Wayne Lockwood: 5 Strategies to Address New Challenges in Asset Management Marketing

The asset management industry isn’t what it used to be. In the face of continued growth, the market has become increasingly crowded and fiercely competitive. But while competition has increased, differentiation among investment offerings has diminished.

What’s more, there’s been a fundamental shift in the relationship between clients and brands. In today’s customer-centric business climate, investors expect firms to provide them with modern, highly personalized experiences—wherever they are, and on any device they choose.

Consider these statistics:

64% of customers say customer experience is more important than price in buying decisions (Forrester).
70% of buying experiences are based on how customers feel they are being understood (McKinsey).
79% of customers only consider brands that show they understand and care about them (Wunderman).
80% of high-net-worth investors under 40 say they would leave their firm if it fails to provide an integrated channel experience (Frost & Sullivan).

Today’s evolving industry landscape has introduced unexpected challenges for asset management firms—and marketing leaders are under pressure to keep up.

Two Essential Elements of a Modern Marketing Strategy

An asset management marketing team has two central functions: to help recruit and retain advisors and to help acquire and retain clients.

In a crowded market where customer expectations have changed, that’s easier said than done. Indeed, as firms struggle to differentiate themselves, marketers are quickly learning that traditional acquisition and retention strategies are no longer effective.

Today, firms that can build deep, long-term relationships with their target audiences—and deliver truly meaningful experiences—will rise above the competition. The keys to building those relationships are aggregating your customer data and then acting on that information in a timely fashion.

Five Tactics for Creating Clear Differentiation

Here are five ways marketers can deliver superior value to clients—to improve acquisition and retention:

1) Get Personal

Today’s investors expect their communications with asset managers to be personalized and highly relevant to their needs. The challenge, of course, is achieving this level of service at scale; traditional batch and blast emails simply won’t work.

Through the use of demographic and behavioral data, segmentation, and lead scoring, firms can gain the rich, 360-degree customer view they need to deliver the personalized messaging clients expect.

2) Facilitate Communication

Modern clients—regardless of age—have become digitally savvy. They’ve grown accustomed to getting answers and access to information on the go, across multiple devices. The problem is, many asset management firms developed their various touch points in silos, thereby creating a disjointed and sometimes disorienting customer experience.

Delivering connected communications requires an omnichannel approach. The right automation solution should allow teams to deliver seamless conversations—as clients (and advisors) move from their phones to their laptops to their tablets, and beyond—all from a single platform.

3) Build Trust

Asset management is a high-stakes service and building client trust is crucial. While providing a personal touch is central to creating meaningful relationships, steps must be taken to safeguard client privacy.

Asset management firms must adhere to strict regulations surrounding marketing investment management and the handling of client funds. Indeed, compliance is a fundamental concern. Marketing leaders must ensure that their systems—and their marketing teams—are always up to date on new rules and regulations.

A trusted engagement platform, with high-security standards, will enable marketers to deliver personalized experiences, across multiple touch points—with a keen eye on privacy and regulatory compliance.

4) Find Truth

Historically, the asset management industry has been cautious about new MarTech trends. As a result, many marketing teams are still operating on outdated, disparate systems, including their CRM solutions.

Building and nurturing meaningful client relationships requires a single source of data truth. By creating a centralized repository of data and insights, marketers can move from a reactive acquisition and retention strategy—to a proactive one. A single source of truth will also help brands deliver consistent messaging across sales and marketing.

An automated marketing solution that easily integrates with CRM platforms—as well as multiple solution partners and open APIs—is essential. By gathering multiple data points in one location, it will provide the single source of truth marketers need to create the personalized experiences clients demand.

5) Prove ROI

For many marketing leaders, creating a strong marketing strategy is only half the battle. The next step is to prove their efforts are yielding real results for their institutions.

Marketing teams must be able to effectively measure—and continuously improve—the impact of their programs.

A fully optimized marketing engagement platform—one that puts all marketing data into a single view—will enable more robust reporting. Indeed, it will empower teams to move way beyond click-through rates—to measure multi-touch attribution, pipeline, and true ROI.

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