Maintaining a strong and positive brand image is more important now than ever. Every contact with a client and every piece of material they see from your firm needs to be professional, timely and well produced. Even something as mundane as a poorly produced factsheet can be off-putting and give an investor pause to think about the overall quality of your operations. Yes, even in the digital age, quality design and typography in printed materials really matters. That’s why automating factsheets in PowerPoint is a bad idea. 

A long-time head of marketing for a major asset manager once said to me: “If you look at the most successful companies in any industry, you’ll find that they share one thing in common; excellent branding.”

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Due to the competitive nature of the financial services industry, content automation has become a strategic priority for many.  With a finish line goal to improve scalability, risk management and brand compliance, the race is on to improve marketing and sales operations.  The challenge firms face is knowing how to approach content automation.  Is it better to build or buy?  What are the differences between the leading vendors, and their approaches?

In 2017, we commissioned some research on how asset managers are automating content production.  The research found 3 common models: Fully outsourced, DIY, and hybrid.  Here’s a brief description of each and the pros and cons.

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You probably see the term “account-based marketing” (ABM) pretty frequently of late. The hype has grown over the past 12 months, with hundreds of articles, blogs, webinars, podcasts, videos and events devoted to the topic. At least a few dozen new vendors have sprung up with solutions focused on ABM, adding to the noise.

Even with all that noise, most organizations are unclear about whether and how to implement these strategies. So this post will give you a high-level sense of what ABM is all about, give you concrete criteria on whether you should consider it for your organization, help you decide what type of ABM would be appropriate, and give you a couple of practical steps to get started.

By Candyce Edelen

This post originally appeared on the Propel Growth blog.

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When it comes to the automation of marketing materials like fact sheets, people often have a hard time letting go of their InDesign templates. This is understandable. Preserving the InDesign functionality gives marketers a sense of security, especially if they’ve been using this program for years. We see this scenario all the time in both large and small investment company marketing departments.

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