Marketing Playbook Recap: How Asset Managers Can Up Their Digital Game

Last week, I hosted a  little webinar called Marketing Playbook: How Asset Managers Can Up their Digital Game. In it, I outlined how asset management teams can deliver engaging, almost one-to-one conversations with their prospects and investors through scalable digital channels — all while staying compliant. I wanted to take the time today to recap a few of the major talking points for asset management marketing today and to let you know that you can re-watch the whole webinar on-demand right here.

Without further ado, let’s review a few key points when it comes to asset management marketing.   

Digital transformation

To point out the obvious, the asset management marketing space has changed in the past few years thanks to digital transformation. The biggest change has been to how clients interact with portfolio managers and sales teams. To summarize: they don’t. Today’s clients prefer to self-educate with on-demand and easily accessible resources online. This movement towards self-education and research means fund managers need to equip clients and prospects with relevant, timely content when and where they want it.

Still, digital transformation hasn’t changed the core objectives — fostering relationships, establishing trust and imparting knowledge. Instead, it’s shifted those objectives into overdrive, requiring sales teams to learn and adapt to new digital distribution models and work more closely with their asset management marketing teams to get data on which advisors to target.

Knowing your advisors

Part of that adaptation means knowing your advisor base. This is an issue for most asset management marketers. According to a recent Merkel survey, only 15 percent of leading asset management marketers say they communicate with their advisor base through personalized, engagement-driven messages. Exactly zero percent of respondents say they feel they’re doing an “excellent” job of using data to improve the advisor experience.

Those numbers hide a more troubling trend. What they suggest is that asset management marketers aren’t collecting data on their advisors, clients and more. In the new digital marketplace, data is king and must inform every aspect of marketing communications. You simply can’t craft personalized experiences today without knowing your audience base. You can’t know your audience base without data.

Making the webinar connection

So here’s where webinars fit into all this. Webinars, and especially webinar platforms like ON24, are powerful tools marketers can use to disseminate a range of content in a personal manner. Depending on the platform, you can gather actionable insights on your audience, so your team can gather assets easier.

It’s one of the few technologies that can disseminate compliant and personalized data quickly and on a digital scale. Executed well, a webinar program can create active environments for guided content consumption that audiences can consume live, on-demand or both. Additionally, webinars can simplify compliance with centralized, gated messages and muted lines.

Now, simplifying content access is great, especially for areas, like asset management, that depend on a lot of information to capture clients. At ON24, however, we’ve found that leading marketers at asset management companies go beyond simply delivering content — they engage their audience with interactive polls, knowledgeable hosts and subject matter experts, live Q&A forums and a whole lot more.  We’ve even seen customers use data from surveys, polls, and Q&As can to improve product offerings.

There’s a reason for this. The more engaging and interactive you make your content as part of your asset management marketing strategy, the more connections you can make to raise your AUM. What’s more is the fact that your organization can gain insights into high-value and interested prospects as they consume your content. You can also boost investor trust through thought leadership events, or build a knowledge center for financial advisors to earn CE credits. We’ve found that companies like Fidelity, State Street and Capital Group are moving to webinars for these reasons and more.

The days of having sales doing the heavy lifting to win business on its own, from awareness and education to investment and purchase, are over. With webinars, asset management digital marketing can now play a sizable role in informing and guiding the customer, prospect, investor and advisor’s journey. And they can do this while gathering data on what interests an audience.

Digital transformation has changed a lot of things and not always for the better. Quality webinars as part of an asset management marketing strategy, however, can deliver a lot of value with relatively little effort. In fact, if you’d like to see one in action, simply click on this link and watch last week’s discussion at your leisure.