The asset management industry is undergoing a disruptive phase. Regulatory complexities, market volatility, rising costs, evolving investor preferences, and the ever-increasing demands for transparency are putting a massive squeeze on margins. Asset managers are facing the heat, and the situation for CMOs is no different.
Why asset management marketers struggle with impact delivery?
One of the biggest challenges CMOs face is to streamline the way asset management marketing works. Most marketing teams still run inefficient and manual processes to accomplish their day-to-day activities, such as:
- Sourcing data from disparate sources
- Reusing data across several marketing, sales and distribution initiatives
- Collaborating with stakeholders including sales and product teams, and seeking their feedback, input or approvals
- Tracking client consumption patterns and content relevance metrics
Manual processes are prone to errors and delays, and unnecessarily elongate the content production cycle. On top of it, marketing is expected to create and support a multi-step and a multi-channel campaign, which further increases the complexity of producing up-to-date and relevant content.
CMOs can overcome these operational problems by leveraging simple, yet intelligent automation. Let’s see how.
Three new ways in which automation can make marketing efficient and effective
CMOs and heads of marketing are under constant pressure to not only scale marketing processes but also help sales reach more customers, faster and with less effort. If marketers are to succeed, then they must prioritize their efforts around the following three marketing automation strategies:
1. Leverage a common workflow and collaboration platform to align priorities across the different functions: Marketing aligns with compliance, sales, distribution and client servicing teams to produce a consistent and a positive experience for the customer. As the first touchpoint in the customer journey, marketing sets the tone for everything else that follows. Therefore, collaboration becomes critical.
Marketing can facilitate and improve collaboration by leveraging an automated workflow that provides complete visibility to all the stakeholders involved in the content production process. Sales team gets a view of upcoming content and can align their outreach efforts with the marketing initiatives. They can also review and prioritize content requests.
Other stakeholders receive automated alerts informing them of the action they need to take – whether an approval or a review – and this minimizes project slippages and delays. Not only this, a collaboration platform fosters employee self-service and acts as a one stop shop for requesting and accessing all marketing information and assets including templates, product disclosures, images and videos.
2. Create a central data repository to automate and accelerate content creation: Marketing creates multiple types of content pieces, in multiple formats, and across multiple channels. In the absence of a streamlined process, content creation can be a daunting task.
Marketing can consider creating a central data repository to facilitate sourcing and storage of data. A central repository offers the potential to apply rule based data validation logic and check data quality. It streamlines the process of gathering source data, which can then be effectively used across multiple documents and formats such as PDFs, PowerPoints and HTMLs. A central repository also automates version control by maintaining a full audit trail of the different steps – right from content creation to checking and approval.
But before marketing deploys a central data repository, it is important to standardize all document structures to ensure consistency. If there are any content customization requests, then marketing should ask for a business justification prior to taking those up. This causes minimum disruption to the systems and processes that have been already put in place.
3. Use analytics to measure content performance and ROI: While marketing creates engaging content, it struggles to showcase its impact. Some marketers measure content performance but fail to link it to the overall impact that marketing delivers.
Analytics and automated reporting can bring marketers all the intelligence around content performance. Using custom dashboards, CMOs and heads of marketing can get a holistic view of all marketing initiatives in real-time. They can analyze client responses, and glean useful insights regarding which campaigns and messages are resonating the most with clients, and then use these insights to inform future strategy. Analytics also helps marketing link its efforts to sales conversions, and build the case for additional budgets and funding.
Together, these three marketing automation strategies can shorten turnaround time, improve content accuracy and relevance, reduce workload, and enhance the quality of management reporting. Streamlined workflow and automation-led content generation can reduce manual effort by 25–30% and overall turnaround time by 30–40%. Analytics dashboards not only enable sales and marketing to set up structured processes for measuring RoI and calculating channel effectiveness, but also reduce time required for periodic performance reports by 40–50%. Thus, these strategies can free up marketing teams’ bandwidth, allowing them to concentrate on value-adding activities, such as growing and nurturing client relationships, creating thought leadership, and building a superior brand presence.
If you would like to learn more about automation and analytics and how these three strategies can help you maximize marketing ROI, click HERE to send us your query.
The following infographic summarizes the operational challenges the asset management marketing is facing and how CMOs and heads of marketing can leverage automation to deliver business impact.
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