Category Archives: Global Marketing Operations
7 Problems With Automating Fact Sheets In PowerPoint
By John Toepfer
With the highly competitive nature of the asset management industry, maintaining a strong and positive brand image is more important now than ever. Every contact with a client, every conversation 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.
I had the opportunity recently to speak with a long time head of marketing for a major asset manager and she spoke with passion about on the topic of brand. Among many compelling things she had to say was this: “If you look at the most successful companies in any industry, you’ll find that they share one thing in common; excellent branding.”
The 3 Ways to Approach Content Automation
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.
How to Prep your Team for Content Automation
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 implementations 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.
Q&A Discussion: Blending Marketing Customization & Compliance in Financial Sales
In the heavily-regulated world of investment management, consistency and harmony between functional areas, including marketing, sales and compliance, are key goals for competitive advantage. However, this is difficult to achieve.
Many disconnects happen at investment companies when marketing creates collateral which, from the sales perspective, misses the mark on client-focus and relevance—all before a compliance review. Ultimately, in the name of making the sale, salespeople customize presentations, creating multiple versions along the way that are difficult to track. This unwieldy process can cause compliance, branding, and messaging nightmares that may lead to fines, outflows, and lost revenue.
Firms are almost always aware that these disconnects exist and want to fix them, yet don’t know where to start. We recently held a webinar; The Sales Success Formula in Financial Services: Blending Customization and Compliance, to discuss this very topic. It was a Q&A session moderated by investment marketing expert Andrew Corn of E5A Integrated Marketing and explored the ways in which firms are using digital transformation to disrupt the status quo and gain competitive advantage.Read More
Video: Who is Synthesis?
Premium Resources
Recent Posts
Compare the Top 3 Finserv Content Automation Vendors [White paper]
Perfecting the Pitchbook: An Agile Approach [White paper]
Make vs. Buy: Should Your Financial Services Firm Outsource or Insource Marketing Technology? [White paper] 
10 Tips for Rebranding your Fund Marketing Documents [White paper]
