Investment app Betterment is running what CMO Kim Rosenblum calls an “anti-marketing” playbook.
Her team oversees growth, and they spend a lot of time strategizing about user acquisition. But once someone becomes a user, it’s up to Rosenblum to keep them calm, hands-off and focused on the long term – which is hard to do in a world of meme stocks, instant gratification, tariffs and FOMO.
“Part of our job in marketing, which is a strange thing for a marketer,” Rosenblum says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks, “is to say, ‘Do not engage.’”
Instead of nudging people to trade more or obsessively check their balances, Betterment wants customers to leave their money where it is while long‑term compounding does the work.
When Rosenblum first arrived in early 2021, however, the emphasis was on keeping customer acquisition costs low. But “just chasing the CAC,” as she puts it, isn’t a great recipe for retention.
By pursuing growth without factoring in lifetime value (LTV), Betterment ended up attracting people who would make small trial deposits, then quickly churn. Now, Rosenblum says, the company prioritizes return on ad spend, long-term value and strengthening Betterment’s relationship with existing customers.
For example, Betterment has gotten “much more comfortable” running promotional offers for longstanding users, she says, which it didn’t do in the past.
“If you were looking at CAC, you wouldn’t have done that, because you’re just spending money again on customers you’ve already acquired,” Rosenblum says. “But we really feel like loyalty [is] a more important measure of success.”
It’s a sharp contrast with much of fin tech, an industry that tends to gamify trading and pursue engagement.
But Betterment’s not about that, Rosenblum says. “There’s no FOMO here.”
Also in this episode: rebalancing Betterment’s media mix, how AI is shaping the app’s content strategy, why it was worth building its custom bidding script from scratch – and how Rosenblum handled a recent security breach from a communications perspective.
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