From Cherry Farms to C-Suites: Molly McClure’s Relentless Pursuit of Marketing That Performs

NATIONWIDE - JUNE 2025 - (USAnews.com) — In a highly competitive and ever-evolving market, transforming a brand, energizing a team, and driving measurable growth requires both vision and strategic execution. Molly McClure, a seasoned marketing executive, has spent nearly two decades shaping the marketing landscape for technology, financial services, and fintech companies. Her experience spans leading both lean, scrappy teams and large, matrixed organizations. She has managed everything from modest startup budgets to multimillion-dollar enterprise investments, and she builds from zero with the same confidence she brings to scaling mature engines.

Molly approaches marketing like a systems thinker with a storyteller’s soul, balancing data and emotion, precision and creativity. Whether architecting integrated campaigns or unlocking new customer segments, she blends strategic rigor with hands-on agility to move fast, adapt faster, and deliver business results that last. Her leadership fuels cultures of accountability, innovation, and growth, making her not just a marketing leader but a true growth architect.

McClure’s journey began in northern Michigan, where she worked on a cherry farm—a formative experience that taught her the value of hard work as both a personal virtue and a business strategy. This early lesson has influenced her leadership approach, which combines resilience, strategic insight, and a relentless pursuit of results.

Most recently, McClure served as Head of US Marketing for intelliflo, the financial advice software division of Invesco. Operating as a mid-sized, fast-moving business within the structure of a global asset management powerhouse, intelliflo offered the best of both worlds: the agility to innovate quickly, combined with the backing and stability of a Fortune 500 brand.

As the de facto CMO for the U.S. business, McClure led all aspects of marketing, including strategy, budget ownership, brand positioning, content development, demand generation, digital and partner marketing, events, analytics, and stakeholder engagement. Tasked with building the U.S. marketing function from scratch, she began with a deep dive into market research and customer insights to understand brand perception, buyer pain points, and decision-making behavior across the financial advisor landscape.

With low brand awareness emerging as one of the most pressing challenges, McClure quickly prioritized a full-funnel omnichannel campaign to drive visibility and engagement. Within just six months of joining, she launched a scalable marketing engine spanning 15 channels, including 12 the company had never used before. Each channel was carefully aligned to audience segments, buyer journeys, and performance goals.

But the campaign wasn’t a one-and-done. McClure and her team operated with a test-and-learn mindset, relaunching and optimizing the campaign every six months to reflect new insights, market dynamics, and performance data. This commitment to continuous improvement kept the messaging fresh, the creative relevant, and the results strong.

The initial launch helped drive a 25 percent year-over-year revenue increase in the U.S. business and marked a pivotal shift in intelliflo’s growth strategy. Even more notably, 67 percent of closed-won deals in the launch year were directly attributed to marketing. The campaign also significantly improved brand visibility and resonance: intelliflo jumped from 12th to 2nd in top-of-mind brand recall and achieved a 13 percent year-over-year increase in communication recall.

One of McClure’s defining strengths is her ability to simplify complex messaging and align it tightly with customer insights. She translates strategy into language that resonates, turning pain points into value propositions and capabilities into compelling narratives. Whether speaking to financial advisors, internal stakeholders, or executive leadership, she makes the message meaningful and clear.

Earlier in her career at USAA, McClure led the company’s first-ever annuity marketing campaign following the divestiture of its investment company. After four rounds of in-depth member research and countless conversations, she uncovered a key insight: members were skeptical of the word "annuity" but drawn to the peace of mind it could offer. That insight led to the launch of the “Freedom in Retirement” campaign, which reframed annuities as a "paycheck for life." The campaign resonated deeply with USAA’s member base and was praised for making annuities feel both relevant and empowering.

At intelliflo, McClure brought that same insight-driven approach to experiential marketing. One standout example was her decision to sponsor the Future Proof Festival, a bold and unconventional wealth management event set on the beach in Huntington Beach, California. With its modern atmosphere and brand authenticity, Future Proof was a perfect match for intelliflo’s challenger positioning. After gathering insights from two years of participation, she and her team reimagined their booth at the 2024 event. The result was an 81 percent increase in opened opportunities and a 133 percent surge in qualified leads, along with a major customer win.

During her intelliflo tenure, McClure also transformed marketing attribution from a manual model to a process-driven, data-informed system that enabled faster insights, smarter optimization, and tighter alignment with sales.

As a leader, McClure is known for building teams of never-satisfied experts—high-performing marketers who are hungry to win, eager to evolve, and driven to lead. She creates a culture defined by strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and creative problem-solving. Under her guidance, marketing is never just an order-taker; it becomes a proactive growth engine and a trusted partner to product, sales, and executive leadership.

She also brings a consistent focus on the bigger picture, grounding her work in a deep understanding of the “why” behind every initiative. Whether helping USAA members build financial security or enabling financial advisors to spend more time with their clients through intelliflo’s software, McClure brings purpose to every campaign, message, and metric. This connection to mission fuels both her strategic clarity and her ability to lead teams with meaning.

Her strategic discipline was sharpened at USAA, where business-line marketing leaders were expected to present rigorous go-to-market strategies each fall to the CMO and executive leadership team. Budgets were earned, not given, and every assumption had to be defended. That experience embedded a high level of accountability and executive fluency that continues to define McClure’s leadership style.

By combining startup speed with enterprise discipline, Molly McClure has proven her ability to architect marketing organizations that not only build brand equity but also drive real business growth with strategy, passion, and purpose at the core.

McClure’s work has earned widespread recognition for its strategic insight, creative execution, and measurable business impact:

• In 2025, she was named Marketing Executive of the Year by the American Business Awards, claiming the Gold Stevie Award. One judge called her “an inspiring case study of how strategic thinking leads to real results.”

• She also received two Stevie Awards for Marketing Disruptor of the Year—one for her bold, brand-driven activation at the 2024 Future Proof Festival, and another for intelliflo’s omnichannel campaign, which drove a 25 percent year-over-year revenue increase and significantly elevated brand perception.

• In 2024, her team was honored with the ThinkAdvisor Luminaries Award for Excellence in Marketing and PR, recognizing their innovative and high-impact campaigns.

These honors are part of a growing list of accolades, including being named one of the Top 30 Most Influential FinTech Marketers of 2025 and recognized as one of the Top Female Business Leaders of San Antonio for two consecutive years. Each recognition reflects McClure’s ability to lead with vision, challenge convention, and drive lasting results in industries fueled by innovation and trust.

Beyond her professional achievements, McClure is deeply committed to personal growth and development. She is an avid traveler, experimental cook, and devoted wife who brings perseverance, curiosity, and optimism to everything she does.

Those values were forged early, during her formative years working on her grandparents’ cherry farm in northern Michigan. That experience instilled a roll-up-your-sleeves work ethic and a grounded perspective that continue to shape how she leads with grit, humility, and purpose.

McClure is also a passionate advocate for supporting other women, especially in industries where they remain underrepresented. While not every leader takes on this responsibility, McClure embraces it fully. She mentors rising professionals and recently joined Wednesday Women, a community focused on empowering women to help one another rise, lead, and thrive. For her, lifting others is not a side mission—it is a core part of her leadership philosophy.

Her advice to fellow marketers is candid and hard-earned: have thick skin, lead with data, and don’t be rattled when everyone in the room thinks they’re a marketer. In her words, “Your job is to lead with expertise. Own your seat at the table, bring the insights, and deliver results that speak louder than opinions.” It’s this balance of confidence, clarity, and credibility that has defined McClure’s leadership across industries and earned her the trust of executives, peers, and teams alike.

Molly McClure’s career is a testament to the transformative power of strategic marketing. Her ability to simplify complexity, empower teams, and deliver results at scale has left a lasting mark on the brands she has led. Her influence continues to shape not only the future of marketing but also the next generation of leaders poised to define it.

To connect with Molly and explore her latest thinking on leadership, strategy, and storytelling, follow her on LinkedIn.