The Year of Digital Marketing

For the Chinese we may be in the Year of the Rabbit, but for Financial Services marketers it’s definitely the year of digital marketing. That was the clear message from keynote speaker and Brand New Media CEO Frank Dudley at last week’s Financial Communications Society “Cocktails with Content” event hosted by The Wall Street Journal in midtown Manhattan.

Having recently completed an extensive study of digital marketing practices (close to 100 interviews with VP- to CMO-level marketers) with a specific focus on the unique issues of the wealth management segment, the study revealed that on a number of levels 2011 is the year digital marketing has come of age.

Spending on digital marketing is up over 20% year over year (compared with mid-single-digit increases in recent years), but more significant than the burgeoning budgets is the emerging consensus among marketers that digital is now at the strategic core of their mission. This belief is increasingly influencing practices from executive recruiting to shifting agency relationships as firms look to build internal centers of excellence and seek niche expertise from outside to fill knowledge gaps their AORs simply aren’t able to fill.

Some key insights from the study included:

• Marketers are intent on cracking the code on social media, but the consensus is that it’s better to develop a strategy first rather than take an invest-and-test approach.
• Advisors are demanding tools that are easy to use and help them do their jobs better.
• Most marketers feel they have not yet figured out how to create an effective “ecosystem” of content to support the advisor.
• An emerging organizational trend is toward centralizing the digital marketing function.

What’s most distinctive about this group of marketers is that they are challenged with communicating effectively with clients both directly and through the financial advisor intermediary—and whether it’s a new iPad app or compliance-approved use of social media channels, FAs are clamoring for more digital marketing tools and support. And with wirehouse signing bonuses for top FAs at record highs and independence an increasingly more viable and attractive option, chances are the big players in this space will want to go the extra mile in this area to keep their FAs happy.

Which leads to a signifcant challenge: As marketers have become more sophisticated in the digital space, they’ve recognized that you can’t simply take something that works in one channel and transplant it to another one. Features that work on your website do not necessarily work on a mobile app. Similarly, content that works in one channel will not work in others, so the message must suit the medium. That white paper or research report may contain some great insights, but if most clients are discovering it on a mobile device, it’s not going to get the readership it deserves.

The addition of mobile, social media and other digital channels to traditional communications channels exacerbates the content production challenge for marketers, who will need to optimize content across more and more platforms to align with the evolving information consumption behavior of their clients, prospects and centers of influence. One senior wealth management marketing executive interviewed for the study described their own role as essentially a running a “content creation engine.”

In order to continue to be effective, marketers will need to make smart decisions about how to build or buy expertise on generating quality content that engages their target audience and keeps pace with when, where and how that audience chooses to consume information.