Delivering timely and personalized communications is extremely difficult, especially in highly-regulated industries — a pain that wealth management marketers know too well. Financial advisors and marketers working for wealth management firms have to deal with compliance regulations (such as FINRA) that often limit what they can and cannot say and require them to implement communication archiving for audit compliances. And let’s not forget that, if they’re doing their job right, these individuals also have their hands full with trying to adhere to other common marketing best practices. Can marketing automation help produce FINRA compliant email marketing?
Producing FINRA compliant marketing initiatives takes a great amount of time and effort and often leaves little room for wealth management marketers to think big. In an effort to keep up with the tasks required and reduce the risk of violating any compliance regulations, many wealth management marketers choose to limit the scope of their email communications and keep their efforts as generic as possible. The problem with this approach, however, is that bland and boring marketing is just as bad as not having any marketing at all — if not worse.
In today’s fiercely competitive market, customers are well aware that they have options and are accustomed to conducting their due diligence when it comes to performing research and thoroughly weighing their options. If you want your firm to stand out from the crowd, your marketing team has to be able to produce targeted communications that demonstrate that you understand your potential investors’ pain points and have what it takes to help them maximize their investment.
Thankfully, despite many obstacles, innovative and personalized marketing is not out of reach for wealth management firms that have the proper tools. Today, we’re going to outline some of the most common FINRA marketing compliance challenges faced by wealth managers and how marketing automation can help overcome them.
Common FINRA Compliance Marketing Challenges Faced by Wealth Managers
Producing innovative and targeted marketing in today’s competitive environment is no easy feat, regardless of what industry you’re in. Marketers working in the wealth management industry, however, face a unique set of challenges due to operating within a highly-regulated industry and saturated market.
- Building Brand Awareness: As more and more wealth management clients turn to search engines to research and evaluate their wealth management options, it’s becoming increasingly more important for wealth management firms to stand out from the crowd. To do this, wealth managers have to be very targeted with their messaging to reassure clients that they have their best interests in mind.
- Maintaining Compliance (Finra): Compliance regulations often dictate what wealth management firms can and cannot say. Having to ensure marketing compliance often creates an extra step for marketing teams and makes it difficult to enhance and update their marketing efforts on the fly.
- Antiquated and Disconnected Technology Limits Growth and Prevents Efficiency: Despite having many great ideas, many marketing teams lack the tools they need to execute them. Adding to that, many of them are using antiquated and disconnected technology that requires their team to spend their time on tedious manual tasks rather than tackling more impactful marketing efforts.
- Keeping Up With the Demand for Targeted Marketing: Today’s consumers expect companies to provide them with content and messaging that will help them make informed decisions. However, delivering personalized marketing can be quite the undertaking for wealth management firms, especially for those that have small teams and lack the proper marketing tools.
These challenges, although common, are not insurmountable with the right tools. In the next section, we’ll walk you through how the right technology stack can help you eliminate these obstacles and implement best practices that will drastically enhance your marketing.
The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors
Best Practices to Help You Stay Ahead of the Game
Having to adhere to compliance regulations shouldn’t limit your marketing team’s creativity or prevent them from delivering timely and targeted communications. Following these best practices will help you remain compliant while delivering targeted campaigns that make a lasting impression with your customers.
- Implement Pre-Approved Marketing Efforts: Providing each of your audience segments with personalized marketing doesn’t mean having to take on more work than your team can handle. Developing FINRA compliant email marketing campaigns prepares you to strike when the time is right.
- Automate Your Marketing Efforts: Automating your marketing efforts allows your team to step away from tedious tasks and focus their time and resources where they’re likely to make the biggest impact. A marketing automation platform (such as Act-On) allows you to set up rules so these efforts automatically launch when a customer completes a form or meets a certain threshold or criteria. This enables you to continuously deliver relevant messaging and content so you can stay top-of-mind and establish brand recognition while reducing time and resources.
- Segment Your Contacts to Deliver More Relevant Content and Messaging: A mistake that many wealth management firms make is launching marketing efforts that are one-size-fits-all. Segmenting your contacts into lists as you uncover more information about them allows you to deliver personalized messaging to stand out in their inbox and improve engagement.
Leverage a BCC Archiving Solution: Implementing a FINRA compliant email marketing tool that syncs with a BCC archiving solution helps you easily store emails in one centralized location as you send out communications. This allows your company to prepare for any future audits while eliminating the tedious task of having to manually archive emails.
Leverage Marketing Automation to Streamline Processes and Improve ROI
Up until now we’ve talked about how marketing automation makes it easy for you to produce FINRA compliant email marketing campaigns, but the right tool can help you do so much more. With Act-On, you have the features to improve alignment between marketing and sales, launch cohesive multi-channel campaigns, and measure your impact for continued improvement and proof of ROI.
If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On can help your wealth management firm to tackle common marketing challenges, we invite you to download our eBook, The 4 Main Challenges Facing Financial Advisors.