How to boost your AuM with Integrated Marketing 2.0 – Webinar Summary and Replay

Published: 1 November, 2018

Around fifteen years ago, as the digital revolution began to take hold, integrated marketing became a big trend.

With so many more marketing channels available thanks to the internet, integrated marketing offered the possibility of ensuring that marketing communications were consistent across all mediums – PR, digital, print, social, website etc.

And this approach has served many financial companies very well over the last decade or so.

But, times are changing. And this integrated marketing model is now failing to deliver the one core goal of marketing – to raise and preserve assets under management.

Why?

Because it is not addressing a big and growing problem – the failure of marketing, IT and sales teams to connect properly in regards to marketing. Instead, these departments operate as three independent silos in an organisation – all with their own agendas and processes. This means you end up with:

• A marketing team with no insight into the sales process, or idea of the IT infrastructure necessary to deliver the sort of data analysis necessary to track ROI.
• An IT team that lacks strategic insight and is more concerned with tackling day-to-day tech issues than delivering long-term value to the business.
• A sales teams that has become lazy and lacks the ability, or desire, to analyse how it can do things better and encourage more people to invest.

This is clearly a dysfunctional situation and one that is driven by the fact that these teams have no common purpose. But, to really drive things forward, they must be aligned and working towards the ultimate goal of the business as a whole. And, if you’re a fund or an asset manager, that goal is the acquisition and retention of assets.

A new model for successful integrated marketing

The old model of integrated marketing – providing a consistent message – is still important, but it should now be taken as a given. We now need a new model for integrated marketing – let’s call it ‘integrated marketing 2.0’ – that will focus all marketing activity on boosting AuM.

The first step in this process is for all the relevant departments to ask themselves some tough questions:

• The marketing team needs to ask what the company actually stands for, and how that can be framed to appeal to potential investors.
• The IT team needs to ask what integrated systems can be introduced to better support the business and the aim of generating AuM
• The sales team needs to ask how much it really knows about the company’s products and investors – and how it can find out more.

Answering these questions brings IT, marketing and sales together – because they actually all need the others. Marketing needs IT to help it analyse what investors want, and IT needs marketing data to enable that. And sales needs this analytical data to be able to target potential investors effectively.

So, when you integrate things become clearer. The IT department sees that it needs to install APIs (application programming interfaces) which move data through the organisation, from the marketing department into CRM or content management, and then into analysis – which is where you deduce what potential investors want and need by analysing their actions. This information then passes onto the sales department, giving it the exact knowledge it needs to target potential and existing investors more effectively.

And the result of all this integration is smashing your one true goal – raising AuM.

“The winners in digital marketing in finance will be those that see Marketing integrated across all business functions”