Every day, marketers are challenged to create engaging, entertaining, impactful, authentic, and informative content. In the financial services industry, that content also must be regulatory compliant. But the processes financial services marketers go through to meet all those criteria aren’t quick or easy and require collaboration across multiple teams from product development to creative to risk and compliance.
So, how are financial services marketers managing their content creation processes? What are the biggest challenges they face? As you’ll read below, our recent survey of 48 marketing leaders from small-, mid-, and large-sized U.S. financial firms uncovered some anticipated and unexpected responses.
Show us the money!
38%
Budget limitations are their top challenge
The marketing leaders in our survey listed budget limitations as their number one concern (38%). This tracks with what other marketing industry experts are finding. A recent Harvard Business Review article, for instance, reports that CMO budgets have not increased, but the costs for digital media and talent have, putting real pressure on marketing leadership. In short, a majority of marketing leaders are being asked to do more with less—and there is definitely more to do.
Dial back the channels
27%
Too many delivery platforms to consider when creating content
Our survey respondents told us that navigating too many delivery platforms (i.e., channels) is proving challenging for their teams. The rise in popularity of newer social media channels and broadcasts such as podcasts, combined with traditional email, social, web, video, print, direct mail, broadcast, and out-of-home channels are increasing marketing team workloads.
With so many available avenues for communication, leaders are having a difficult time managing competing priorities for content development. For example, when we asked leaders on which types of content their teams spent the most time, multiple formats made the top of the list, including written content (83%), video content (83%), audio/podcast content (83%), sales materials (81%), event / webinar content (75%), and website / social media (65%). Teams are working hard creating campaigns for multiple channel formats, causing them to spend more time on content creation.
Speed up the process
6 to 10 days
Average time it takes to create a standard piece of marketing content
Marketing leaders had a lot to share related to the amount of time their teams spend on content creation. On average, 44% of leaders said it takes six to 10 working days to create a standard piece of marketing content, and more than 30% of managers at small firms said it takes their teams longer than 10 business days.
Why so long? Leaders tell us that 61% to 81% of the content creation process is spent on compliance review, and that it takes up to six rounds of review with compliance before a piece of marketing content is approved. For larger departments, the rounds of review could be as many as 10.
The volume of work that needs compliance review is also significant. Marketers said between 41% and 60% of the content they create must go through these types of reviews. In an interesting contradiction, compliance leaders who participated in the survey told us that they estimate they are reviewing more marketing content (61% to 81% of content created). We’re not sure what the cause is behind the disparity, but it shows that marketers and compliance are not always on the same page, even though they are working collaboratively on the same tasks.
Get the technology right
27%
Too many platforms used in creating content
Technology and tools do exist that could help bring visibility and consensus to marketing and compliance teams’ processes; but based on our survey, it appears marketers are struggling to manage too many content creation platforms already. Slightly more than half of the marketing leaders we surveyed (54%) said their teams use between six and 10 content creation tools, and almost all respondents (99%) said they use in-house tools for content review.
The good news is that marketing leaders do see promise in AI-based tools and tech. For example, a large majority (90%) told us they believe AI can enhance and support creativity, with 100% leaders from large firms, 92% of small firms, and 82% of mid-sized firms all bullish on AI.
See more insights from marketing leaders
Did any of these statistics surprise you? To get more data and insights on the state of financial services marketing, download our ebook, The struggle is real: Overcoming hurdles in content creation and review.
The opinions provided are those of the author and not necessarily those of Fidelity Investments or its affiliates. Fidelity does not assume any duty to update any of the information.
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