Ultumus’ overall marketing strategy is a customer-centric philosophy focused on building meaningful 1:1 relationships by providing value through expertise and exceptional customer experience. Since 2021, the strategy has evolved from a fragmented digital presence into a structured, data-driven Loop Marketing model that leverages advanced search technology and unified brand messaging.
To achieve this, Ultumus redefined their brand voice and, supported by AI, deployed a unified multi-hub solution combining HubSpot Content Hub and Marketing Hub on the Smart CRM, yielding exceptional commercial results.
Challenge:
Prior to the implementation, Ultumus faced a highly fragmented operational state that severely bottlenecked growth. The core challenges included:
- Fragmented Digital Presence & Underperforming Assets
- A disconnected web ecosystem built on a legacy tech stack that failed to track or nurture users.
- Outdated Brand Positioning
- Disconnected service value propositions that misaligned with a sophisticated global financial ecosystem.
- Lead Generation & Conversion Gaps
- Inefficient sales and marketing assets resulting in severe lead leakage and an inability to convert high-value traffic.
Solution and Results:
Apply the loop marketing framework, transitioning from project-based campaigns to a continuous, AI-enabled growth engine.
1. Express: Define Your Unique Brand Story
This stage focused on establishing the brand's unique "taste," tone, and perspective before utilising AI for scale.
The Foundation: The development of the "One Ultumus" platform narrative organised the business into two clear streams: Index Solutions and ETF Solutions. This repositioned Ultumus as a premium, mature provider for a highly technical audience.
- By repositioning as a mature, quality product with a sophisticated voice, Ultumus defined the brand story that differentiates them from generic competitors. This strategy is built to serve a sophisticated, technical audience within the global financial ecosystem.
- This balance of human creativity and AI research was achieved by prioritising strategy over technology: human expertise defined a compelling brand narrative, while AI accelerated research, validated insights, and scaled consistent execution.
- Spitfire & Ultumus first defined a human brand voice with a three-part tone structure (authoritative, human, technical). AI then researched competitor language to validate and sharpen this tone. Built into HubSpot, the voice scales AI-generated content consistently, with humans reviewing each piece against the narrative before publishing.
- A key component of defining the brand story was the identification and development of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and refinement of their Buyer Personas, both designed to transition the business toward a service-oriented model. These were mapped directly into the Smart CRM to guide all future automated distribution.
- Ultumus used HubSpot's Brand Identity Tool to establish a centralised brand voice profile, ensuring a consistently authoritative tone across all AI-generated technical guides, emails, and articles.
2. Tailor: Personalisation at Scale
This stage leverages the shared data context between Content Hub insights and Marketing Hub behavioral data to achieve true 1:1 personalisation.
Identifying customer personas and ICPs established the data, strategy, and workflows for lead scoring and persona-based automation.
- Form properties include not only the persona based fields but also job function and enquiry type based on product to better understand not only the persona but also the ICP and relevant product interest. Segments were then used to to ensure that all enquiries receive the relevant updates.
Figure: Buyer persona breakdown over time (Source: HubSpot)
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Content development utilises the new brand voice to build and deliver ongoing content that speaks to product, personas and ICPs, while being optimised for AEO, SEO and human intent.
- Lead scoring (100 points for fit, 110 for engagement) acts as the CRM logic derived from both hubs that allows for 1:1 personalisation through the establishment of lifecycle stages, ensuring prospects feel understood rather than just targeted.
- Understanding how the content strategy integrates with loop marketing enables the team to plan content that is focused on the customer journey.
Figure: Cumulative blog views by traffice source (Source: HubSpot)
3. Amplify: Diversify Channels & Trusted Voices
Modern financial buyers follow their feeds rather than traditional linear funnels. This stage focuses on omni-channel distribution driven by cross-hub metrics.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation):
- Prioritising visibility in AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT is a key strategic driver to show up where prospects are performing discovery.
- Blog traffic analysis shows an increase following the brand refresh and strategy alignment, demonstrating the value of an amplified distribution strategy focused on AI, referrals, and social media.
- Based on refined segmentation and tailored automation, email metrics improved with email health for automated emails at 9.
- Increasing the publication of content by 160% (social and articles) and ensuring it’s relevance for all persona’s and ICPs resulted in Social and referral-driven discovery emerging as powerful growth engines.
These metrics prove that the tailored strategy for distribution via social channels, partner sites, automated email, and AI discovery effectively delivers the right content to the right people.
4. Evolve: Optimise in Real Time
The "Evolve" stage replaces "set-and-forget" campaigns with iterative testing and continuous improvement.
- Continuous dashboards enable real-time optimisation based on query performance, combining AI analysis with human strategy.
- A feedback loop of AEO and engagement data drove agility: 23% of blog content was updated post-publication in a single month.
- HubSpot's AEO functionality strategically integrates and updates tracked product and ICP prompts.
- The flexible 2026 content calendar allows the team to test, learn, and pivot based on technical queries gaining traction in AI-driven search.
- This data-driven approach raised brand visibility in AI engines from 33% to 38.59% in one month.
- Ultumus co-leads share of voice at 22%.
- Ultumus is the most cited brand compared to all competitors.
Impact
The transition to a Loop Marketing and the unified multi-hub approach on HubSpot's Smart CRM has delivered clear commercial and engagement benefits:
“Spitfire took a fragmented, legacy marketing setup and turned it into a genuinely unified, data-driven engine. The brand refresh gave us a voice that finally matches the sophistication of the audience we serve, and the results speak for themselves, stronger lead quality, better conversion, and a growing presence in AI-driven search. It has been a genuine partnership rather than a vendor relationship."
Henriette Reed, Head of Marketing, Ultumus
Looking to apply loop marketing to your strategy? Reach out to our team - we are ready to partner with you.
