Previously, wealth management marketing was heavily dependent on contacts and recommendations from past and present clients. It was just as much about who you knew as it was what you knew.
But, as Bob Dylan famously said, the times they are a changing. While forging trust and building personal relationships remain important, the digital age has transformed the wealth management landscape. Today, marketing within the wealth management space is about expanding reach through more personalized messaging to targeted audience segments.
As digital technology becomes more and more advanced and sophisticated, wealth managers must accommodate a growing number of potential business prospects and their investment needs at scale. Marketing automation software is a major asset in this regard — providing segmentation and personalization capabilities to help you understand the distinct behaviors, interests, and needs of your target market and deliver the services your customers expect.
The Wealth Management Industry Is Undergoing a Marketing Automation Revolution
Industry experts suggest that wealth managers who refuse to adapt to the ongoing digital revolution and continue to operate with traditional business models are at risk of largely disappearing from the market. To capitalize on this transition, wealth management firms need to take advantage of marketing automation.
Many people who are new to marketing automation equate the software with a batch-and-blast email approach: a never-ending series of identical, impersonal emails being sent to all customer segments at all times of the day with no thought to segmented messaging. The reality, however, is that marketing automation offers unprecedented personalization and strategic insight to improve your campaigns.
Your clients trust you to maximize the value of their assets, so you should seek to build trust in your communications as well. Marketing automation helps marketers collect and analyze data that empowers them to speak directly to their clients’ specific needs and interests — such as preparing for their retirement, purchasing a home, or making sound investments. When used properly, marketing automation can drive changes in behavior, tell unique stories to interested audiences, and give your business the ability to build and strengthen trust.
Put Customer Data to Good Use with Marketing Automation
Marketing automation helps your collect clean and relevant data to tailor more customized campaigns, improve response times, and remain compliant with various regulatory laws and commissions — such as GDPR. In most instances, these platforms also integrate with CRM systems, helping businesses cut excessive costs and conserve resources, which means marketers have more time to use their creativity to develop the best possible strategies and campaigns from the ground up.
Plante Moran is a great example of how Act-On’s platform helps businesses of all sizes implement and refine sophisticated, dynamic marketing campaigns. The global accounting giant integrated Act-On with their existing MarTech stack to segment their audiences and their messaging, allowing them to collect more and better leads, and then gain useful lead insights to optimize their campaigns in short order. By enabling their marketing team to tailor everything from usability enhancements and email templates to more sweeping capabilities for social media, data visualization, and reporting, Act-On has revolutionized the way Plante Moran does business.
Use Marketing Automation to Enhance the Customer Experience
Marketing automation doesn’t just benefit businesses; it also significantly enhances the customer experience — making it a win-win for everyone, especially wealth management consumers. Many wealth management firms have an international focus, which means they’re frequently dealing with clients and stakeholders across the globe who are looking for more tailored messaging. Marketing automation can help them develop unique regional strategies and determine the markets in which their investment will reap the highest reward. Lastly, as wealth management transcends the business/client relationship to include several other parties and intermediaries, marketing automation can help align, simplify, and improve communications among all parties around the globe, allowing your staff to make more effective use of their precious time.
Whether it’s customers and prospects having immediate access to relevant financial information to inform their investment decisions or the ability for stakeholders to conduct virtual meetings and share information digitally, marketing automation streamlines business flow for all involved in the fast-paced world of wealth management. And when organizations are able to work more efficiently and effectively with improved targeting, messaging, and analytics in one convenient MarTech stack, great ROI is sure to follow.