The secret of customised marketing material

Published on March 18, 2024 by H Vinith V Prabhu

The world of marketing collateral

The use of marketing collateral in the asset management sector is not new. It is one of the main ways in which to promote products, services or a brand. Emails, factsheets, presentations, blog articles and investor letters are some of the most popular marketing collateral made available to external customers.

Marketing collateral plays an important role in empowering sales personnel to promote and sell products or services. One of the main responsibilities of the marketing team is to support the sales team with the right marketing tools and collateral. However, tracking and monitoring all this material could quickly become overwhelming. It could also be too time-consuming to find relevant material and become complicated to collaborate without a central repository.

Another main responsibility of the marketing team is to collect all the material into one centralised repository or marketing library. This enables sales personnel to choose the relevant material and customise it in line with a prospective customer’s requirement. It also helps store it for future use.

With all material stored in a repository for easy access, the following illustrates the marketing collateral lifecycle.

Customisation is the new-age marketing strategy

Gone are the days when customers ran behind specific products or services. Each customer is unique, with their own set of demands, and this is why asset managers need to identify this uniqueness and customise products and services to cater to it.

Customisation enables a business to thrive and succeed in the long run. It also increases efficiency, ensuring business wins with maximum optimisation of relevant materials and tools. When implemented properly and audited regularly, customisation can help differentiate a company from the competition and generate new business.

“The customer is the king in marketing, and in this new-age business, customisation along with quality is the surest way to win over the king,” according to Philip Kotler.

Analysing the problem area

The following case study shows how we were able to assist a US-based investment firm to abandon conventional methods and introduce efficiency. All strategies were stored in one location, making maintenance quite cumbersome.

• The structure was one lengthy Seismic LiveDoc with 50+ one-pagers

• The sales team used this as a base to generate a number of customised outputs

• They would manually delete the non-required slides in each instance and merge them with GIPS and disclaimer slides

This was a time- and effort-consuming effort. More importantly, given the manual intervention involved, the process was prone to high risk in terms of accuracy and quality.

The shift to an optimal solution

We helped automate the LiveDoc so that the user could obtain the desired output with a few clicks. We suggested using the feature of slide grouping – linking the one-pagers with the relevant GIPS as a one-time back-end configuration. A user-friendly tile-view LiveForm was created for users to access. It required only basic input from the user in the form of a check for inclusion/removal of one-pagers. The highlight here was that we enabled a preview of each tile, making inclusion/removal much easier.

The solution led to the following benefits:

• Eliminating manual slide deletion resulted in 60-75% time savings in terms of manhours

• Accuracy was increased to 99% from 80%

How Acuity Knowledge Partners can help          

We have nearly two decades of experience in serving more than 500 financial institutions and consulting companies through our specialist workforce of over 6,000 analysts and delivery experts across our global delivery network.

We support asset managers in streamlining their marketing collateral in this rapidly changing market. With our marketing and reporting solutions suite, operated by our financially adept personnel, we support and enhance bespoke collateral – fund investment research reports, fund factsheets and presentations and commentaries. We provide support in setting up LiveDocs and assist in the pre-production phase, ensuring quick turnaround once production starts. This also helps us build customised marketing collateral templates and reports for the client’s sales team to use in sales pitches. Keeping abreast of updates and regulatory changes, we also help with compiling customised marketing collateral using Seismic.

References:

• https://www.acquia.com/blog/marketing-collateral

• https://www.pica9.com/blog/managing-marketing-collateral-quick-guide-brand-managers

• https://www.smartsheet.com/content/marketing-asset-management

• https://www.paperflite.com/blogs/introduction-marketing-collateral

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