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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As Ben Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Preparation is critical to the outcome of a content automation initiative. There’s always a possibility implementation will go awry if the project plan is disorganized. Organization and planning are challenging, for it takes specific business and leadership skills to run this kind of technical project. Many departments need to get involved, including marketing, IT, sales, and compliance. Stakeholders from each department must re-examine their processes and work together to re-create them for automation. The goal is to improve the process fundamentally and permanently within the boundaries of a systemized solution. More often than not, this is easier said than done, and may require professional assistance. Here are 5 best practices to prime your team for content automation.

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Guest post by Meghan Rees, Digital Communications at Mediafly

Sales and marketing teams in the financial services industry have their work cut out for them. Marketing teams struggle to create content and processes that will be well-received by the sales group. Salespeople, in an effort to be more client-centric, tweak materials themselves, creating “rogue” content that is not compliant with regulatory and brand standards. When compliance approvals and procedures are bypassed, the firm is exposed to significant risk.

To some extent, all investment firms struggle to create and present client-focused content that is on-brand and compliant. Weighed-down by the risk of penalties and the pressure of working in a competitive business environment, financial services companies are turning to digital platforms to streamline their efforts and improve engagement with prospective clients.

Adopting a sales enablement solution may be the obvious choice to help with content automation and effective sales engagement, but building a case internally and setting expectations with the teams are crucial to a successful implementation.

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Hi, I’m Kim Rebecca. Throughout my career in the global asset management industry, I’ve had the opportunity to help facilitate data-heavy content automation.  I’ve done this on thousands of regulatory documents, marketing collateral, presentations, web pages and so on. Actually, it’s probably hundreds of thousands. One of the key advantages of content automation is the accommodation of the ever-expanding scope of distribution. It allows product marketers such as myself to bolster their bragging rights. I’ve had the good fortune to help three global asset managers with their content automation efforts ­­— prominent and well-recognized firms managing assets galore. I was thus somewhat surprised to find that a common challenge in the implementation phase of all of their automation was something seemingly basic: the identification and articulation of something called business rules.Read More