Entering the age of rapid and responsive marketing: revolutionising marketing with cutting-edge technology

AI and other innovative technologies can help shorten the marketing cycle and ensure each campaign matches the changing market conditions and audience interest

Key points:

• Market conditions continue to change quickly, and the media landscape differs in each market, so marketing campaigns need to be nimble and customised for each individual market.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) should be utilised to monitor market cycles and competitor activity, match your existing product range to the current demand, create the ads and provide attribution and reporting for optimisation. All in real-time.
• Having an automated reporting and data capture system in place is essential for any marketing professional looking to shorten the marketing cycle.

Technology plays a vital role in shortening the marketing cycle, enabling asset management marketers to quickly adapt marketing campaigns to match any changes in the wider market environment.

Traditionally, asset management marketing campaigns could take up to nine months from the moment the business decides to promote a strategy to the point where the assets are ready to be trafficked. Following this period, the campaign goes live regardless of the market conditions.

However, in the current market environment, where circumstances can change quickly, it is inefficient to spend months on preparing a campaign which may no longer match the market conditions and demand once it is ready for launch.

Differences in media landscapes

Another obstacle is the disparity between the media landscape and investment audience characteristics in each market.

Fundamental Media’s decades of experience in the media planning and buying industry in countries across the world has provided us with ample insights into the intricacies of each country’s media landscape. While some countries have a mature and sophisticated publishing landscape, other markets are costly with little sophistication.

The one overarching observation is that media landscapes differ globally, as does the appetite for different asset classes and the factors influencing fund selection. On top of this, the investment audience’s familiarity with an asset manager’s brand will vary in each country. This makes international investment marketing tricky, requiring a dedicated local approach for each individual market.

How technology can help shorten the marketing cycle

With all these considerations and pressure points, how do marketers customise campaigns to manage this complex matrix across different markets, audiences and levels of brand awareness per country?

Asset management marketing teams are unlikely to have large teams covering each market, but artificial intelligence (AI) could be utilised to monitor market cycles and competitor activity. It can also match your existing product range to the current demand, create the ads and provide real-time attribution and reporting for optimisation.

Fundamental Group has developed Alphix Solutions, a suite of marketing technology tools to help asset management marketers gain valuable insights into the performance of their web content and traffic as well as their advertising campaigns.

Understanding your competitive position

One of the issues technology can address is understanding current demand and interest in the market as well as the competitor landscape. Alphix Trends enables asset management marketers to benchmark their site’s content and traffic volume against that of their competitors, and to see which investment topics are most popular on asset managers’ websites and in the financial media.

Analysing your site’s page traffic provides insights into the topics of interest to your target audience. But comparative analysis needs to measure more than just traffic volumes to your site. It needs to take into account the audience type, the content topic that’s being consumed, and the volume of content available to that audience.

If, for example, you have noticed an increased interest in fixed income from visitors to your site, an important question to ask is how this compares to the traffic your competitors are getting to their fixed income pages.

By comparing volume of content on certain topics, the volume of visits to the pages by the target audience, and the average session time, it is possible to provide more valuable insights from which to benchmark. Each asset manager is then indexed, providing you with a thorough understanding of how your content performs compared to your competitor set.

Understanding your relative position for content consumption on your site vs your competitors is an invaluable data point. When the data point is measured over time, it can be converted into a core metric to measure marketing influence: the Cost per Index Point (CpIP). For example, if the index moved 12 points and the campaign budget was £240,000 then the CpIP (fixed income) was £20,000. We delve deeper into this topic in our latest Alphix Solutions whitepaper.

Insights into your audience’s content consumption

Apart from understanding the competitor landscape, marketers would also benefit from understanding current demand and interest in the market. This improves the chances of a positive audience response to their campaigns and thus a higher likelihood of new inflows. 

Alphix Trends provides marketers with insights into which topics are currently being consumed most by investment audiences on asset managers’ websites and financial news websites. Fundamental Group is one of the biggest buyers of asset management media around the world. We are increasingly partnering with these publishers to allow traffic and sentiment data to be aggregated, modelled and converted into metrics from which signals can be extracted.

When volume and sentiment are both above the ‘mean line’, then the data is converted to a signal and triggers an advertising ‘event’. This could then be used to promote a philosophy, asset class, strategy or a product.

For example, if asset managers and financial publications are writing more about fixed income compared to the average of the past 60 days and if the sentiment is more positive than the average of the past 60 days, then a signal would be triggered. This indicates a more receptive environment to promote fixed income strategies.

How artificial intelligence can make your marketing rapid and responsive

Another one of our solutions helps marketers understand current demand and interest in the market across the various distribution channels.

Alphix Vectorsuses artificial intelligence and our proprietary large language models (LLMs) which receive input from Alphix Trends as well as from Nosible, an AI platform used by asset managers to make data-driven capital allocation decisions. The platform uses the data to write the ad copy for paid search, display, email and social campaigns, ensuring that the messaging is in line with the interest seen in market and distinguished from competitor advertising activity.

By using AI, Alphix Vectors has made getting messaging to market not only rapid (less than five minutes to create ad copy) but also responsive by accessing a knowledge base of over ten million financial news articles.

The importance of accurate on-site analytics

All of these insights and campaign activations are brought together into the cookie-free Alphix Solutions platform, which also provides marketers with automated reporting to ensure campaigns can be optimised and result in maximum return on investment.

Our accurate on-site analytics allow marketers to understand how various media channels, publishing partners and advertising creatives are performing. These can then be optimised to achieve a maximum return on investment.

Having an automated reporting and data capture system in place is essential for any marketing professional looking to shorten the marketing cycle. Without the data, it is impossible to understand the competitor landscape, to gauge current demand and interest in various products and strategies, and to ensure your messaging is in line with current market conditions.