When running an initial discovery with a marketing team member, these questions will help you to uncover pain within the marketing team as it relates to the running of the asset manager’s website.
Question | Context |
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What kind of feedback do you get from the distribution team and your sales partners about the site? Are there a wish list of things that they have highlighted to you? | Distribution teams, advisors, and institutional investors are the main users of these sites. Understanding how they feel about the site is an important barometer as to whether change is required. Their wish list will be important to the marketer. |
Are you able to drive leads from the site to the distribution team? If so, who do you do this? | Most asset management sites transmit information one way. Using the site to gather information about which advisors or investors are visiting the site is important. This data can be passed to a wholesaler who can then connect with the advisor or investor to assist in the sales process. A modern CMS like Kurtosys allows you to implement forms which seamlessly tie into marketing automation or CRM systems where sales people can directly act on new leads.
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How easy is it for you to make a change to content on the site? For example, editing page or blog content?
| If the firm is using an old CMS then changing even basic content will be hard. This will make it hard to communicate in a timely fashion. We saw the impact of this during COVID. For firms who were able to get the word out, they were able to create an effective comms channel to their customers, while those who were not largely will have relied on other mediums.
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If you need to implement a brand change or a new design, who do you have to go to? Can you do that yourself?
| As above. However, making broader brand changes to a site is even harder and often involves a developer – this takes time and requires people. The net result is these changes often don’t get done and so the experience ages. A modern system like Kurtosys allows marketers to make even these deep content changes visually without coding. This marketing agility creates a huge amount of capacity within even small marketing teams, and ultimately allows them to build better brand experiences that serve their sales teams and partners.
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How do you deal with content that has to expire for compliance reasons? Do you have a human driven process for that?
| Often claims will be made in blog posts that are time sensitive, and if viewed out of context in the future could mislead investors. Compliance teams will often make recommendations that content is taken down after some time. If this is not automated it creates a drag on the marketing team. Systems like Kurtosys allow for time based expiry of content, freeing the marketing team to write content knowing that it will expire safely in the future.
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How do you handle record keeping requests from the compliance team for your digital experiences?
| In most major jurisdictions, regulators will require that the asset manager keeps records of claims made in its marketing materials to clients. For print materials this is straightforward as they merely print the content once it is updated. However, on the web this is harder because the content changes dynamically without warning. Our system contains a module that automatically takes snapshots of content as it changes and allows it to be retrieved for a period of up to ten years after publication. This is fully automated.
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In terms of SEO, do you manage that in house or do you use an agency? Do you perform regular audits for search engine optimization?
| Search engine optimization or ‘SEO’ is challenging and requires constant maintenance. The penalty for doing it badly is your traffic going somewhere else – usually to Morningstar when an advisor is searching for a fund! Most older CMS systems do not provide the ability for users to easily maintain optimum SEO data or indeed tell them when they are not optimal. Our system automatically reports on how well optimized the content is and allows marketers to update it easily. The net effect is more organic traffic from investors and advisers.
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What feedback do you get about site performance?
| Site performance is the number one determinant of perceived site quality (and user frustration). Optimizing page load speed is one area that majorly improve visitor (sales) happiness.
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How would you rate the site search experience?
| Site search is critical. People should be able to find funds, documents, and content via a prominent search. Without this visitors may not find content and bounce out. Kurtosys contains a full text search that provides many best in class features, such as the ability to search all three areas of critical content. |
If you need to make a change to the fund buying experience (fund center, product pages, document hub, etc…) how easy is that and how long does it take?
| The fund buying experience or FBX is the hardest part of the site to build. Most firms custom code their fund centers and product pages. However, the secret is that most of the site traffic actually goes to these areas (we have borne this out via analytics and hard data). Being able to improve this area of the site is most beneficial to distribution teams but is often the hardest to tweak because it requires developers. With Kurtosys we are able to configure these modules quickly, add new features in minutes, and of course are able to help guide our customers on best practices because of our years of experience.
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Do you personally have a wish list of things that would make the experience better?
| Always interesting to know what ails them
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How do you manage regulatory and marketing documents within the sites?
| Managing documents is painful. There are often thousands of them. They go out of date and are hard to audit. Our system offers an easy to use interface for upload, automatic placement based on meta data, and the ability to integrate directly into document production systems so marketing don’t need to touch the docs at all!
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What kind of org structure supports the digital experiences?
| It is important to understand who is making content updates, responsible for technical changes (SEO, Analytics, etc). We can use this to target messaging to the specific personas down the road. |
If the prospect has UCITS products, then you may want to drill deeper on some specific workflow issues related to managing the marketing of these types of funds:
Question | Context |
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How do you manage the individual country sites? | Content needs to be syndicated to each country site. Often this means copy and paste. Our system does this automatically through “sharing”
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How often do you audit your attestation and compliance disclosures?
| Attestation is critical for UCITS because it gates content and products based on user jurisdiction. A poorly built one may be uncompliant. They are also hard to build. Our system contains an attestation module that can be configured quickly to meet this need.
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How do you ensure your registered for sale key is reflected in the relevant country site?
| Once a visitor enters a country site, they must only see products registered in that country that are suitable for their type of investor profile. To not do this is again a breach of EU UCITS regulation. Our system automatically does this by tieing attestation to our segmentation module.
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Are the PRIIPS/KIIDs and other reg documents handled in the same way as on the US site?
| This is an order of magnitude harder as the number of docs is higher. There are harsh penalties for showing old or incorrect regulatory docs.
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How do you handle localization (translation, formatting, cultural sensitivity)
| Localization of content is important for building trust in foreign markets. This is a major pain point for marketing teams. Our system handles this through our translation and content modules, allowing us to automatically apply translations (must be sourced elsewhere)
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