Social Strategy for a European Asset Management Firm
What new social business strategies can be utilised within the asset management industry to facilitate engagement and social uptake?
This long-established private bank and asset management firm wanted to explore opportunities for better engagement with its markets via social media and accelerate its uptake of social technologies, while also retaining its exclusive client relationships and ensuring strategic alignment across multiple geographies and service lines.
Our approach focussed on developing a practical, coherent strategy which took into full account the firm’s level of operational readiness, the extent to which it aligned with existing communication strategies, and how it could develop the required capabilities to engage with both market-facing and internal social ways of working.
As a starting point, we worked with the client team and wider project stakeholders to document insights from their existing social media activities globally, mapping the firm’s current and future social media stakeholders, and engaging with examples of good practice across local territories, which could be used as pathfinders for the rest of the firm.
In parallel, we carried out an extensive, in-depth competitive benchmarking exercise to highlight AM industry-specific examples. In the process, we also researched common barriers to successful social business engagement, delving into some of the wider dynamics shaping the European AM sector, researching its emerging and still-tentative relationship with digital and social media, and exploring some of the fundamental challenges influencing the industry’s transformation.
At the same time, we spent some time with our clients developing and testing some new approaches to thought leadership, inbound marketing, a sophisticated content repackaging strategy, and a detailed set of recommendations for propelling the firm’s offering into the 21st Century.
This approach ensured that our strategy recommendations for future social business activities were highly innovative but realistic, covering all aspects of the firm’s needs – from market segmentation to targeting and activities, and from KPIs to technology recommendations, including a detailed multi-step project roadmap and guidance on the internal skills, team structure and capabilities required for success.
Activities
- In-depth research to benchmark competitor challenges in social media transformation
- Researching common barriers to social media enagement
- Documenting insights from existing company social media activities
- Building a multi-step roadmap to propel the firm forward
- Exploring wider dynamics that shape the AM sector
Results
- Implementation of a flexible social business strategy to be used firm-wide, regardless of AM market
- Creation of a detailed multi-step project roadmap and guidance on the internal skills, team structure, and capabilities required for success
- Recommendation of highly innovative and realistic social business activities to cover all the needs of the firm