diverse workforce, if there is not an inclusive culture, appreciating different backgrounds, different, you know, sexualities, different genders, different types of colors. And so being in that position of leading that program, leads to so many opportunities really, you know, to speak to people to learn from, you know, their challenges, to see where people may have struggled, but also to learn, you know, where people had opportunities to shine due to the person they are. And so we are very much focused on gender equality. We know in the financial industry, women are still a minority, really. So that’s definitely on the Morningstar agenda. LGBT is a huge topic for us. So we want to make everyone feel comfortable, to bring their whole selves to work really. Then ethnicity, which is a topic very close to my heart, also given what recently happened with Black Lives Matter in the US and all over the world, really. So that is a topic we’re massively focused on. But then also not to forget topics like disability, age, nationalitie–that’s all part of diversity, really. So it’s a huge, huge, huge area where every company in the financial industry has to improve. And so has Morningstar.

Carlota Pico 25:28
What a beautiful response, Fabio. And obviously, racism isn’t only a problem that Americans face. It’s worldwide.

Fabio Peyer 25:35
I totally agree. I totally agree.

Carlota Pico 25:37
Okay. And now moving into our next question, what about a podcast or another resource that you’d like to recommend to our audience?

Fabio Peyer 25:45
Yea, funny you ask that. So I never really listened to podcasts and don’t ask me why because it’s such a wonderful world out there, which I’ve never really access. But I did recently, and I found a lovely one. So it’s called The Content Jam. Hosted by two wonderful chaps really, with a massive knowledge on content marketing, marketing, in general, storytelling–all kinds of things. And the way they they host these podcasts is in such a funny, but enriching and full of expertise way, sometimes a bit sarcastic. It makes you laugh, even though it’s fully professional. That’s definitely something I would recommend. And I promise I will listen to more podcasts going forward.

Carlota Pico 26:38
On that note, please tune into The Content Mix as well.

Fabio Peyer 26:42
Totally, totally 100%.

Carlota Pico 26:44
Yes, we are coming towards the end of this interview. But before we wrap up, I’d like to ask you about your favorite app at the moment and why?

Fabio Peyer 26:53
Yeah, so might sound a bit boring the answer I give you now, but during the pandemic, I was constantly on LinkedIn Learning. For those that don’t know LinkedIn Learning, it’s a subprogram of LinkedIn with wonderful training courses on all sorts of things whether that is you know, more leisure focus or whether that is more professional focus, you find, obviously, stuff around marketing courses, around marketing, how to drive a content, marketing strategy, and you know how to create a lead gen strategy. You find your diversity and inclusion courses–really all sorts of things, a wonderful opportunity. And the reason why I wanted to mention this now is because it wonderfully distracted me during the pandemic. So definitely something I’d like to recommend.

Carlota Pico 27:48
Okay, excellent. Well, Fabio, thank you so much for joining us on The Content Mix. It was awesome to meet you and to learn about your experience in marketing.

Fabio Peyer 27:57
It was an absolute pleasure. And thank you so much for this great opportunity!

Carlota Pico 28:01
The pleasure has been mine. And to everybody listening in today, thanks for joining us on The Content Mix. For more perspectives on the content marketing industry in Europe, check out The Content Mix. We’ll be releasing interviews just like this one every day, so keep on tuning in. Thanks again, have a fabulous day and I’ll see you next time. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai