Virtually, Overnight

In grappling with the crisis, Asset Managers are discovering the power of digital-first marketing

Asset managers, who have been painfully slow to fully integrate strategic digital marketing into their operating models, are suddenly adopting digital, social and virtual client engagement as they scramble to respond to the coronavirus market crisis.

And they’re doing so almost overnight.

In the space of a week last month, a perfect storm of crashing markets, closed offices and the end of in-person client meetings combined to essentially kill the advisor engagement model. This has obliged firms to embrace neglected marketing strategies—like client insight, topical content-driven demand generation and sophisticated cross-platform engagement strategies—that have turned out to be perfectly suited to the crisis.

The industry went from being one that is “belly-to-belly” with its customers, as one chief marketing officer puts it, “to one completely reliant on virtual and digital engagement.”

The coronavirus crisis, for all of its terrible costs in human and economic terms, is demonstrating the true value of marketing in what has traditionally been a Sales-led business. If one can even speak about “a silver lining to the crisis,” says another, “it is that this is Marketing’s time to shine.”

The coronavirus is proving to be a defining moment for global asset managers and the crisis response has meant a fundamental change in the way firms operate. The strategic role that Marketing is playing has been a wake-up call for everyone in the asset management C-suite.

A group of US-based chief marketing officers, assembled online by CityWire Virtual last week, shared just how dramatic the shift has been.

Drawing on marketing metrics showing trends in content, conversations and distribution, which are augmented by behavioral and emotional pulses from advisor and client panels, teams from across the business are meeting daily to co-create messaging for clients. “The collaboration we’ve seen is remarkable,” says one CMO. “It’s not just up to marketers to get these communications to market; everyone is having to work in concert, very tightly and very quickly.”


Sales teams are using this messaging almost immediately in virtual meetings with clients, via email and on their social media networks. But Marketing is getting this timely content to market at scale, leveraging personalization capabilities developed in recent years to ensure the right content is targeted to the right audiences at the right time.

“The competitive game is changing and may have changed permanently.”

—Emily Pachuta, Invesco

Marketing is also able to measure the success of these messages in real time, not only through traditional measures like content engagement rates but with clients’ willingness to meet virtually with their advisors.

These changes have happened almost overnight but have far-reaching implications for the success, if not survival, of asset managers. For asset management leadership, we summarize six key themes, which we’ll explore each in more detail in subsequent posts.

• The urgent need to communicate is cracking internal silos.

  Client demand for timely information has forced strategist, PMs, Sales and Compliance to work together, and quickly. Marketing’s leadership in convening the teams and framing messaging is changing perceptions of its strategic role in the business. Messaging decisions that would have taken weeks of meeting are now decided in five minutes at a cross-team morning conference.

• It has become clear who is a “thought leader” and who isn’t.



  The meaning of this long misunderstood term has become crystal clear in the crisis: which firms (and which PMs) have the knowledge, expertise and communication skills to comment quickly and credibly on the crisis. Many who thought this type of topical commentary unimportant now see just how difficult it is.



• Finally focus, and alignment, on what is essential to clients.

  Client-facing teams are finally talking about the strategic purpose of each engagement activity and prioritizing what is vital to customers, says Jaime Kalfus, brand head at PGIM. Things that aren’t have quickly been dropped—probably forever.



• The long-awaited digital transformation of asset management? It happened—literally in a day.



  Virtual and digital tools that would have taken months to roll out were adopted almost instantly, “not only without resistance but with enthusiasm. It was just so quick,” says Emily Pachuta, CMO at Invesco Americas. Technologies championed by Marketing for years—collaboration platforms, client insight software, group teleconferencing, social selling tools—are what is making today’s engagement possible.

• Zooms by home-bound PMs are inadvertently helping the industry with its “relatability” problem.



  “You just feel connected to them. They’re not these suits, standing there stiffly.” Virtual client meetings, broadcast from PM home offices, are succeeding where expensive “intimacy” campaigns failed. They may not look as professional, but they are more real.



• The bar has been raised—forever—on in-person events

  Overnight, clients have become comfortable with digital events and the limited time commitment involved in joining them. It is going to require very special content or a unique experience to get them to come together in a hotel ballroom when things return to “normal,” says Ian Forrest, global marketing officer at New York Life Investments.
  

The question to ask about all these changes is not whether they are going to stick when the world reverts to normal, but what role are they already playing in client perceptions of the firms that are embracing them—and those that aren’t.

“The competitive game is changing and may have changed permanently,” says Invesco’s Pachuta. Loyal clients are deciding whether their firms are delivering for them in the crisis. Firms that are adapting are able to intercept potential new clients deciding that their current provider isn’t changing with the new reality.

“This is going to be a moment when people change their minds” about investment providers. This “puts Marketing in a very commercial place.”

Larry Black, Managing Partner
larry@blackmosspartners.com