HSBC Global, a prominent Financial Services brand with a strong presence across the world, envisioned the implementation of a world-class digital marketing operating model. Their ambition was to establish a system that would enable local teams to plan, execute, and measure digital marketing activities effectively, thereby deploying and commercialising new innovations. To do so, they formed a new Global Marketing team of seasoned specialists with a clear mandate: to achieve their ambitious vision promptly.

Despite the clarity of their vision, HSBC Global team faced several challenges. Firstly, the team members were geographically dispersed between Hong Kong and London, which, combined with a lack of familiarity amongst them, resulted in instances of overlap and duplicated efforts. Additionally, there was a pressing need to deliver and demonstrate value to the leadership.

The team identified a key problem – the lack of a clear operating model to translate their ambitions into a cohesive strategy and outline specific roles and responsibilities to bring this vision to fruition.

LEAD Consulting successfully addressed these challenges by implementing a digital marketing maturity model, which examined six key dimensions of digital marketing: attribution, audience, organization, access, automation, and assets. This model aligned with the strategic objective of delivering personalized customer experiences through the improved use of internal capabilities.

Our structured approach garnered the support of the senior leadership, securing crucial internal investment for developer resources aimed at enhancing marketing technology capabilities. This investment played a pivotal role in realising the commercial outcomes of the digital marketing initiatives.

The newly implemented engagement structure fostered effective collaboration within the team and across the globe, instilling a focus on delivering both short-term and long-term results. The improved initiative design and facilitated deployments enabled local markets to develop their digital maturity, thus realising the commercial outcomes of the initiatives.

Through these improved efficiencies and effectiveness, the estimated return on investment of the new digital marketing operating model is an astounding 3500%. This figure indicates the potential of this new approach to not only streamline operations but also drive substantial growth across global markets.

In conclusion, our efforts led to the successful implementation of a new digital marketing operating model that is expected to significantly boost the efficiency and effectiveness of HSBC’s global marketing initiatives.