How FinHive Uses AdRoll ABM for Multichannel Advertising Success

The financial services market is expanding at breakneck speed, and there are now more ETFs than listed companies on the stock exchange. The largest asset managers control the vast majority of the market, leaving everyone else fighting for space on an increasingly crowded shelf. It’s not enough to bring a great product to market. Now, the biggest challenge is making sure the right people discover it.

In this case, precision matters, and here is where our business, FinHive Solutions, shines.

My business partner Lauren Hein has spent more than 15 years selling into the financial advisor community, while my background is in digital marketing and consulting. Together, we created FinHive so that small asset managers, fintech platforms, and advisor recruiters get in front of the financial advisors most likely to buy their products.

We aim to give boutique firms the same targeting precision, audience intelligence, and sales-enablement capabilities as much larger firms—without an enterprise-sized budget.

Financial firms often still rely on a broad advertising strategy, which involves getting in front of as many eyes as possible and hoping the right people take notice. For smaller firms, that’s a wasteful way to pursue growth. At the same time, many of our clients are trying to compete with multimillion dollar campaigns with a budget closer to $10,000.

The only way to compete is to make sure every dollar spent is on a targeted, well-defined audience. Rather than maximizing reach through a spray-and-pray approach, we focus on reaching the ideal prospects and turning that engagement into real sales opportunities. Every engagement starts with a discovery workshop, where we learn about a client’s company, product, audience, tech stack, and sales process. From there, we build a precise strategy to
meet our clients’ goals.

We want every dollar working harder and focusing on the right impression, the right click, and, ultimately, the right conversation. By the time a salesperson picks up the phone, that prospect should be ready for a meaningful conversation.

Since 2020, we've used AdRoll ABM as the foundation of our highly targeted marketing engine. At the time, we wanted to build a more connected system where marketing and sales could work from the same data. We were migrating to HubSpot CRM, so I started looking for a display platform that integrated well with HubSpot.

After testing a few different options, we chose AdRoll because it gave us the HubSpot integration, hyper-targeting capabilities, intent signals, and ease of use we needed. The HubSpot integration is critical. Advertising only creates value if it leads to action. By connecting AdRoll ABM directly to HubSpot, we can move engagement data into the same
system our sales teams use every day.

What we love most is that AdRoll ABM is sales-first and sales-enabling. Instead of just generating awareness, it creates a feedback loop that helps sales teams understand who is engaging, what messages are resonating, and where they should focus their efforts.

One advantage of working in financial service is the availability of data. Forget making broad demographic assumptions. Through partners like AdvisorPro, we ingest specialized data and map the precise universe of 600,000 financial advisors. We analyze factors such as investment behaviour, 13F filings, client accounts, and discretionary AUM to build highly targeted audiences.

All of this work starts with understanding the product. If we’re promoting a newly launched ETF, for example, we immediately focus on those advisors with the discretion and profile to buy that type of product.

From there, we:
● Build audience segments
● Layer in AdRoll intent signals
● Identify advisors who are researching similar solutions
● Launch campaigns and test different audience groups

Within weeks, engagement patterns emerge, helping us continuously refine our targeting and messaging.

One of my favorite moments comes a few weeks into a campaign. When we hand clients the data that reveals which firms viewed and engaged with their ads, everything clicks for them. Until then, the idea that we’re hyper-targeting the audience they want to get in front of is still a concept. But once they begin to review their own sales hit list we’ve created, it suddenly becomes real.

I explain it to them like this: it’s like paying somebody to stand outside a target firm’s office holding a sign with your product or company name on it. Instead of anonymous impressions, clients receive named firms and signals that sales teams can immediately use to act.

Advertising stops being a branding exercise and becomes an effective sales enablement tool.

That combination of precision targeting and visibility delivers measurable results. Across client programs, we’ve consistently achieved click-through rates of 0.12%, outperforming common industry benchmarks of 0.08% As clients gain confidence in our approach, many choose to scale their investment significantly.

AdRoll is as forward-looking as we are, and they’re always helping us explore new offerings that create more value for our clients. Connected TV (CTV) is a great example.

Many boutique firms want the brand awareness that comes from TV advertising, but historically haven’t had access in a measurable, targeted way. What makes CTV exciting for us is that it uses the same precision audience infrastructure we
already trust in display. Our clients can extend the same targeting and audience intelligence into a channel that portrays them as a large, established, credible presence. We're seeing similar opportunities with Digital Out-of-Home (DooH) advertising.

If we know financial advisors will be concentrated around a conference or other industry event, we can select highly visible digital placements around hotels, transport hubs, and event spaces. The more advisors see a brand, the more likely they are to recognize it, remember it, and even trust it.

We’re also using AI to make our programs more efficient. After integrating the AdRoll MCP Server with Claude and into our workflow, I receive daily Slack alerts on any campaigns that need to be reviewed, audiences that should be refreshed, and other opportunities for optimization. It shifts marketing away from a defensive gamble to a predictable and offensive sales-enablement machine. Combined with AdRoll’s open API, which we use to build custom reporting layers and dashboards, we’re able to move faster and give clients more actionable insights.

Most boutique firms start with a simple assumption: if we build a great product, people will find us. In reality, that rarely happens. The firms that succeed are the ones that consistently put their message in front of the right audience and optimize the message and placement based on what they learn.

That’s why we don’t try to outspend the biggest firms in financial services, but out-target them. For us, that’s the future of financial services marketing. A $2,500 media budget works very differently when everyone seeing the ad is someone who is more likely to buy the product. We’re proud to work with AdRoll as we shape this future and help our clients turn precision into a strong advantage.