When discussing content automation goals, buzzwords like ‘streamlining’, ‘consistency’, and ‘efficiency’ are often tossed around. These are good goals to strive for but are difficult to achieve due to business reasons beyond marketing’s control. After all, the products represent different strategies, ages, data, and audiences; therefore, the literature has to reflect this. In the end, the main goal of content automation should be to make the process as simple as your firm’s business rules and product nuances will allow.

In a recent content automation report, 23% of asset managers cited producing factsheets monthly.  So, the accuracy and timeliness of factsheets are becoming more and more crucial.  Yet, this does not necessarily mean less complex. The complexity of your factsheets is one of the main driving factors behind the cost of implementing and maintaining an automated solution. In this blog post, we’ll identify and discuss the top 3 factsheet automation complications:

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In a budget-conscious financial services industry, marketing spend is a top concern.  That’s why, when we meet new firms looking to invest in automating their factsheet production, one of the first questions marketers ask is, ‘How much will factsheet automation it cost?’.  Before digging into their business requirements, our dreaded answer is: It depends. There are many factors to be considered. Firms take many approaches, and one size does NOT fit all.

Among the major dependencies affecting the cost of automating your marketing documents are:

• Complexity of your designs
• Number of templates and variations you have
• Complexity of your data
• Extent of your language requirements
• Amount of flexibility you have with requirements
• Number of documents to be produced

The complexity of your factsheets and flexibility of your firm’s operating model will ultimately determine the cost for automating them during production. To give you a better idea of what this means, let’s look at a few common scenarios. These are actual case studies of companies who have implemented factsheet automation recently with Synthesis and how much it cost them.Read More

This article, “Why Pitch Decks Should be Created by Sales, Not Marketing,” first appeared in Fundfire.

Recently, a salesperson told us about a deal where he went “rogue.” He got an opportunity to present to a major institutional client but didn’t have an up-to-date deck from marketing. So he cobbled together a deck using slides from previous presentations. He knew he was pushing the compliance boundaries, but he needed to land this deal.

His was the first presentation to the client, and he secured their agreement before leaving. As he walked out, three competitors sat in the lobby waiting for their turn to present. “If I had waited for marketing to send me an updated deck,” he said, “We would have lost that deal because the first sales guy to show them what they needed got the business.”

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Managing disclosure language has been a critical element of Synthesis’ document automation approach for over two decades. Even with modern technology and processes, disclosures continue to be a pain point for most asset management firms. Recently, we’ve been doing research into the processes asset managers use to manage their disclosures. The goal of this research is to better understand why disclosure management continues to be problematic. Through our discussions with marketing and compliance professionals at large and small investment management firms, we’ve been digging into how firms create, edit, distribute, and retire disclosure language — and what the major issues are.Read More