Three Opportunities Enterprise Marketers Are Missing Out On

The problem with most organizations is that they spend too much of their marketing budget on head office programs. This means that micro-segments and customers in local markets don’t engage with content. I believe that a more effective strategy requires marketing teams to rebalance digital marketing investments appropriately between head office and the field. There a number of symptoms organizations can readily identify to determine if they need to rebalance.

Email Engagement Model

If more than 90% of your email engagement comes from head office with no personal connection to the receiver you need to rethink your approach. People are much more likely to open an email from someone they know, rather than a corporate brand. Using name personalization in email results in a 26% increase in open rates. While 100% email personalization/personification is a “nice to have”, it can require special technology or too many resources to apply properly at an enterprise level. This may be why you are not taking advantage of this opportunity. The biggest problem with the head office driven model is engagement – how to conduct thousands of individual dialogues to properly connect with customers is not practical for a head office marketing team. So you may be inadvertently be driving traffic to inefficient service such as the customer walking into the local branch. We have discussed in a previous article, why this is not effective, and that lack of trust is a reason why AUM is not growing.

There are some cautions in implementing more personalized engagement programs to be aware of. Privacy is an increasing concern for people. 86% of people aim to control and hide their digital footprint. Personalisation can negatively impact marketers as well. 85% of those surveyed say that their audience segments are too large to create effective personalization. Additionally, nearly 33% of marketers say they have limited to no capacity to personalize marketing messages.

Digital Marketing Distribution Gap

If the vast majority of your writing comes from head office you are likely not reaching all of your customers and your content will not be diverse enough to engage with them. Your organization is likely distributed across regions and focused on different economic and socio-economic clusters. This focus also produces unique perspectives that are brand consistent and represents years of real-world experience. These viewpoints and the way they can frame and introduce content in the field to customers through content marketing is extremely valuable. Enterprise-level marketers are experts in marketing; however, they do not have the same local or specialty market knowledge that a field representative like a financial advisor will have. This knowledge gap means that content created exclusively at the head office may fit a generalized buyer journey but not a more specific one. And we know that more specific content resonates with unique segments in more human and powerful ways.  

Centralizing Contact Us.

A very common mistake in attracting new customers is not providing choice for who, how and when they engage with your firm. So most financial services firms in an effort to provide a consistent engagement experience for customers provide a central clearing function for contact us. This does not necessarily match the buyer journey where customers are researching products services and people before they make decisions. While there is a need for centralized contact this on its own may add friction to the buying process. Considering how to effectively balance choice with standards is an important element of customer engagement and may make the difference between a more locally focused firm and yours.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, to engage with customers more personally and match their unique buyer journey organizations need to consider how rebalancing their content marketing programs may create new growth opportunities. The constraints and challenges presented with exclusively head office driven programs are going to interfere with building a strong micro-segment and localized digital marketing programs. Now that this problem has been acknowledged, let’s discuss how to solve it.

Follow us in the coming weeks as we will cover The Business Case for Transforming Your Advisor Marketing, and Part 2: The Solution to this article.