Digital marketing in asset management got a big promotion in lockdown. It’s become the most important cog in the marketing mix for many firms.

But this could be just the start – with more creative activities and more humanisation in content and communications to come.

In lockdown, many businesses managed to do more of what they were already doing. The companies that did well focused on three things …

1. More thought leadership – to display intellectual credentials
2. More variety in content – meeting client appetite
3. More brevity – to distil complex messages into bite sized chunks … at a time when everyone’s trying to do the same

Given their success, and as senior management teams get comfortable with more digital marketing, it’s reasonable to expect marketing directors to push onto more interesting things.

Seven in particular spring to mind …

1. More humanisation in content – people value human contact. And not just people who look like me talking to other people who look like me. Marketing directors can capitalise on this with more readable material and imagery, aimed at human beings with problems to solve, and addressing the pressures they face.
2. More virtual events– less “physical meeting held online” and more creativity put into the format, structure, efficiency and output of client meetings.
3. More joint learning environments– asset management marketing and communications used to be pretty one-way: “we’ll talk at you about what we think you should know”. There’s a terrific opportunity to create more human-friendly, two-way interaction, with each party learning from the other, to create more mutual value from relationships.
4. More creativity in medium– TikTok is probably off the list, given security concerns, but new communications platforms may well appear – alongside an erosion of the innate conservatism in many asset management businesses.
5. More agility– asset management has a compliance cycle: when regulation becomes more strict, compliance departments let businesses say less; when regulation loosens they let them say more. We’ve been on a tightening compliance curve since the financial crisis but tis is due to loosen. When it happens companies will have more freedom to create new ways of communicating useful and interesting information in a way that’s commercially beneficial to both parties.
6. More influencers– the forthcoming jobs shake up will no doubt mean we see more clever and outspoken people leave permanent roles and enter consultancy. When this happens these people will want to boost their profiles and become influencers on a myriad of topics. That’s a digital marketing engagement opportunity.
7. More consolidation within businesses– job losses also mean internal opportunities. This is the moment when digital marketeers, having shown their worth, can become both powerful and power brokers internally.

At Communications and Content we specialise in telling stories, across marketing, sales and corporate communications, that engage and generate meaningful commercial results.

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