If there’s a bottom line at every workplace, it’s that profit keeps the wheels turning, or even helps to rocket growth into the stratosphere. When things are going well, the C-suite is happy and everyone can share in the celebrations.
But generating revenue relies on efficient workflows involving people and platforms all pulling their weight. Multiple digital systems and disparate data can throw spanners in the works, and also lower the possibility of return-on-investment (ROI) putting future marketing budgets in peril.
Marketers have traditionally struggled to calculate how effective the fruits of their labours are. Results around creative content can often be qualitative. Sure, insights may be an informative Sunday Morning read for a select few investors, but how many of those are becoming leads to increase AuM? Those knock-on effects can be woolly if they’re merely assumptions not backed up with any evidence.
These days, the amount of data we collect provides obvious clues for the successes and failures of digital marketing campaigns. It goes well beyond the so-called “1998 statistic” of email open rates, once the most important measurement for how well communications were landing with audiences. Since then, we’ve seen the arrival of tracked URLs, and growing follower numbers on every burgeoning social media platform. CRMs and their integrations collate touch points from all over the web in one place, helping fund marketers benchmark future campaigns against past trials and prove ‘digital ROI’.
But numbers are only one half of measuring ROI: the marketers themself have to analyse which AuM-raising measures work best to repeat them successfully. Upping digital ROI is a process of analytics, insights, and actions, and far easier to perform using the data visualisation and reporting tools we now have to hand.
Get Marketing and Sales Gelling Together
If the monthly C-suite KPIs meeting is the end destination, the sales and marketing teams are on a joint mission to get as many arrows pointing in the up direction all along the way. Marketers may not get the champagne moments like those securing sales deals after long cycles, but they’re incremental in laying the groundwork for them.
Getting marketing and sales on the same page comes down to a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” notion. After building ideal investor profiles together, and based on the ideal investor data overseen by the marketing custodians, salespeople can benefit from sitting back and letting the most engaged potential leads hit their ‘to do’ pile.
A higher percentage of conversions relies on funnelling the most apt investors based on their geographies, historical investing behaviours, and digital footprints across the marketer’s data-gathering tools like preference centres or portals. They will be those least likely to hang up on the phone, as they’re repeatedly interested in an investment strategy or particular fund to diversify a portfolio or otherwise.
If over-the-line deals can be traced back to inbound or outbound marketing, both teams are proven to be responsible for upped assets. With a smooth strategy, the two become like a replay sprinting outfit in an Olympic effort to boost sales without altering marketing technology capabilities too much, making better ROI possible.
Keep Insights In One Place
One key investment decision within the marketing budget is the CRM. The large-scale tool may be a hefty expense, but it becomes the central hub that pays itself back considering the multiple ROI uses it can provide fund marketers.
The CRM not only benefits from tracking core metrics, like email opens, replies or unsubscribes (as per the 1998 statistic) but it also demonstrates where numbers are growing or dropping from a range of platforms including social media profiles, website pages, or if certain regions are more interested in a service, product, or content topic. If numbers are on the up, and leading towards positive engagements, it highlights which content is striking a chord and where.
With APIs, the CRM can integrate the vast number of systems that marketers use to identify highly engaged active investors, and those that are dormant, and creates an audit trail of all engagements. All this historical interaction data is gold dust for evaluating where to place more valuable marketing focus to raise AuM.
Plus, a CRM can set email automations into place to distribute the right content to the right places, doing more with less to help pull in new business without marketers having to lift a finger – just remaining the brains behind all the strategic decisions!
Log Your Data Automatically
Speaking of automations, the CRM not only unites investor touchpoints into one view, but it can compartmentalise data according to platform usage, time frames, content types, inflows, outflows, geographic hotspots, and benchmarking graphs against past campaigns.
A dashboard is an absolute powerhouse for showcasing the results of simultaneously-run marketing systems or A/B tests in a visually striking layout that everyone can understand. Notably, which content is leading to increased conversions, and which are not so successful.
Then again, these dashboard interfaces benefit most from being set up in a way that distinctly marks the connection points between marketing activity and eventual ROI, which is ultimately what the C-suite is looking for. For funds, commonly useful trends to visualise include:
New opportunities created
Portal sign-ins
Contacted prospects
Size of distribution groups
Unsubscribe rates
So long as each can identify where value is added or lost by marketing campaigns, these data categories provide the makeup for rich reports to be cross-referenced with sales and CEOs to determine fruitful marketing tactics. These insights are especially useful when exported to Excel formats for shareability.
Speed Up Segmentation
There are, further still, shortcuts to identify which individual contacts can be a straight line towards ROI. This lies in the power of artificial intelligence to underline the CRMs data gathering powers, and hand-deliver the most powerful predictive analytics that can lead to future conversions. AI not only reduces inefficiency from combing through vast data libraries, but identifies the most actionable insights in real-time.
Humans would not be able to screen potentially thousands of budding investors out there who may benefit from one of your funds. At least, not in seconds. Instead, AI can identify with immediate effect any existing investors that may be open to cross-selling opportunities, or when an investor is looking at your fund content after a long hibernation period. It can track lead scores around the clock while marketers sleep, automatically dropping investors into brackets according to their levels of engagement.
This helps a marketer provide a very tangible signpost saying “this person’s interested” for the sales team to handle the rest. If these high-scoring prospects become conversions, it’s obvious which of the marketer’s forms or hyperlinks drove awareness and nurtured the buying decision, marking out whether email automations, webpages or social ad spend assisted in increasing AuM.
Digital marketing has come a long way to make data collection and analysis that much easier. If used correctly by a savvy, creatively strategic marketer, spending on powerful platforms can seem miniscule compared to the profits they can generate, making the boardroom a very happy place indeed.
ProFundCom can help fund marketers identify their marketing attribution through digital strategies and tools tailored to the financial industry:
Client Engagement Tracking: see engagement across digital channels including email interactions, website visits, and social media engagement and identify opportunities to enhance communication and strengthen relationships with investors.
Personalised Communication: deliver tailored content recommendations and targeted offers to clients and prospects based on their preferences and engagement history to help increase client satisfaction and retention.
Data Analytics: data analytics tools allow fund marketers to analyse the performance of their digital marketing campaigns, track AuM growth, and measure client retention rates.
Integrations and Reporting: generate reports in Power BI & Tableau to spot trends and target campaigns, and give a holistic, detailed view of marketing activity.
Cross-Selling Opportunities: analyse client behaviour and preferences to recommend additional products or services to existing clients, thereby increasing AuM through upselling.
