Do you have a marketing playbook for growing assets and revenue when your marketing budget, expertise, and capacity are overextended? Many managers have limits but no plan.

For asset managers and financial advisors alike, limited budgets, constrained staff resources, and gaps in marketing expertise or technology capabilities are major marketing challenges.

This article provides practical ideas to guide asset managers on how to do more with less by focusing on the right technology, outsourcing, and branding.

Why Does Limited Marketing Capacity Feel Like an Overwhelming Problem?

Your internal marketing team may wear too many hats. Content creation caps, client communications fedoras, compliance homburgs, and digital helmets, among others.

Today’s marketing requires expertise in digital channels, content strategy, SEO, analytics, and compliance. More than three in ten financial services marketing teams report they lack the talent and skills to reach their goals. Your situation might be indicative of industry trends rather than a failure of your firm.

Budget pressures make adding resources difficult. 64% of financial marketers identified budget as their biggest obstacle to executing marketing strategies. However, according to FUSE Research Network, asset managers’ marketing budgets have been as low as 2% of revenue, compared to 7-10% for other financial services firms.

Use Technology to Boost Marketing Productivity

Technology-driven automation can be a terrific time saver for marketing tasks and free up hours each week for higher‑value strategic work.

Automate high-volume and repeatable tasks

Marketing automation has proven to improve efficiency in routine tasks like email scheduling, social media content posting, and contact segmentation. Historically, businesses that use marketing automation have increased sales productivity by 14 percent and reduced marketing overhead costs by approximately 12 percent.

Other benchmarks suggest automation can save teams six or more hours per week on routine tasks such as campaign execution and social posting. For a marketing team looking to do more with less, those hours translate into found capacity for higher‑value strategic work. Widely used tools include Buffer, Hootsuite, HubSpot, and MailChimp.

Email campaigns

Email remains one of the most efficient ways to reach prospects and clients, and automating your email distribution can improve results. Companies that use automated email typically see higher engagement and conversions than those that send emails by hand, one at a time. Automated emails can deliver several times more revenue and significantly higher open and click‑through rates.

Mailchimp and HubSpot can help you segment and personalize your email, newsletters, and social media messaging based on your audience’s behavior, demographics, and engagement.

Social media scheduling

Scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite help you plan posts in advance, reuse content you’ve already created, and stay active online without logging in several times a day.

Automation also ensures you post at the best times and keep a regular schedule with less work. Almost 50 percent of marketers use these tools for social media posts.

Performance reporting

Gathering reports from several different sources, such as CRM, email, web analytics, and ad platforms, can take considerable time. Automated dashboards handle data collection and can eliminate repetitive manual work.

Around 58% of businesses currently use automation for data, reporting, and planning. McKinsey estimated that workflow automation has saved six in ten firms up to 30% of employee time on routine tasks like data gathering and formatting. Customer data platforms to consider include Kissmetrics and Twilio. 

Use AI to boost productivity and quality

In its relatively brief existence, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proven to help asset managers produce more high‑quality work in less time and perform at the level of much larger firms and marketing departments. The human element is crucial; you must add your own judgment.

Content creation, editing, and repurposing. AI can aid in drafting outlines, summarizing research, repurposing content, and personalizing communications. According to Bain, AI has produced a 20 percent average productivity gain for financial services firms in marketing, customer service, and software development, among others.

Improve personalization. AI tools can also make it easier to personalize emails and newsletters. Instead of using the same text for everyone, custom content can increase engagement and conversion rates.

Salesforce noted that financial‑services firms using its AI‑driven personalization capabilities have seen a 200 percent or more increase in conversions based on personalized versus generic approachesAI can help you segment your audiences. A wealth management firm, for instance, can use AI to segment its clients into retirees, pre-retirees, and relatively new investors, then, based on your input, create customized thought leadership articles and newsletters.

Campaign management. AI‑driven marketing automation platforms like HubSpot can help firms orchestrate many steps in how you and your prospect work together, from first contact through ongoing engagement. Currently, however, this automation has not been widely adopted. Only one in ten marketers has fully automated campaigns, about one‑third are mostly automated, and many others are merely partially automated.

Use Outsourced Talent to Boost Productivity and Reduce Costs

Today, approximately 27 percent of wealth managers outsource marketing to specialized partners, more than twice the rate just a few years ago.

Outsourcing gives firms a cost‑effective way to bring in specialist marketing talent for website development, copywriting, design, social media campaigns, analysis, and more. Outsourcing has reduced marketing costs by 15–30 percent in many cases.

Managers can outsource specific functions or entire marketing programs. Here’s a rundown:

Fractional CEOs for marketing strategy and planning

The fractional CMO model has gained popularity in asset management, particularly among boutique and emerging firms.

A fractional CMO can bring executive-level expertise, fresh thinking, mentoring, and industry-wide insights. They help avoid blind spots that develop when teams operate in silos. Firms gain strategic leadership without the potential six-figure salary, insurance, and retirement benefits you’d have to pay an internal leader.

Website development

If you only need a new website and not a fractional CMO, it may make sense to hire an experienced website team that knows your business and can bring messaging, copywriting, design, SEO, lead generation, and technical expertise. Website creators have specialized technical skills that you use infrequently. Keeping these capabilities in-house may not justify the cost.

Content creation and design

Thought leadership articles and blogs require writing and industry expertise. The same goes for video and podcast production and professional pitch book graphic design. These people don’t grow on trees, but they can help grow your business with outsourced expertise.

Digital advertising and social media management

Digital marketing has become an increasingly important and cost-effective way to reach more people. However, few asset managers and financial advisors have the technical and creative expertise to master social media, newsletter, email distribution, organic and paid search, and SEO. Many struggle with social media and SEO; they feel that it isn’t working for them. Only about two in ten financial advisors use SEO as part of their marketing strategy.

Build and Maintain a Strategic Marketing Focus

When resources are tight, you cannot market to everyone with assets. You need to focus on efforts that matter most.

Develop your core message

Many small marketing teams seem to start from scratch every time they begin a new website, pitch book, or email. If this is you, why waste the energy? You need a repeatable, disciplined framework to develop content. Marketing that delivers a great message has historically generated more than three times as many leads as traditional outbound campaigns, while costing about 62 percent less.

Focus on your high-value prospects and clients

Reaching the right audience is a top challenge in financial marketing. Focus on your high-value prospects and clients. Reaching the right audience is one of the biggest challenges, with 52 percent of organizations citing it as a top concern.

Boutique firms should create a strategy to segment and score their advisor prospects based on their potential value and the projected long-term revenue opportunity each advisor brings.

Engage the sales team

Asset management firms should empower their sales team to engage with advisors. Provide your wholesalers with the data and analysis they need to engage high-value advisors with the personal service that makes sense for each advisor or sales team.

Similarly, for wealth management firms, equip your advisors with client segmentation intelligence, market insights, and targeted content to build strong relationships with prospects and clients.

Align marketing budget with priorities

You need to show where each dollar spent creates value. But many marketers say they lack enough budget to execute their plans. To make matters more challenging, average marketing budgets across industries dropped to 7.7 percent of company revenues in 2024, down from 9.1 percent in 2023, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey.

Firms must rank their marketing activities by strategic importance and by measurable impact on leads, conversations, new clients, revenue, and retention. Grow the activities that support growth and trust and cut strategies that do not show a measurable return.

Boost Productivity by Measuring What Matters

Many financial organizations report difficulty measuring their marketing effectiveness. Approximately half don’t measure ROI.

You can’t do more with less if you spend time and effort on activities that you don’t measure results, or spend effort on campaigns that have little or no impact.

You can stand out by choosing a short list of meaningful metrics and linking them to business outcomes. Track sales data, including meetings set, proposals issued, net new assets, and retention for clients engaged. Track digital engagement metrics that reflect interest and trust, such as time on page, content downloads, webinar attendance, and email replies.

Use this data to hold quarterly “stop, start, continue” reviews. Stop initiatives that consistently underperform. Keep the efforts that show a straight line from marketing activity to result.

FAQs About How Financial Marketers Can Overcome Limited Capacity

How can a small firm compete with large brands in marketing?

You don’t. You compete by going focused and specific. You can serve a defined niche with useful insights that address the pain points and problems your clients actually ask about. Use proprietary or unique observations from your executive team and portfolio managers.

How much money can hiring outsourced marketing talent save?

Fractional CMOs may command $5,000 to $20,000 per month or more, depending on the time commitment and seniority. Full-service agencies might be at  $5,000 to $15,000 monthly retainers. Freelance writers might charge $300 to $500 per article or more.

Compare these costs to hiring a full-time person or team. A marketing manager’s salary plus benefits typically may exceed $100,000 annually. That doesn’t include recruiting costs, training time, or the risk of a bad hire.

What is the most common marketing mistake asset managers make in trying to do more with less?

A typical mistake is cutting back on strategically thinking about how you are different. High-level planning may feel like a luxury when resources are tight, and other needs are immediate, but without long-term planning, many firms default to generic branding. Bland and undifferentiated messaging does not move the needle. Don’t let this be you.

What happens if the outsourced relationship isn’t working out?

Any engagement should include reasonable provisions for exiting the relationship. Many firms avoid multi-year contracts and start with six-month or longer trial periods before committing to longer terms. Firms should document what they want delivered and provide objective criteria for evaluating performance. If problems arise, address them quickly and directly, preferably in person or by phone rather than by email. Don’t let frustration build.

Doing More with Less: How Asset Managers Can Solve Limited Marketing Capacity

Limited marketing capacity doesn’t have to limit your firm’s growth. The solution is acting strategically to leverage technology, external expertise, and branding efforts to multiply your internal team’s effectiveness.

The firms that will thrive in the coming years are those that focus their in efforts on what sets them apart.

Yes, you can do more marketing with less by focusing on the right audiences, smart automation, and selective outsourcing

Schedule a complimentary strategy session with Dan Sondhelm, CEO of Sondhelm Partners, to learn more about how to enrich your marketing efforts.

Frank Serebrin is the Content Marketing Director for Sondhelm Partners. He leads strategic and creative content and marketing services for our asset management and wealth management clients.