Guest Post by Amy Watson at Red Oak Compliance.

Asset Managers are heavily focused on bringing in new business and attracting the right clientele. Compliance, while important, is something you’d prefer to have running smoothly in the background rather than disrupting your day-to-day flow.

However, an increase in hefty fines throughout the asset management industry means compliance needs to be front-and-center. To make the most of your resources and to ensure you’re not caught by surprise when regulators review your materials, you need to ensure you’ve built efficient, compliant processes that are easy for your team to understand and comply with.

One particular pain point we’ve heard about from clients: keeping sales team collateral up to date and books and records compliant across an organization.

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When meeting and consulting with clients, most investment data specialists refer to 5 datasets managers need to populate in their investment database profiles:

Performance, AUM, Holdings, Characteristics, and Personnel. These are the quantitative datasets. And yes, they are each very important.

However, we at APX Stream believe there are, in fact, 7-9 datasets for which managers need to account. These additional datasets include the qualitative narrative sets: Firm & Product Narratives, Firm & Product Personnel.

But it’s not simply a matter of checking these items off a list every quarter – to successfully execute a professional investment data marketing strategy, managers need to understand, not only the range of data points contained within each set, and account for them accordingly, but how they all work together to create a cohesive, data-driven story for your firm.

All the pieces must fit, and do so in a way that entices database subscribers (i.e. your future clients & investors) to pick up the phone or dash off an email inquiring about your portfolio management services.

So how should these pieces fit together and what are some ideas managers can employ to help improve their data marketing execution?

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Many factors influence the volume of content that asset managers produce. Some, such as the merging or closing of funds, help to alleviate the production burden, but most continue to expand the demands placed on marketing units. In a recent study of asset managers, we asked about their marketing processes and use of automation to fuel marketing programs.

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Growing asset management revenues is much harder than it used to be. The number of asset managers and strategies have proliferated in recent years. However, the number of consultants has shrunk, leading to a notable decline in available mandates. In this fiercely competitive marketplace, even firms with a solid track record of performance will struggle. Asset managers which master the marketing process and effectively differentiate themselves will be triumphant in 2021.

Each year, I check in with my network of industry experts to get a pulse on the trends and best practices in asset management marketing. The upcoming year will be marked by big changes in the way marketers develop and deploy their plans. Largely, this is due to the pandemic and a shift to digital. With everyone “going digital” with their content, events, etc…, it’s going to be harder than ever to rise above the noise.  Recently, I met virtually with three experts in investment management marketing. I learned what asset managers should avoid if they want to differentiate and gain assets in the coming year. Here are three things asset managers should avoid if they want to differentiate in 2021.

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