Category Archives: Marketing Strategy
Beyond Alignment – Marketing & Sales Collaborating Through Content Automation
Guest post by Marianne Hewitt from The Growth Strategy Group.
The conversation about investment marketing and sales alignment began over a decade ago. After ten years, less than 50% of organizations surveyed said they aligned appropriately to achieve the financial results for which they are accountable.
The resistance persists because achieving the synergies between marketing and sales is not viewed as transformational. It does not get the top-down executive support it requires. Nor does it get the governance structure that major transformation initiatives require to succeed.
There was a point in time when alignment between the two organizations made perfect sense. In today’s digital world where buyers prefer digital self-service (Figure 1) and remote human engagement, it is no longer the right way to think about the relationship between marketing and sales.
Four Ways Asset Management Marketers Can Grow AUM
The shift from active to passive investing continues to drive significant change for investment management sales and marketing. In this article, investment marketing consultants Sandra Powers Murphy and Donna DiMaria explain what marketers can do to help their firms grow AUM in today’s challenging environment.
According to DiMaria, operational efficiency in sales and marketing has become imperative, and asset managers are taking note.
“Firms are looking to be more efficient, doing more with fewer resources both in terms of bodies and budget. And that is leading to consolidation, outsourcing, and automation. The status quo isn’t working anymore so, in a way, the market is recreating itself,” she said.
3 Factors that Complicate Factsheet Automation
When discussing content automation goals, buzzwords like ‘streamlining’, ‘consistency’, and ‘efficiency’ are often tossed around. These are good goals to strive for but are difficult to achieve due to business reasons beyond marketing’s control. After all, the products represent different strategies, ages, data, and audiences; therefore, the literature has to reflect this. In the end, the main goal of content automation should be to make the process as simple as your firm’s business rules and product nuances will allow.
In a recent content automation report, 23% of asset managers cited producing factsheets monthly. So, the accuracy and timeliness of factsheets are becoming more and more crucial. Yet, this does not necessarily mean less complex. The complexity of your factsheets is one of the main driving factors behind the cost of implementing and maintaining an automated solution. In this blog post, we’ll identify and discuss the top 3 factsheet automation complications:
Investment Data Marketing: Creating a Cohesive, Data-Driven Story for Your Firm
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?