As institutional asset management firms seek to build new client relationships and increase sales of financial products with wealth management clients, they run into a number of challenges.
- Fee pressure: Investors generally seek funds with lower fees — or more value if fees are high — forcing firms to run more efficiently to accommodate for smaller margins and get more creative in their marketing strategies.
- Complexity: The product landscape is growing, offering more choices for investors, which makes it challenging for firms to differentiate.
- Distribution: New technology, such as robo-advisors and convenient investing apps, along with variations in global rules, influences asset management marketing strategies.
Add to these obstacles regulatory constraints and a limited addressable market, and one thing is clear: asset management marketing seems to be getting more difficult by the minute.
To solve many of these challenges and make every moment more memorable for prospects, asset management firms can rely on the power of marketing automation.
Understand and segment your prospects.
You’ve likely heard the common mantra in marketing: know your audience.
You should aim to know everything you can about your prospects, including:
- who they are
- where they work
- what their role is
- which industry they’re in
- which content they’ve interacted with (social, email, web, etc.)
- when in the buying cycle they interact with certain content
- which teams they’ve talked to already
- when they move from interest to intent
- what asset management or financial firms they currently work with
- what their investment strategy or philosophy is
- what their financial goals are
- which current assets under management they have with your firm
Based on responses to these, you can begin to segment your audience to send specific prospects the most relevant communications.
For instance, you might create rules for one audience segment that includes wealth managers with more than $1 billion in AUM, no existing AUM with your firm, and have downloaded a report or white paper from your website in the last 90 days. Your marketing automation platform will be able to automatically identify prospects with these attributes.
Having this knowledge at your disposal, your marketing and sales teams can work together to identify the content you’d like to use to build out personalized journeys for this engaged segment. Eventually, you’ll also be able to scale your efforts so that your teams can engage more people with less manual work.
Learn more about how to use segmentation rules in Pardot.
Show prospects that you can be personal.
It can be daunting to think about the vast number of ways marketers can personalize interactions with prospects. But learning how to personalize communications is crucial, especially with such a small pool of prospects.
One way to be more personal is by using dynamic content — content that displays according to rules you define based on values within a subscriber’s record.
If a wealth manager visits your website and views information about a particular fund, you can use marketing automation to display targeted offers to that prospect. The offer might be a call-to-action leading to a relevant blog post with rich insights about that fund.
You can also implement dynamic content in emails. If a prospect signs up for updates from your firm, you can serve them dynamic content by leveraging their engagement history or even setting up a preference center.
Learn more about how to use dynamic content in Pardot.
Be obsessed with your data.
Because asset management firms are competing for the attention of such a limited number of wealth managers, understanding your data is vital. Knowing which content works — and which emails, social media posts, white papers, and more are failing — can give firms a huge leg up on the competition.
With tools like B2B Marketing Analytics, you can organize prospect data all in one dashboard to see both aggregate and individual metrics. This can help your marketing and sales teams see which content adds value at a high level, but it can also provide a granular view of each individual.