Creating and maintaining pitchbooks can be the bane of a marketing team’s existence. Product managers are always finding new ways to spin or illustrate their products. Sales teams and firm partners are always insisting that one more chart or illustration is absolutely critical to their pitch. And of course, there is the simple drudgery of making sure the standard data, disclosures, and charts are up-to-date and refreshed on time.

Read More

(The following blog post is the third in a series on the need for the Investment Management Industry to embrace sound data management practices. You can access the first and second posts here.)

Earlier today I was on a conference call with one of the largest asset management firms in the world.  The call was with marketing people representing operational groups in London, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and New York. The purpose of the call was to discuss factsheet automation and the need to unify their operations.  Interestingly, we could hardly stay on topic about documents and automation tools because their real problem was source data.

During the call, each group expressed their internal challenges in collecting clean, verifiably accurate and finalized data for reporting use.

Read More

These days you hear how “content is king” and that data and content are being generated at more than exponential rates. It is a constant challenge for investment marketers to keep up with the demand for compelling and current content. When it comes to fund marketing communications like fact sheets, commentaries, and pitchbooks, managing the dynamic and diverse information that feeds them can become a recurring hassle month after month, quarter after quarter. To break the vicious cycle, marketers must leverage their information (and their efforts to organize it) from one document to the next. Their goal? To fix recurring document problems.

Read More

In today’s competitive business environment, marketers must have access to “the right data at the right time” in order to be effective.

At financial services firms, marketers rely heavily upon their data to market their products and report performance on a monthly and quarterly basis.  In addition to producing fact sheets, pitchbooks, and other vital communication materials, investment marketers are also using data to drive key business decisions.

In either case, it is extremely important for investment companies to place a focus on producing quality data. Otherwise, they risk running into problems from both a regulatory and brand reputation standpoint.

But what is the definition of “data quality”? Why is it important for marketing? And what is the magic formula for achieving quality data?

Read More