CMO Corner: How Greenlight’s Sushil Sharma balances, partnership, engagement, and reach in the path to profitability

Greenlight has one of the strongest synergies between marketing and product in the industry: The firm is a long-running sponsor of the popular podcast Million Bazillion which uses a story-telling format to answer kids’ financial queries. And in 2023, it launched Level Up, an interactive, curriculum-based financial literacy game that stood out from all other gamified experiences in the industry at the time.  

One reason for the strong bond between product and marketing is Sushil Sharma, who is both CMO and CPO at the fintech. This dual leadership structure eliminates the traditional silos and competing priorities that often plague organizations, allowing Sharma to orchestrate campaigns that have product needs baked in.

Get an insight into the strategies on the CMO’s table in my conversation with Sharma to learn how the fintech consistently speaks to multiple audiences without losing context. And learn the executive is optimizing engagement and partnership strategies to tie exposure back to business growth. 

Communicating with multiple audience personas

Greenlight caters primarily to families with children, who want to use child-friendly financial products and services like debit cards, as well as educational materials that help children learn how to manage their finances early. 

“Families primarily look to us for two things: helping kids earn, spend, save, invest, and give responsibly, and keeping them safe with features like location sharing, driving safety, and parental alerts,” said Sharma. 

Recently the firm has diversified its product mix to also cater to the elders, with products like Family Shield, that offers fraud protection and identity theft services for seniors. This means that the Greenlight product now speaks to all three generations that may be present in a household. 

“Safety resonates really well for families who have kids and senior parents. The sandwich generation is often juggling the responsibility of both at this point in their life and we aim to put them at ease by providing an all-in-one tool,” added Sharma. 

The challenge, however, is crafting messages that can speak to three very different generations with very different roles and “jobs-to-be-done” at once. To make sure that their message connects, Greenlight anchors its tone to what all three groups have in common: family. 

“We keep our messaging and visual storytelling simple, consistent and centered on creating value for the whole family. Authenticity is key, so we often highlight the voices of our users and share their real experiences.”

Leading for growth and profitability 

Greenlight’s business model depends on building and nurturing both B2C and B2B2C relationships, with banks like U.S. Bank plugging Greenlight’s money app and debit card for families directly into its own app. 

The B2B2C product is an important growth vector for Greenlight and plays a critical role in pushing the firm towards profitability, according to Sharma. As the fintech’s bank and fintech relationships grow, it is able to tap into highly-engaged, pre-established audiences, amping up brand recognition and awareness in segments that may otherwise have been unengaged. 

“Direct-to-consumer campaigns are at the core of how we reach families, but partnerships with banks also play a supporting role in our distribution strategy. It’s one way marketing helps drive growth and extend our impact,” said Sharma. 

Executive tip: Measurement of success and strategic action go hand-in-hand: “The growth marketing team receives a clear payback period target, then builds channel-level strategies to meet it. That structure keeps our marketing investments directly tied to business outcomes,” shared Sharma. 

The low down on engagement

Getting consumers’ attention is getting harder and harder. Old school marketing playbooks made for channels like TV adverts and billboards don’t fit in the era of social media, where fintechs have to fight a barrage of influencer content and UGC for eyeballs. 

“What we’re seeing consistently is a shift toward shorter attention spans and higher expectations for relevance and trust. We actually did a survey in June that showed that nearly 70% of Gen Z and Gen Alpha favor mobile apps and interactive learning for financial tools because they want to be met where they are – online,” noted Sharma. 

To overcome congestion issues in online channels as well as the closing window that is the modern consumer’s attention span, Greenlight is betting on expanding the scope of its messaging strategy, across different channels and through partnerships. “Relying too heavily on a single approach can leave brands vulnerable to policy changes or platform shifts,” noted Sharma. 

Recently, Sharma led a saturation testing campaign in cities with lower brand awareness of Greenlight’s products. In Dallas, the fintech ran a month-long experiment of out-of-home ads and saw nominal awareness gains. 

However, analyzing the campaign’s performance led to a deeper understanding of how consumers were engaging with the brand on different platforms: “What surprised us was the spike in Meta ad engagement during the campaign. That insight now drives a broader brand push in Chicago designed to reach families across multiple touchpoints,” said Sharma. 

Executive tip: In the online world, “engagement doesn’t always follow reach,” says Sharma. While TikTok is an exposure engine for the fintech, Meta platforms perform better in terms of providing meaningful interaction.  “Messaging that leads with strong value propositions, like our Greenlight debit card, chores, or savings tools, consistently performs best,” he added. 

Sidebar: Marketing on the road

In 2023, Greenlight launched the The Million Bazillion Live! tour launches with two ten-week East Coast programs, hitting cities like Austin, Kansas City, and Dallas with 30-minute game shows where middle schoolers answered financial questions to win prizes. 

Select cities featured family game nights for parents and kids to learn together. The tour targeted middle schoolers, the Million Bazillion podcast’s main audience, who have limited access to financial knowledge.

The on the road game show was a unique example of IRL marketing, where greenlight became the catalyst for financial education experiences for hundreds of families, giving the fintech a chance to launch a new stream of B2B partnerships with schools.