Investment managers are battling for their share of voice in a crowded media environment. The holy grail – of having engaged prospects and converting them into loyal, long-term clients – is difficult to achieve. Much of the struggle lies in getting clients to engage with your brand’s content in the first place.
So why do so many asset and wealth managers still not get this right? At a recent CMO Exchange session White Marble hosted, we picked the brains of some of our industry’s top marketing minds. They shared common challenges, what has worked in their businesses and where the industry is still lagging.
Not relevant enough
Our industry is not very good at speaking to our different audiences’ particular needs. We’re behind many others in our ability to provide personalised content.
We need to ensure we bring the voice of the client into our marketing and communications. This might be via research groups that can bring clarity to the ‘client voice’ and perspective. More fundamentally, we need to instil the concept and culture of relevance in the respective teams that are producing content – from investment teams to investment writers to the marketing department.
Most content marketing is still produced by investment writers. Writing or marketing teams also face challenges from investment teams keen to push their content agenda, regardless of whether the content works or not.
Our challenge is to get all writers to think like investment marketers. Investment writing and marketing are different skillsets which are both necessary for a strong marketing machine. There is a growing recognition of the need for a marketing mindset in all our content – to ensure it is relevant both for our clients and our own strategic purpose. Content that ticks those boxes will be adaptable and useable across multiple channels and will be genuinely additive to our marketing efforts, delivering much greater return on investment.
Many marketing teams now produce multiple forms of content (in different media) to satisfy clients’ different habits. We need to think in the same way about the content itself.
The content agenda moves quite quickly and while businesses try to be relevant, it’s difficult to gauge where an audience is at. Understanding what the relevant message should be at any given moment is a constant challenge.
Personas: how good are yours?
Relevance is predicated on effective segmentation and personas. How many businesses are doing a good job of this? Are they matching content to client types or needs? In an encouraging trend, there has been a growing demand for email preference centres, showing companies wanting to gather better data about their clients’ areas of interests.
Personas are often used to help teams frame their content. We must always ask ourselves: when were these built? This is not a one-off exercise – they must be maintained and refreshed. Any personas created pre-Covid will now clearly need a refresh.
Automation breeds efficiency
The use of marketing automation is on the rise, helping teams become more effective by personalising our content delivery. Effective automation is built on the perfect marriage of relevance and personas.
In this industry, personalisation doesn’t mean having the recipient’s name in the email, and it certainly doesn’t mean content written for one person. What it means is the ability to match content to particular groups of clients in our databases based on data and context. It means we can pair content with client behaviour or behavioural patterns.
To do this well, we need content specifically written for that purpose – short, relevant, impactful, sequential and varied for different responses.
A marketing mindset in our investment writers might seem like an ambitious goal, but with a long-term view it’s a shortcut to success in the future of your marketing.
Do you experience some of these challenges in your business? Get in touch to find out how we can help your team drive better engagement with client-centric content.