What Purpose Does Your Marketing Serve?

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Eyes glazed over—if you’re a passionate digital marketer, you no doubt have produced that response from a non-digital colleague at one point or another. Digital can dazzle, can’t it? You’re to be forgiven if once or twice you have let your passion for the work carry you beyond your colleague’s point of following or even caring. It’s the digital marketer’s occupational hazard.

But come back down to Earth now and let’s get real. No matter what your stripe, marketers can’t afford disconnects with the people they work with, or report to. Alignment helps assure employment.

The latest research to quantify the gap between lead marketers and C-level executives is “Outside Looking In: The CMO struggles to get in sync with the C-suite," an Economist Intelligence Unit report sponsored by SAS.
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3 Views On The Asset Management Industry And Its Future

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Tomorrow the people decide the future of the United States—and we can all rest assured that there will be ample interpretation of the Election Day results.

Today and closer to home, I want to share some content that’s been published recently about the future of the asset management industry and its challenges.

Study after study points to the bright future for digital marketing at mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms. You my dear digital marketing peeps are all good. But, what about your firm as a whole and the industry you’re in? The more you think about the business’ challenges, the greater the contribution you can make. It’s in that spirit that I offer the following.
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Ripped From The Headlines: 3 Notes For Your Mobile Strategy

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The news this week produced three random reports that might help ground your mobile planning in reality.

Stand-out iPad Apps For Advisors

From Investment News, here's a video preview of some stand-out iPad apps that will be cited in the publication's upcoming vendor and technology usage report.

If your app plans call for you to port the text content that nobody reads on your advisor Website to this new medium where nobody will read it, don't take your mobile victory lap just yet. This report by technology reporter Davis Janowski highlights where the bar is moving.

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Social And Financial Services Can Drive More Than Chump Change, McKinsey Says

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I've just come across a McKinsey Global Institute report that you might benefit from.

“The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies” presents a 184-page case (download the full PDF) for the value potential to be created by business’ adoption of social networks, blogs, social commerce and a host of other applications. (Or, how McKinsey defines social technologies: "IT products and services that enable the formation and operation of online communities, where participants have distributed access to content and distributed rights to create, add, and/or modify content.")

Special attention is paid to consumer financial services (insurance and retail banking are the focus) for which social technologies could create $256 billion–$423 billion in value annually across product development, operations and distribution, sales and marketing, customer service and business operations, McKinsey says. What mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer wouldn’t want to drive some of that!

This screenshot shows how McKinsey gets there (note that marketing and sales are the top levers). But, this exhibit appears more than halfway into the report. To understand it, you’ll need to take a look at the full discussion.

Social Technologies Drive Value For Financial Services

A few excerpts from the report:

Why Financial Services And Social Are A Match

In general, the companies that stand to benefit most [from social technologies] have one or more of the following characteristics:

  • A high percentage of knowledge workers
  • Heavy reliance on brand recognition and consumer perception
  • A need to maintain a strong reputation to build credibility and consumer trust
  • A digital distribution method for products or services
  • An experiential (hotels) or inspirational (a popular sports drink) product or service offering

The Great Potential Value: Enterprise Collaboration

“Our research suggests that the application of social technologies to enterprise collaboration holds the biggest value potential for the industry.” Earlier, the report made the point: “Many of the top consumer-facing financial services players in mature markets are large, complex organizations that were formed from mergers and acquisitions, resulting in siloed personnel structures, fragmented processes, and differing IT systems. Effectively applied electronic collaboration tools can help create more cohesive, transparent organizations that consistently and effectively share knowledge.”

Investments Limited To Marketing Functions

Noting financial services’ compliance and organizational barriers to adoption, McKinsey says “so far, most of these institutions have limited social technology investments to marketing functions and not attempted to implement large-scale collaboration or communications applications on social platforms. By definition, banking and insurance firms have a culture of confidentiality and discretion that bodes against the blossoming of a free-wheeling open community of ideas on an internal social network. However, as innovative upstarts such as Movenbank and Zopa prove that there is more value to be gained from social technology than cutting marketing costs, even the largest institutions may be convinced that social technologies can work for them, across operations.”

This Financial Mobile App Initiative Is Missing You

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Interesting.

Do you all know about the MyMoneyAppUp Challenge? It’s a contest offering cash prizes “intended to motivate American entrepreneurs, software developers, the public, and students to propose the best ideas and designs for next-generation mobile tools to help Americans control and shape their financial futures.”

It's sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department in partnership with the D2D Fund and Center for Financial Services Innovation. The content submission form asks contestants to specify how their app would promote financial capability and/or financial access but that's not presented as a primary focus.
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