The second in a four-part series of commentaries on how and why digital marketing is now a central business priority for the world’s wealth management sector. 

Paul Das, who is managing director of ProFundCom, an international digital marketing platform, has these thoughts about how wealth managers do and should use digital marketing - a crucial theme not just because of the present pandemic but because of the continued momentum behind modern technology. These articles will run in four parts over the course of this week. The editors are pleased to share these ideas with readers and invite responses. Email tom.burroughes@wealthbriefing.com  

This is the second in a series of posts examining the new normal of digital marketing - and how wealth managers and private banks can best capitalise on it.

In this post, I’m looking at the advantages of distributing content digitally.

The beauty of digital distribution - via email, social media, web etc. - is that you can take the engagement data you derive from your campaigns and turn it into something that your sales teams can use.

Take email as an example: with each message you send out you can use a platform like ProFundCom to see who’s opened it, which attachments they opened, the links they clicked on, where they are in the world, the device they used etc. 

This can be a massive boost to your marketing - as you can quickly build a picture of what interests both prospects and existing clients, which provides a massive advantage in any sales conversation.   

But, sadly, valuable information is often gathered by marketing departments that never makes it to the sales team.  

This is a problem we faced in the early days of ProFundCom, when we saw lots of quality engagement data being produced by private banks and wealth managers – yet nobody was using it. That’s because it was flying around in all sorts of different formats and wasn’t being categorised or collated. 

We soon realised that the solution was a ‘lead deck’, where all engagement data pertinent to a single client or prospect could be seen in one place, without having to dig around.  

This concept is as useful today as it was back then. And it’s much easier to set up, as you can simply deploy it through your CRM. Having this means that your sales reps can instantly bring up a list of prospects and see information taken from across the CRM that shows key data about each person - without having to jump between various spreadsheets and tools, with all the hassle that involves.  

The type of information you need on a lead deck includes where people are based, what is – and is not working - theme analysis to show what people are particularly interested in, and trend analysis to show what is current. 

And the beauty of a lead deck is that the processes which push the information into it are all automated. So data is being constantly analysed and used to update the status of everyone on your system.       

The result is that both sales and marketing can see everything about a prospect or existing client in one place. So, any communication with that person will be guided by an accurate and current overview of preferences, interests and any current investments. This results in more informed sales conversations, which ultimately boosts AuM.

But what is the best digital channel to use for your content distribution? I’m going to cover that in the next post in this series.