Sponsored by:
Produced by:
Paola Arias
Marketing Strategist in Financial Services and Content Creation
Unlocking Customer Value: The Role of Relationships and Advocacy in a World of Changing Consumer Behaviour and Generative AI
About Paola Arias
Paola Arias works in marketing for a leading global reinsurance firm in Miami. With a passion for branding, she offers marketing consulting services to local personalities leveraging her experience in the financial services industry. Her official job title is not explicitly stated.
How has the financial services organization transformed its marketing strategy in recent years?
Over the past 5 years, the marketing strategy for financial services has fundamentally shifted to become much more data-driven and reliant on CRM systems rather than generic email blasts. Previously, marketing was focused on driving event attendance through mass emails and communications. But this blanket approach was very inefficient, with chronically low engagement and open rates. I see great value in investing heavily in building out a robust CRM system integrated seamlessly across all platforms - events, email, social media - to track granular engagement metrics for each individual client. This allows to completely pivot the strategy to highly targeted, personalized marketing campaigns focused on the specific client profiles demonstrating high engagement across channels. In my experience, the revenue impact has been substantial thanks to this laser focused, relevant approach powered by integrated CRM data.
What key metrics do you use to determine customer value in financial services?
In sophisticated services like asset management, valuable customers cannot be defined just by monetary metrics like revenue or sales. We've come to understand that customer value is based on two core dimensions - monetary transactions as one component, and CRM-tracked engagement behaviors across channels as the second critical component. This engagement measurement analyzes a range of behaviors like event signups, social media interactions, client reviews and referrals, call and email frequency, and more. Clients that rank highly on both monetary transactions and multi-channel engagement metrics are the most valuable customers that we want to nurture into brand advocates. By balancing both data sets, we gain a truly comprehensive view of who our highest value clients really are.
How have you incorporated AI tools into your marketing content strategy?
The suite of AI content creation tools have been completely game-changing for boosting the quality, customization and efficiencies of marketing content production. For transcription and translation, there are tools that easily repurpose a single video or speech into multi-language formats at scale.
For editing and writing assistance, AI tools produce more polished, strategic content rapidly. And emerging voice cloning technologies open up incredible new opportunities for automated, customized audio content using our personalities' voices. Rather than manually recording every single podcast, video, or audio program, tailored voice content is generated efficiently. Between transcription, translation, writing, editing, and voice cloning, AI is driving immense value and transformation on the content production side. Additionally, proficient in video editing techniques to segment lengthy videos into easily digestible portions, enriching them with valuable information, and providing multilingual captions, thus expanding the range of possibilities exponentially.
What opportunities and risks do you see with AI marketing tools?
I'm very optimistic about AI enabling more authentic, personalized brand experiences in the future through hyper-customized content and recommendations tailored to each individual client’s specific needs and interests. But customers must be empowered with transparency and control. If they lose trust due to misuse of data or opaque AI practices, the reputational damage could be severe. Brands that responsibly harness AI to improve customers' lives while protecting their interests through ethical governance will become tomorrow's most beloved and trusted brands. It's about balancing the immense benefits AI provides with thoughtful data practices to maintain consumer trust and confidence in the brand.
How do you quantify the success and impact of your customer advocacy programs?
In my experience, loyalty is driven much more by the personal relationship and trust with the specific advisor than the broader brand name. It's not like Apple where people will stand in line just for the latest product. If my financial advisor moved firms, I would likely follow them over staying for the brand. Financial services rely so heavily on that individual relationship of credibility and trust. The advisor's personal brand is far more important than the corporate brand name. True brand advocacy is built through expanded personal networks, not digital ads. The individual drives the relationship.
How do you segment and tier clients in financial services?
In my experience, the key VIPs are the executives who decide which investment funds to approve for their platforms. If we can get those high-level gatekeepers at a bank to greenlight adding your offerings, it opens up all their financial advisers to potentially sell your products to their end clients. Those platform decision-makers are the big fish you want to land and focus energy on.
After that, top-selling advisers are also an important segment driving product volumes. Ongoing nurturing of those tiers through tailored relationship-building is critical to sustainable growth. In asset management, the strategy must devote marketing resources to those high-potential segments.
Up Next: Janet Jaiswal
