This comes as no surprise as, increasingly, wealth and asset firms are turning to content as a means to attract, engage and convert investors and advisors alike.

Where does your organisation place the highest emphasis in terms of improving the customer experience?

Notable examples include Advisor Tech Tips by Putnam Investments. This site provides useful advice aimed at engaging and empowering third-party intermediaries and advisors, who then in turn might be more likely to promote Putnam’s products.

Goldman Sachs uses the power of its videos to cover capital and money markets, but also cover tangential topics such as ‘citizenship’ and ‘progress’.

Every month Schroders produces an infographic that summarises market activity from the month before.

However, impending regulation (such as MIFID II in Europe) is going to change how wealth and asset management firms fund, research and distribute content – as well as what that content can and can’t say.

In light of this, how can digital marketers working with wealth and asset management content get ahead in 2016?

Create editorial guidelines and a calendar

The backbone of every relevant content marketing initiative is an editorial guideline (which states what can be said) and an editorial calendar (which states when it should be said).

Editorial guidelines are particularly important for wealth and asset managers, not just because of the editorial and branding aspect, but also for making sure that everyone within the firm that produces content does so in a manner that is compliant with financial regulations.

Editorial calendars come in all shapes and sizes and need to be tailored to your firm’s particular needs and expertise.

However, you should certainly consider the following column headings:

  • Date for publication or re-use.

  • Deadline and submission date (if submitting editorial to a third-party site).

  • Description of Content Asset: Title, Theme, Problem solved.

  • Synopsis: Helpful to understand messaging without having to read an entire piece of content.

  • Format: White paper, blog post, article, video, podcast, webinar, etc.

  • Distribution: social media channels, syndication, links to other content on the calendar (e.g. this registration page for this webinar links to that whitepaper).

  • State of Content: Complete, Under Development, In Review, etc.

  • Ownership/author: Who’s responsible for developing and delivering it.

Encourage content creation from advisors

We all know the curse of siloed content: content created independently of the people who will be using it invariably leads to miscommunication and content waste.

Encouraging advisors and relationship managers to be actively involved in content creation fixes this from the outset.

A great example of a firm that is using the voice of its advisors to create its marketing content is M&G Investments’ Bond Vigilantes.

It takes a technical and complex product (bond investment) and uses advisors to make the process more fun and interesting than your typical finance datasheet.

Centralise and tag content

Bring all of your content into one central place where your digital and advisory teams can access the marketing content that has been created.

This approach requires a content repository for storing, managing and serving digital content.

Of course, just because you’ve centralised content doesn’t mean that it suddenly makes it easier for busy advisors to find. Particularly if there are large volumes of content to wade through.

Use descriptive metadata to tag your content and make it easily searchable.

Metadata can go well beyond typical tags such as ‘content type’, ‘date created’ and ‘author name’.

You should use descriptors such as ‘topic’, ‘theme’. ‘investor type’ and so on, to map that content to your various client journeys and personas.

Centralising and tagging content assets ensures that all materials used by advisors are fully compliant with regulatory requirements. This will also make it easier for your advisory team to delve in and find the appropriate content asset to use for their various client engagements.

Don’t just measure content: monitor client content consumption

Divided dashboards mean divided departments. By unifying the digital marketing tools used by the marketing department and the CRM tools handled by advisors, wealth and asset management firms have a better chance of creating a brilliant client experience.

The content that clients consume is highly indicative of their needs and interests – as well as their likely areas of investment.

Tagging content with metadata such as ‘content topics’ means that – like Kraft – you can both measure the performance of your content and also monitor how it is being consumed.

Using monitoring tools that let relationship managers see in real time how clients are interacting with the content means that the advisory team can both identify and predict topics of interest for each of their clients.

If advisors can understand what their clients’ interests are they can also make the right content recommendations.

It’s this kind of unified intelligence that helps justify the cost of content production for firms, makes content marketing easier in an increasingly regulated environment, and leads to the improved customer experience that senior executives at wealth and asset management firms are currently prioritising.

And for more on this topic, read: