The power of marketing in financial services is about being able to assist sales and to have the two divisions work in tandem, according to David Master, chief marketing officer at global asset manager Janus Henderson Investors
“Increasingly, our sales organization is comfortable with ours serving up leads,” he said. “That may sound mundane, because isn’t that what marketing does everywhere? But in asset management, that has not always been the case. A lot of times, it’s been ‘keep your nose out of our business’.”
He explained that Janus has been able to create what he calls “interesting moments” that can be delivered to a firm’s sales team, a term he favors over leads. “I think leads sometimes take on a connotation that may be too extreme,” he said, adding that “interesting moments” can be created through advertising, webcasts or emails.
When sales and marketing are aligned closely and jointly executed through a specific campaign, it’s easier to look at the tangible results of that campaign. But firms should refrain from trying to figure out how much of the success should be attributed to marketing and how much should be attributed to sales, because it creates a chasm between sales and marketing.
Proper measurement in financial marketing can be extremely difficult, in part because marketing represents a cost. But combined with sales, which represents more an element of revenue, then the measurement makes a lot more sense, Master added. Looking at marketing activity just by itself is limited.
“As we begin to use more and more marketing automation, we’re careful about how we create stories and criteria that also characterize something as an interesting moment, and then we do hand those over,” Master said. “In that sense we are able to calculate a reasonable measure of what the cost of an interesting moment might have been. And we’re getting more and more data about how many of those interesting moments translate into something real and tangible.”
