By Garry Hamilton, Chief Growth Officer, Equator
In my previous article, I began to set out how wealth management firms can use the pandemic as an opportunity to rebuild and restructure around the real needs of their customers. That means embracing digital transformation, in particular travelling along eight paths towards value growth.
We’ve already considered the importance of ‘digital due diligence’ during consolidation; technology options; harnessing AI; and optimising CRM. Now let’s turn our attention to the four remaining opportunities:
5) Choose the right CMS to scale at speed
Wealth management firms of all sizes are failing to invest substantially in digital. As a result, their web visitors often struggle with slow sites that are light on detail and confusing to navigate.
As PE firms move to invest, consolidate and bring scale to the wealth sector, they will seek to merge investments under one platform. At the heart of any web offering is the Content Management System (CMS), the core platform for growing and managing digital presence, including website, content, apps, and social media feeds.
Choice of CMS is a critical decision affected by cost, speed, scalability, security, and flexibility. Many businesses turn to WordPress but it is not perfect. Wealth companies should seek more scalable, secure and contemporary CMS platforms, for example Umbraco, Sitecore, and EPiServer.
As wealth management companies grow, customer experience must not be lost in complexity. Firms must also consider the mobile world we live in and ensure content renders well on all devices customers might use.
Action for PE houses: Don’t skimp on digital due diligence that only takes a few weeks to complete. It will assess what technology is already in the business, and shape a roadmap for future digital service provision.
6) Invest in content to differentiate, drive sales & increase loyalty
Content is a worthy investment for any business. Research from CMI show that 72% of marketers believe a focus on content has increased the number of leads. It demonstrates knowledge and expertise, and keeps an otherwise static site up to date.
But content also requires exposure, ease of access, and discoverability. This is not just about publishing content on social media; it also encompasses originality, engagement, and planning.
Critically, content offers an opportunity for lead generation as an inbound marketing tool. Woven into a tool like Hubspot or Pardot, long-form content creates contact opportunities pre-qualified by proxy, and indicates areas of interest.
To be efficient and successful a content strategy must help you:
- understand your audience’s wants and needs
- review rival content to inform your own unique content
- ensure the entire business is considered in your content efforts.
Action for PE houses: Thoughtful content, regularly delivered through careful distribution channel management, can prove a powerful lead generator and loyalty builder. The target audience is increasingly selecting financial services online, driving sales and deepening customer relationships.
7) Develop an advanced search strategy to win new business
In most growth plans, a comprehensive search strategy will feature as a crucial lever for customer acquisition. Get it right, and you have a platform for growth. Get it wrong, and it can be a genuine threat to your digital business. For these reasons, search strategy analysis is one of our most requested services.
Our study showed a minority of wealth management first invest in the long-term acquisition of new customers through search. With so many people still working from home it is fair to say smaller wealth business will continue to rely on word of mouth, and less effective mid- to upper-funnel marketing activities, for customer acquisition.
Search is inextricably linked to content strategy (see opportunity 6). Considering content creates conversations, it indicates authority, credibility, and trustworthiness; backlinks to your website are votes of trust and credibility. In general, the more links your website gets, the higher Google ranks it.
Action for PE houses: There is insufficient focus on the importance of search for many wealth management businesses. As you grow and consolidate, ensure that scale and localisation are realised in a strong presence on Google.
8) Go beyond basic analytics for sales & marketing efficiencies
It’s easy to overlook analytics despite the fact it’s a critical part of any digital infrastructure. Our research revealed more than four in 10 digital businesses have inaccurate or incomplete analytics strategies in place.
With a properly implemented set-up a business learns, and can adapt its digital operations in real-time.
All of the firms we studied have implemented Google Analytics as a foundation for digital insights. In our experience, however, this doesn’t always provide a complete view. While it will give insight into how your site’s pages perform, where you source traffic, and user behaviour, it will not track handoffs to portals, links to third-party sites, or PDF downloads.
Visibility is therefore clouded for any wealth business looking to measure the effectiveness of its on-site content, and its ability to drive phone and email leads. Line of sight and engagement of existing customers will also be severely limited.
Fixing these problems is not complex, and clearly worth time and investment. Understanding what content, source or activity drives your contacts to get in touch is imperative.
Action for PE houses: It’s critical to ensure all CRM efforts are measurable and accountable, so web analytics must be robust and accurate. This minimises waste and brings efficiency to sales and marketing operations.
Digital transformation delivers many opportunities to bring rapid profitability, scale and simplification. While our research has shown that consolidation can create more problems than it solves, firms that take a strategic approach and treat technology as an enabler can grow rapidly.
All eight of the overarching opportunities I’ve highlighted are relevant to both wealth businesses and their PE backers. Firms without equity funding would do well to consider how they’ll scale to meet the challenge of well-funded, digital-centric competitors. As a result, wealth managers can face the future with new-found confidence built on digitally enabled, customer-centric foundations.
