The marketing function at asset management companies is moving from one of sales and distribution support to actively engaging clients and targeting investors, according to an international survey of digital marketing trends in funds management.
The survey, by New York-based funds management marketing firm Kurtosys, which produces various online marketing tools, shows content marketing has provided the best results, followed by email marketing.
The survey, conducted last year, involved about 200 funds management and wealth management executives, primarily in the US and Europe and most of whom described their primary role as ‘marketing’.
The key findings in the survey results were:
- Asset management marketers today have an arsenal of digital tools to directly target and engage with prospects and clients. They’re now focused on enhancing the user experience, and measure their performance through client satisfaction.
- The website has become the indispensible hub of the digital marketing program – and a key way to improve client service and extend distribution. But the report says although survey respondents ranked fund descriptions and fund factsheets as the most valuable section of their websites, we continue to see far too few asset managers using interactive performance data or fund widgets to engage users.
- Content marketing has finally arrived in asset management and is a big driver of the digital marketing effort. Nearly 40 per cent of respondents said that content marketing had produced the best results for their firms, with email marketing not far behind. At the same time, they claimed that one of their biggest challenges was determining the ROI of their marketing efforts, which could be difficult to measure without integrated digital marketing platforms.
- Manually creating documents, such as fund factsheets and client reports, continues to be a pain point for the digital marketer. Nearly 40 per cent of the respondents said they planned to invest in a ‘documents automation’ platform, which was their top-ranked technology investment for the coming year.
- With less time spent on manual processes, asset management marketers will increasingly take advantage of the next wave of digital marketing technologies, including CRM systems, new websites with dynamic content and marketing automation platforms. This triumvirate of marketing technologies will enable the digital marketer to not only improve their ability to interact with clients and prospects, but also deliver measurable results for their firms, the report says.
