An A-Z Guide to Asset Management Marketing: Part Two

nyc-timelapse-hedgethink

Ready to get to grips with the rest of our A-Z guide? It’s designed to help you get to know the key elements of asset management marketing in the digital age. What does your business need to harness now to reap the potential rewards that social media offers? These marketing essential will show you how.

Improve results through Optimization

Online marketing campaigns obviously vary hugely from company to company, depending in product and audience. But no matter what kind of campaign you’re creating, and for who, three main objectives remain vital. 1) attract visitors, 2) convert visitors into leads, 3) close new business. If you want to succeed in this arena you need optimum results in all three of these vital areas – and that means optimization. Gather together your marketing data and analyze it to identify exactly where refinements can be made within each of these three areas.

Get practical with Progressive Profiling

You know what customers hate? Filling out forms. Particularly online, where it can seem like our lives become one long conveyor belt of forms and passwords. Don’t bore potential clients, keep them with you by keeping your marketing forms succinct and simple. You can then go on and set up iterative forms allowing you to collect important new information about prospects on future visits. You want to keep the conversion process smooth, so that means growing the amount of intelligence you collect about your leads organically over time.

Get Googling to monitor your Quality Score

Yet again, Google steps in with a tool to help marketers do their job more effectively. Using Google’s analytics and tools, you can now monitor precisely how effective are your ads on Google. The search engine wizards measures ad performance based on over 200 factors – and the key factor to check is click-through rate (CTR). Analyze these performance figures carefully and you can boost the quality and effectiveness of your ads while driving down adword bid costs too.

Close more sales by Retargeting

When customers visit your website, it’s now possible to use personalized retargeting to retarget them, allowing you to connect more strongly with those who have already shown interest in your product. It’s a great tool to support any paid search campaigns and lets you bid more aggressively for competitive search terms without your ad spend spiraling out of control.

Reach out with SlideShare

SlideShare has become a sleeper hit in the content marketing world. Want to share your marketing and sales presentations? SlideShare offers a beautifully streamlined way for your readers to access and download your marketing and presentation materials. Easily linked to your LinkedIn profile, you’ll broaden your audience reach, and make it even easier for readers to share your content.

Now for the science part: Testing

There’s only one way to know which headline, landing page, web page or email design or ad wording appeals to your readership more, and that’s through testing. Setting up simple A/B testing, where you set up two versions of each webpage or headline, then send 50 per cent of your traffic to each, gives you instant results. Analyze the results and you’ll learn more about what your audience wants, and how best to reach out to them in future.

Keep your emails in check using your Unsubscribe Rate

We’ve all been spammed, and we’ve all unsubscribed from pesky emailers – the key is not to become one of them. You want your mailing list to enjoy, or at least read with interest, the news you have to share. Keep an eye on your unsubscribe rate to find out just how well your email tactics are really performing. Too high a rate means you need to readdress your email content, and also your email frequency, to get to the bottom of what could be driving potential clients away.

The holy grail: going Viral

Nothing spells success in the world of marketing in the modern age like going viral. When content goes viral, it essentially means that it’s ultra-sharable. When this happens, internet users do the work for you, sharing and sharing your content on your behalf, all over the globe. It’s no surprise that this is now what all marketers strive for. Now, that’s all very well if you’re marketing the latest Transformers movie or Miley Cyrus single, but what if you’re tasked with marketing asset management services? Online, nothing is impossible, and it always pays to pay attention to viral campaigns and other B2B marketers who use humor and outside-the-box thinking to boost their campaigns.

Never forget – Website Usability

It’s all very well spearheading a killer campaign that goes viral, but if the website your promoting doesn’t cut it in usability terms, all of those new customers are going disappear just as quickly as they appeared. Your site’s users have to enjoy a smoother than smooth, appealing experience when they use your site. This is why so many major firms now employ CXO or Chief Experience Officers to ensure that plenty of user testing, complete compatibility with mobile and more.

Don’t be Xenophobic – face the fear and do it anyway

When it comes to new technologies, and the social media field in particular, many financial services professionals are xenophobic – “fearing the foreign or strange.” Fear has no place here – knowledge is key. Rather than shying away from this new phenomenon, it’s vital that businesses arm themselves with knowledge, learn all about it, and its incredible potential. For targeted marketing and ROI, social media can drive truly incredible results.

Be a big hit on the small screen with YouTube

Despite the phenomenal success of YouTube and the companies that use it, video remains a woefully under-used marketing tool. Think about it. How many people do you now know with a tablet, or a smartphone screen as big as a netbook. The future is visual, and the sooner companies grasp this fact the better. Creating content that is highly visual, and looks great on these visual tech products, is the way forward, with the onus now on asset management marketers to create video content that’s engaging, and easy to consumer and share.

Get more for less with Zero Budget Marketing

This is an area where marketers and financial services companies can really learn from start-ups. How do these small fries achieve so much with so little? Think like a start-up. What could your brand do for free? Which influencers could help you that you aren’t already connected with? Perhaps you have plenty of free content that’s all ready for you to share? Go back to basics, cut your costs, and get a whole new marketing perspective in the process.