Increase AUM with Marketing Automation: Acquire Clients during Volatile Times

Editor's Notes

• #2: ©2006 Marketo, Inc. CONFIDENTIAL
• #3: And with that let’s get going! Brief introduction of Joe and Mike.
• #5: While acquisition and churn are probably always on your mind, why is now a perfect time to more acutely focus on acquisition? Primary reason: After months of very turbulent markets, U.S. equities have recently entered into positive territory for the year. While this is good news for investors, it may mean that clients will suffer from “breakeven-itis” and look to find a new asset manager. Especially those clients that felt like their asset manager didn’t effectively communicate with them. In a recent survey of 1,375 advisors conducted by Financial Advisor magazine, advisors were asked to select the top three reasons that clients fire advisors. The most selected reason was "failure to communicate on a timely basis," which was chosen by 72 percent of advisors. In our last webinar we talked about retention strategies. For those asset managers that don’t have a solid plan to retain clients, this provides an opportunity for other firms to acquire those clients that are now either actively looking for a new manager or “on the fence” about whether or not to stay with their current advisor. The secondary reason why you should focus your efforts on acquisition is technology improvements. Specifically Marketing Automation. Marketing automation has been around for many years, but just recently it has begun to gain traction within Financial Services Institutions, like credit unions, banks, and financial advisors/asset managers.
• #6: What is Marketing Automation? Marketing automation is technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows to increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. Said another way, Marketing automation acts as: A central database for all your marketing data, including detailed prospect and client interactions and behaviors. An engagement marketing engine for the creation, management, and automation of marketing processes and conversations across online and offline channels. And an analytics engine to test, measure, and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue. There is a lot that you can do with Marketing Automation. But in the interest of time, we’re going to focus on what probably matters most to you as you are attempting to acquire new investors: segmentation, scoring, and Sales and Marketing alignment and efficiency. In other words how to get the right message to the right investor at the right time, and how to prioritize follow up with Sales so they only spend time calling on prospects that are most likely to turn into new business. You’re able to gather intelligence about potential investors (such as what pages on your website they view, what emails interest them, what events they’ve attended, if they interact with your social presence, really any online and offline behavior). You can use that information to more accurately segment your database that will allow you to nurture prospects with the appropriate type of information in the way they want to receive it. And you can automate all of this so you don’t have to spend as much time and resources building marketing programs.
• #7: You must first establish how are you going to segment your prospect. By creating a personalized journey, you need to segment your prospects into different buckets to provide each bucket a personalized journey to your desired outcome. Basic segmentation can be separated into two different buckets – behavioral - based on what they have done and demographic – based on who they are.
• #8: Demographic segmentation can be split up into two categories for financial advisors: institutional investors and retail investors. For institutional investors, you likely know your target market. Marketing automation allows you to segment based on industry, company size, role, location, AUM, investment style and anything else you deem important. On the other side, you have retail investors, which at a basic level can be segmented by age, net worth or investable assets, location, gender, and investment preferences or goals.
• #9: For behavior segmentation, this is based on what prospects do. This could be based on where the prospect is in the buying cycle, what their score is (Mike will talk about scoring in a moment), different financial products or strategies they have expressed an interest in, web activity or email engagement, and of course, non-activity. All of these behaviors give you a form on online body language that can be indicative of future buying intent. With the right segmentation and scoring, you can create timely and hyper-relevant marketing campaigns and also increase sales efficiency, which we will go through in a few slides.
• #10: To stay relevant and tailor your communications to each individual, you can define and build segmentations for your clients that update in real time. Above, I’ve illustrated a few different possible segmentations that you might explore. Target Accounts, Organizations, Industry, Assets, Investment Strategy, Client Behavior, Portfolio Size, Investor Persona and Region. The next step is to start developing even more advanced and targeted segments taking into account behavioral data, scoring, etc. If you have marketing automation solution like Marketo, it’s easy to do; you need to define what behaviors you want to listen to (for example, last engagement or web site visit, attendance to your event, specific asset download or specific score threshold). The more precise your segmentation the more targeted and relevant your campaign messaging and overall client communications, which will ultimately drive higher engagement, conversions, client satatistfaction and retention. Because the digital communication will be so tailored and personalized, this will reduce time spent on the phone and inbound calls by clients.
• #11: Something that I found useful in my marketing campaigns at previous wealth management firms was to segment by investor persona. Every client has unique investment objectives and knowing those key objectives will help you further tailor your communications to them. In our last webinar, we talked about using this type of strategy for retention, but it always works effectively in acquisition. The bottom line here is that you want to be able to the speak the message your audience is interested in hearing. For instance, a prospect may be retired and primarily interested in fixed income. If you want to acquire this prospect, it definitely doesn’t make sense to send them a message about a long-short strategy or some other tactical play. On the other hand, you may have identified some prospects that are more hands on or sophisticated. Those potential investors may prefer more detailed communications in the form of a white paper. The point here is if you know what your clients and prospects care about, you can tailor your communications to them. You’ll be able to take the personalized touch and feel of a 1-1 phone call and extend it into all of your digital marketing communications. Simply by segmented your audience, you will be in a much better position to acquire new clients.
• #12: And it’s not just about a personalized message or a 1:1 conversation, it’s just as important to communicate on the cadence and channels your prospects prefer. Marketing automation allows you to isolate specific segments of prospects based on how they engage with different forms of marketing. If you are marketing to millennials, they might prefer email and mobile communications. On the other hand, baby boomers might prefer a mix of email and direct mail communications. With marketing automation, you can even personalize your website so the messages and content changes based on the different segments that you identify. If you communicate with prospects on their preferred channel, they are more likely to engage with your campaigns and consider your firm. And now I’ll pass it over to Mike to talk about Lead Scoring and Sales and Marketing Alignment.
• #13: Thanks Joe! So what is lead scoring? It’s a method of ranking leads for their sales-readiness, which is agreed upon both sales and marketing. In order for this to be truly effective, you need to make sure that your organization is aligned.
• #14: With marketing automation, you can set up rules that score prospects based on demographics, behavior, inactivity, asset range, investor persona, and anything else that you have found to be important for your sales team. On the right hand side of this slide, I have two types of scores: latent behaviors (which are really just forms of engagement) and then active behaviors which demonstrate some buying intent. In latent behaviors, a prospect could download an early stage whitepaper and get +3 points. Then another prospect, who you assumed to be a good prospect, began to visit the careers page heavily. This action indicated that maybe this wasn’t a prospect at all but someone interested in a job. So then you decrease the score by -10. In active behaviors, if a prospect visits the fees page, give them +30 points. Or if someone requests to be contacted, give them +50 and send them straight to sales. Using this scoring methodology, you can then set a score threshold that indicates when a prospect is “sales-ready”. For example, if a prospects gets to a score of 100, you know based on sales feedback that prospects at a score of 100 or greater are very warm and ready to a sales conversation. This is the biggest value to scoring and I’ll show you why in the next slide.
• #15: Scoring helps you prioritize prospects for sales. Here’s an example: Before you implemented a marketing automation solution, you were sending 35 prospects (on the left) to sales per day. Of those 35, only 5 were warm and ready to talk. But sales doesn’t really know that. They have to dial through all 35 to figure which 5 are warm, and that takes time and is extremely inefficient when scaled out to thousands of prospects per day. But with scoring, you were able to automatically eliminate 17 of those prospects that weren’t ready to chat. Furthermore, you found that 3 of them went to the careers page and wanted jobs, 2 of them didn’t have enough assets to meet your minimum investments, and 8 of them were interested in an investment strategy that you didn’t offer. All of these are just examples, but the point is this. By sending over less prospects, you’ve just doubled the efficiency of your sales team in this example. It’s easier for them to find the warm leads and disqualify those who are not ready. Even better, you would likely increase the raw number of sales ready prospects because you segmented your marketing and provided extremely personalized, relevant campaigns right from the beginning. Scoring and segmentation with marketing automation can increase sales efficiency and produce higher quality prospects for sales to call.
• #16: I don’t think anyone doubts the importance of alignment. According to a study by Sirius Decisions conducted in 2015, companies that have aligned sales and marketing teams achieve up to 19% faster growth and 15% higher profitability. If you can score your prospects based on their investment preferences, asset size, engagement levels, or anything else we just covered AND have solid marketing and sales alignment, your firm can see a dramatic increase in sales efficiency.
• #17: Other benefits of S&M alignment include … higher revenue, shorter sales cycle, better conversion rates and forecast accuracy.
• #18: Charles Schwab, Brinker Capital, and Jupiter Asset management are all customers of Marketo, but chose marketing automation because of different challenges they were trying to solve for. However, ultimately they had similar goals: increase client acquisition and drive AUM. As they all regulated entities, they had similar challenges around compliance, regulation and security. Each of these firms selected for their own reasons. But in general, Marketo was selected based on our ability to create targeted marketing campaigns, track and understand client behavior, and to score and segment lead databases. With Marketo, firms can design their own email templates and build out marketing programs with targeted, multi-layered campaigns. In addition, they are able to determine quickly which campaigns are effective and provide detailed program success reports and analytics to sales and management. Further, they can instantly see what parts of their website are generating the most activity and market to that audience more appropriately, or flexibly adjust their campaigns and themes to drive improved results. To end with a quote from the Senior VP of Institutional Services at Schwab, Mary Rosai: “Ultimately, Marketo is going to help Marketing & Sales to be more relevant and much more targeted in our efforts to acquire, retain, and grow relationships with independent advisors. By bringing marketing and sales together and making us more effective as a team, we can build a stronger program to meet advisor needs and achieve business results,”
• #20: ©2006 Marketo, Inc. CONFIDENTIAL