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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I’ve written and spoken frequently in the past about what asset management firms should be looking for as they evaluate content automation for production of their templated literature; fact sheets, commentaries, sales ideas, pitch decks etc. Indeed, this article is largely an update of one I wrote in 2021. I feel compelled to revisit the topic today, however, because of one key thing that seems to be driving a lot of decision making in the market today.

The four things described in the original blog remain as on point today as they were in 2021: data source flexibility, data visualization power, real scalability, and integration capabilities.

The fifth item is hidden in the discussion of the original four and I feel it should be brought to the forefront. And that item is: the total long-term cost of ownership of the solution.

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Over the past couple of years, the way we live, work and communicate has been changed forever. The global pandemic left an indelible mark on the asset management landscape that requires new strategies for engaging both clients and employees. So how do asset managers attract and engage financial advisors and grow assets in a more distributed and remote workforce?

This topic was explored at length at the Spring 2022 IMEA conference in Chicago. Some of take-aways from the event are included in our tips below:

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Guest post by Marianne Hewitt, CEO at The Growth Strategy Group. This article first appeared on cdp.com.

Asset managers must continue to drive down expense ratios and keep an intense focus on growth by leveraging modern technologies and improving operational efficiencies. For asset managers to deploy that technology, they need to invest in the marketing technology (Martech) stack of the future.

The Asset Management MarTech Stack Insights and Trends research, in which I collaborated with Synthesis Technology and Sondhelm Partners, identified operational efficiencies as the largest influence for shaping MarTech Stacks in the next two years. Delivering an effective customer experience and generating business insights were also priorities that will influence the construct of the future MarTech stack.Read More