In today’s fast-paced, tech-driven environment, investment product marketers can’t really afford to dismiss document automation as just a “nice to have”. Marketing departments at investment management companies of all sizes are increasingly utilizing automation to improve productivity and mitigate risk. Good marketers in any industry plan for the future to ensure that their operations scale in pace with their growing business. Similar to their colleagues, to remain competitive, investment product marketers must be strategic. They must determine how to effectively use automation to produce key sales support materials such as fund fact sheets, commentaries and website content — and it’s important to get the timing right.

There are typically three key indicators that your firm should start seriously considering a marketing production automation solution:

• You’re marketing 14 products or more
• Your current process can’t keep pace with demand
• Your data processes have become unwieldy—and risky

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Incorporating a productive workflow into your project life cycle can greatly improve the accuracy and time-to-market of your marketing communications. We refer to “workflow” as a series of repeatable steps that transform a product into a desired end result. The idea is to move the product along in the project life cycle to catch and fix any potential errors early on in the process.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.

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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.

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