4 Tips for Serving Multiple Audiences in Financial Services Marketing

Financial Services marketing teams often need to create and maintain compliance-approved collateral, messaging, and training materials for very different audiences within their organization. Whether they’re servicing distributed sales teams or internal employees, Financial Services marketers must ensure every audience has access to the materials they need in a convenient, hassle-free way.

Successfully enabling different audiences presents a multitude of challenges, however. Some include:

• Inability to scale: One-off content requests are impossible to satisfy with a small internal marketing communications department, especially when multiple audiences are requesting different materials. “Where do I get this? How can I find that?” are common refrains heard again and again by centralized marketing teams.
• Risk of non-compliance: As new assets are created, older documents quickly go out of date, introducing risk of incorrect information being used in the field. When materials aren’t accessible, employees and partners may get frustrated waiting and “go rogue” creating assets that are non-compliant.
• Poor customer experience: Employees and partners both often have the best intentions, and just want easy and fast access to the materials they need to do their jobs. But, when those materials aren’t accessible, off-brand and off-message materials can be used instead. While a brand manager may be the one who really tears their hair out, the customer is ultimately who suffers from a disjointed customer experience with the brand.

How to support distinct internal audiences

Cornerstone (a broker insurance services agency) addressed these challenges by implementing MarcomCentral as their centralized Marketing Asset Management solution. With the underpinning of our technology working behind the scenes, this team demonstrated four additional best-practices in serving two distinct audiences; internal employees of Cornerstone and their vast network of brokers in the field.

1. Know and address their needs – Just as you spend time and resources to understand what buyers want, internal enablement requires getting to know, intimately, what your stakeholders need to be successful. For example, at Cornerstone, their internal sales team members needed the ability to access documents at any time, from anywhere. They ensured their asset management solution was available from a mobile device and laptop alike, 24/7.What’s more, knowing users inevitably have questions, Cornerstone used MarcomCentral to replace any kind of intranet or internal server, hosting all training and tutorial resources on the centralized platform alongside key documents such as requisition forms and other necessary materials.
2. Allow them to be self-sufficient – At Cornerstone, the marketing team makes pieces available for brokers and employees. These resources are designed and ready for use, but each distinct audience will choose to use them at their own discretion. To enable their independence, users of both audiences opt to use the tool’s “digital delivery to download” feature to bring any asset to a local, approved print vendor. They can take pieces direct to market without having to go through additional team members or unnecessary steps, providing immediate access on the go.
3. Customize the experience for each audience – Two different audiences require two different experiences. Cornerstone set up two different platforms, one for employees and one for brokers. Each platform is set up according to the specific needs of each segment, with flexible user groups controlling what each group can see. Brokers that handle a particular line of business only have access to the relevant documents and assets for them.Additionally, folder structures and other navigational elements are established to make it easy to understand what’s new, what’s available for customization, which formats are available, and more.
4. Enable personalization at scale – Personalized marketing is far more effective than general messaging due to its relevance to the end-customer. But many marketing teams are bogged down by requests to personalize individual documents. The more internal audiences you need to serve, the more difficult it becomes to personalize anything.The key to scaling marketing asset personalization is to allow users to customize assets on their own within approved areas of assets. Compliant language or that related to branding (from the logo to the colors) may be locked down, but other areas can be left available for customization. Personalizing documents on the fly allows a broker or salesperson to remain hyper-relevant to their customer. For marketers, it reduces the number of one-off requests or reliance upon an internal marketing team to make simple changes such as phone numbers, addresses, or other personal touches to documents.

Serving multiple internal audiences can be tricky in financial services. Multiple carriers, a distributed sales team, a vast network of brokers… how can a beleaguered marketing department keep up? Learn more about the way Cornerstone’s marketing team addressed these challenges by minding four best practices in this on-demand webinar.