At a recent (and by recent, I mean the 6 +/- months it took me to pull up my notes and write this) Financial Communication Society lunch, I had the pleasure of attending the ‘Performance, Trust & Best Interests: Marketing to Financial Advisors’ panel with JPmorgan Chase, AllianceBernstien (AB) and OppenheimerFunds. These are my take-aways from part 2 of the lunch, where the panelists dove into their experiences with marketing to financial advisors.
Here’s a link to the first part - insights from the latest FA trends and behaviors.
How do you define success of marketing campaigns?
Jessica Fernandez, SVP, Head of Integrated Marketing at OppenheimerFunds, gave her insight on targeting wirehouse advisors: putting something on a site alone doesn't work. It's important to give sales the content to share with advisors, so that they may in turn have strategic email communication.
Jessica also added that more data is not the solution, it's how data gets analyzed that is most important.
Christine Dehil, Senior Vice President, Head of Americas Marketing at AB, believes success is achieved with sales and adaptation of internal and external sales - with feedback from advisors on adoption of different content pieces.
How do you utilize data?
Dipti Kachru, CMO, Wealth Management and Affluent Segment at JPMorgan Chase, recognizes their business is different than the other panelists. For instance, the JPMC team is able to feed their FAs with Chase customer behavioral data allowing them to predict things like which customer may become a Wealth Management client.
Messaging overload is a problem; what's the solution?
Jessica from OppenheimerFunds is working on creating automated ways to capture a holistic view of how many of the same types of messages are going out.
JPMorgan Chase’s Dipti believes there's no complete solve for this. Less is more is her motto.
Customer preferences dictate today’s customer comms
Christine from AB believes it’s vital for brands to understand their clients and find out how they prefer to be contacted. She believes exploring technology such as Facetime and text is important to the business.
Younger doesn’t always = tech adoption
Christine also shared an insight into AB’s tech adoption, citing that seasoned wholesalers, not necessarily younger ones, are using tech more to reinvigorate their business. It was a surprise to her as everyone thought that the younger target market would adopt their technology, but that hasn't necessarily been the case. This gave everyone in the room some pause.
A final, and my favorite tip: putting yourself in an advisors’ client or prospects’ shoes is vital when providing them with content. Ask yourself if the content answers “What can you do for me as an advisor?' And, it doesn’t end with giving an advisor great content - also show them how to distribute it.
I hope you found this helpful and are able to take some of the learnings and apply them to your FA marketing strategy. If you have any advisor trends/marketing tips or have anything else to add, please feel free to comment or tweet me @commentground