Beyond Content Marketing

Larry Black of BlackMoss Partners was recently the guest on The Financial Marketeer podcast, hosted by Paul Wood.

Larry talked about his journey from financial journalism to leading global marketing at several large investment firms, including Credit Suisse, AllianceBernstein and FTSE Russell, the information services division of London Stock Exchange Group. The discussion focused on the current state of financial services client engagement in the wake of the Covid crisis, but Larry also shared his perspective on the evolution of investment management marketing over the 20 years since the advent of the modern internet and the first use of HTML email for content marketing.

Key Takeaways:

We're moving beyond content marketing to topical client engagement.

Larry had been a finance reporter and columnist for publications on both sides of the Atlantic when he was approached by Credit Suisse in 1999 with the idea of using journalism skills to market their research. “They had seen my financial journalism and wanted to try to create what we now call content marketing.” Larry hired a team of in-house journalists to package the firm’s sell-side research as news, covering the day’s market developments through the lens of its analysts, strategists and economists.

The stories were published on a website, CSFB Newsroom, updated throughout the day, and then promoted through what was then cutting-edge technology—HTML email, which made it possible to display the firm's brand, the occasional analyst headshot and the odd GIF-based chart.

The need to frame ideas and products around what is “top of mind” for clients is what led to the next iteration of this concept, when Larry led digital marketing at AllianceBernstein. The firm published a lot of very weighty research that was getting read less and less in print form. “They needed to find a way to make [their] research relevant, timely and topical…we came up with one of the first blogs in the industry.” PMs commented on market developments, using it as a way to revive research written in the past but newly relevant to the current market.

Despite initial skepticism, the blog, Context, was a success, quickly overtaking traffic to the firm’s website. And content marketing at investment firms has continued to evolve, with the development of social media and sophisticated digital marketing techniques. These give firms the opportunity to become true digital publishers, moving beyond content marketing into what Larry calls “topical client engagement”—using social to provide clients with real-time authoritative investment insight tied to market developments.

Advertising has been displaced by digital engagement.

Despite the clear advantages of modern digital marketing content, some marketers continue to rely on traditional advertising to promote products and brands. Paul wondered why this is so.

“It’s partly testimony to how we, as marketers, are trained. You come out of business school or a university programme that focusses on marketing where you really are learning the techniques from the 80s and 90s when (advertising) was your only real way to build a brand. The innovation that’s happened in the digital world and our ability to reach customers and measure their response and engagement in real-time has revolutionised the industry. But it hasn’t really revolutionised the teaching of marketing, or even of digital marketing, I would argue.”

At the same, advertising is what the leadership of our firms understand marketing to be. This is changing as firms undergo digital transformation, but the persistence of traditional advertising reflects the fact that “it remains something very concrete, and appeals to the ego of many the people who lead our firms, and lead our marketing departments, for that matter.”

While there is a clearly an ongoing role for tactical advertising, search and paid social that is properly integrated in a multi-touch campaign, the ROI of traditional advertising continues to decline every year—at the same that ROI continues to rise for content-driven digital engagement. “I’ve always been a big believer that our customers, our clients don’t want to be marketed to or sold to and it’s really a question of trying to get our products and put them into context.”

The crisis has forever changed the role of Sales.

One takeaway from the crisis has been how the suspension of in-person selling has accelerated changes in the core function of Sales within investment management firms—a trend already evident before the onset of the pandemic.

With the full shift to virtual and digital channels, Sales is no longer a client's main point of contact with a firm. Nor are individual salespeople the best way to communicate to clients, the best source of knowledge about a client's preference or even the best way to understand what a client intends to buy next. “It is time to stand back and look at that and say, ‘where has that role gone?’ It’s moved away from individual salespeople and moved into digital interaction and the data that we get from that.”

Responsibility for that interaction and the resulting data sits with Marketing—within the data-driven engagement framework that Marketing teams have been developing over the past decade. Firms need to adapt their model to this new reality, merging Sales into this marketing framework in a new function and approach that BlackMoss, Larry's new consulting firm, calls “Client Engagement.”

“[Client engagement] is about how you transform your model to be able to engage with customers digitally and how to use all of the data we’re able to capture through that engagement.”

The crisis is freeing up resources to fund content-led, data-driven digital engagement.

Central to this engagement model is thought leadership content, which not all firms have been able to afford. “It is an investment and not every firm has the bandwidth to be able to tell differentiating stories.

“I don’t want to mislead very small firms into thinking they are going to be able to create the wealth and the depth of content that they’re going to need to suddenly bust through in this crowded marketplace.”

But another fallout from the pandemic crisis has been significant shift in the cost structures of firms, from dramatically lower travel & entertainment expenses to the suspension of costly in-person events and conference sponsorships. While firms are using these savings to cut costs, they are also redeploying them to fund digital transformation and engagement platforms, including the development of the relevant content that clients have come to expect through the crisis.

The promise of data-driven “Client Engagement.”

Those firms that are investing in client engagement are in a position to unlock the power of client data—using it to deliver the solutions, services, content and information clients need, when they need them. For customers, the benefits are clear: an investment manager that knows them better with each engagement, providing on-point solutions to relevant needs—not to mention the end of the deluge of unwanted emails, poorly targeted event invitations and irrelevant product pitches.

“It dispenses with so much of the irritation of the current relationship, to reframe that relationship the way that so many other industries have reframed their relationship with their customers.”

Investment management has the opportunity to join other industries that have used data to remake their relationship and service model, but it is going to require realigning roles and de-siloing our deep knowledge about our clients.

The Bottom Line…

Larry's career has been all about helping firms modernize their client engagement platforms. And that means helping them to embrace change.

As long as the companies ignore the full promise of digital transformation, they will be vulnerable to competitors, inside and outside the industry, who are using client data to gain competitive advantage. It's only a matter of time before digitally enabled disruption comes to the investment management industry. The industry has an opportunity to get there first itself, but only if ambitious firms take advantage of the crisis to evolve away from their analog models.

Most investment management marketing people aren't any more ready for this new approach than salespeople are. They need to build not only their digital and data science skills but also their familiarity with the details of the revenue models of their firms.

“Most of us who have grown up in financial services marketing haven’t had direct responsibility for the commercial side of the business,” including pricing and meeting revenue targets. “In this new construct, these (responsibilities) will be shared across dedicated client segment teams.”

Larry Black, Managing Partner
larry@blackmosspartners.com