The three A’s reshaping financial marketing

Three key themes are redefining asset management marketing, Fundamental Media’s latest roundtable conversation revealed

Key points:

• While advisers remain the primary audience for most asset managers, their needs, behaviours and decision-making ecosystems are changing fast. One of the most discussed shifts (apart from the preference for passive solutions) was the rise of managed accounts, now used by over 58% of advisers in Australia.
• The promise of artificial intelligence was another major topic at the roundtable. While adoption is still varied, most marketers agreed that AI is no longer an emerging trend – it’s a necessary tool.
• Most marketers spend 80% of their time on pre-click creative, and just 20% on post-click experience. Yet this is where engagement, lead capture and conversion often happen.

 
Three key themes – audience, AI and adaptability – are rapidly redefining how marketing teams operate and succeed in financial services.

This was the main finding of Fundamental Media’s first financial marketing roundtable of the year, bringing together senior marketers from leading asset management firms across Australia to explore the most pressing challenges marketers are facing in a landscape marked by increased regulatory scrutiny, shifting investor expectations, and a wave of digital transformation.

Audience: A shifting landscape of influence

While advisers remain the primary audience for most asset managers, their needs, behaviours and decision-making ecosystems are changing fast.

One of the most discussed shifts (apart from the preference for passive solutions) was the rise of managed accounts, now used by over 58% of advisers in Australia. According to the latest Zenith report, 92% of advisers who use managed accounts report time savings and overall satisfaction – an insight that can’t be ignored by marketers.

But with scale and efficiency becoming the new battleground, the conversation focused on the growing influence of asset consultants in adviser decision-making. As more advisers delegate portfolio construction to consultants, it’s only natural to ask: Should we be building strategies for this new audience too?

While the number of financial advisers has declined, the number of Australians seeking advice continues to grow. This gap puts pressure on marketers to communicate value more clearly, simplify their messaging, and provide tools that support advisers’ need for ease of use, compliance and client engagement.

Short-form content has emerged as a clear winner. Videos under 90 seconds, interactive explainers, and concise insights are becoming the norm – yet several roundtable participants also flagged compliance as a barrier to producing and approving this content efficiently.

AI: From curiosity to capability

The promise of artificial intelligence was another major topic at the roundtable. While adoption is still varied, most marketers agreed that AI is no longer an emerging trend – it’s a necessary tool.

Many teams are experimenting with custom-trained versions of ChatGPT to generate content aligned to their tone of voice, while others are exploring tools like Jasper for secure, closed-environment content development.

So far, the most common use cases are:

• Headline creation and repackaging: turning long articles into bite-sized assets for marketing purposes
• Compliance checks – using tools like RedMarker to flag regulatory issues in marketing copy
• Voice-to-text automation – for internal comms and CRM updates using platforms like “Hey Dan”

Still, a question lingers: Can AI deliver more than operational efficiency? Can it help with campaign activation and drive campaign performance? At Fundamental Media we think it can, so we have developed several solutions to overcome this challenge.

Adaptability: The need for speed

As markets shift and headlines evolve daily, marketers are being asked to react faster with limited time, shrinking teams and ever-growing expectations.

To help clients meet this demand, Alphix Solutions (Fundamental Group’s marketing technology business) has developed the AI Asset Builder, a tool that scans market headlines and matches them against a firm’s website content, creating new marketing assets (including digital banners, Google Search ads or social posts) in real time.

One client used the AI Asset Builder to launch a timely fixed income campaign just 24 hours after a major central bank announcement, repurposing existing insights into a new, relevant format.

It doesn’t eliminate the compliance hurdle, but it does enable marketing teams to go to market more efficiently with messaging that’s timely and aligned to market movements. What typically takes 6–9 months of campaign planning, messaging development and asset creation can now be accelerated dramatically, giving marketers a way to stay relevant without sacrificing control or budget.

The post-click gap: Fixing the forgotten funnel

While tools like this solve for the pre-click experience, what happens after the user lands on a campaign page?

We posed this question during the roundtable, which revealed most marketers spend 80% of their time on pre-click creative, and just 20% on post-click experience. Yet this is where engagement, lead capture and conversion often happen.

Post-click optimisation is an area with untapped potential. While many teams focus on developing compelling pre-click assets, the post-click experience – where true engagement and conversion happen – is often harder to optimise.

This is often due to fragmented data, limited understanding of which data truly drives user engagement, and platform limitations that make it difficult to act quickly. Many teams also struggle with stretched internal resources and a lack of specialist UX support. With Alphix Solutions, marketers can now have access to this data, allowing them to report on more meaningful post-click metrics.

Unlike banners and ads, campaign landing pages are not always designed to be dynamic or easily adaptable, making it harder to deliver a seamless, relevant experience once the user arrives.

Furthermore, many marketers shared concerns around the personalisation of ads based on segmentation, which the roundtable participants felt was often surface-level and fails to drive meaningful engagement, while also not being very dynamic in terms of timings. This has two root causes:

1. Fragmented data and martech stacks. Roundtable participants mentioned the difficulty in personalising messaging due to the small data sets available in Australia.
2. Compliance bottlenecks that slow execution and reduce creative agility. Due to this, marketers need to think about the opportunity cost of focusing on personalisation versus other optimisation techniques.

As marketers, it’s important to look beyond the click and ask:

1. How do we ensure more users are arriving at the website?
2. Are they engaging with the campaign page and finding what they came for?
3. How can we better track their journey and gather meaningful feedback internally?

To address these questions, here are some solutions:

1. LLM-O: Structuring websites for AI-readiness

As search behaviour shifts toward AI-powered “answer engines” like ChatGPT and Perplexity, traditional SEO alone isn’t enough. In mid-2024, Alphix Solutions started tracking traffic volumes from answer engines. We observed that, while the site traffic referred by answer engines was very small, it was essentially doubling every three months between January 2024 and December 2024. Over the same period, site traffic from organic site has declined 30%. If this rate of growth continues, by the end of 2025, the site traffic referred by answer engines may rival that of paid search.

But while marketers are well versed in SEO, optimising websites for answer engines is a different ballgame. LLM-O is about optimising content and structure for visibility in these emerging platforms.

• Focus on clean content structure and lexical density
• Publish content in a question-and-answer format
• Avoid JavaScript-heavy or iframe-based content
• Introduce structured files like llms.txt to guide language models

 
Early tests Alphix Solutions has done show that properly structured sites can see traffic increases of over 200% from AI engines.

2. UJO: Rethinking landing page structure

Using interactive elements and reworking page layouts can significantly improve engagement and reduce bounce rates. This includes modular content blocks, collapsible sections, and targeted calls-to-action that reflect the campaign message.

Adopting dynamic and interactive landing pages also helps to improve message retention.

3. Alphix Solutions: Smarter tagging for deeper insights

Accurate data tagging across your digital properties enables more reliable tracking and analytics. Alphix Solutions helps uncover user behaviours often missed by traditional analytics platforms.

• Enhances reporting accuracy across platforms
• Helps link user actions to content performance
• Addresses known under-reporting issues in tools like Adobe and Google Analytics, which can range from 40% to as high as 80%

 
Toward a more responsive marketing model

The roundtable made one thing clear: financial marketers are facing different challenges both internally and externally. As a trusted partner, we want to ensure we are supporting marketers in an evolution that requires:

• A deeper understanding of shifting audiences;
• The smart, strategic use of AI (beyond content generation); and
• A renewed focus on the user journey, both before and after the click.

At Fundamental Media, we’re committed to helping marketers lead this transformation through the integrated capabilities of Aureum, Sonar and Alphix Solutions. If you're looking to move faster, market smarter and adapt in real time, let's keep the conversation going.