Marketing within financial institutions has never been more visible — or more scrutinized. Teams are producing more content than ever before: fund updates, investor letters, macro outlooks, earnings commentary, newsletters, videos, and one-pagers tailored for every audience and every market condition.

Yet, for all this effort and sophistication, most firms still cannot answer the most basic question with any certainty: which of our materials are actually influencing capital decisions?

The Attribution Black Box

In financial services, where trust and relationships often determine outcomes, marketing content is central to the sales process. But unlike sales teams, which track pipeline progression and close rates, marketing teams are often left relying on shallow metrics: opens, downloads, and click-through rates.

These metrics may suggest activity — but they rarely provide insight. Did the recipient open the fund strategy deck and read through the risk section? Did they forward it internally? Did they revisit it after the investor day?

Most firms have no idea.

According to Forrester’s 2023 B2B Measurement Study, only 26% of marketing leaders in high-consideration sales environments say they’re confident in linking marketing efforts to revenue. That figure is likely even lower in financial services, where interactions happen behind login walls, via PDFs, gated data rooms, or 1:1 email exchanges.

A Relationship Business with Commodity Data

Financial services prides itself on precision. Portfolios are stress-tested. Risk is modeled to the fifth decimal. But when it comes to understanding how institutional investors engage with their materials, most firms are still flying blind.

Consider the following:

• An asset manager distributes a monthly insights report to 2,000 LPs. The only feedback? A Mailchimp open rate.
  
  

• A private equity firm sends its 80-page fundraise deck to a list of prospects. One email response comes back. Silence from the rest.
  
  

• A bank hosts a webinar for corporate clients. Dozens attend. But which slide led them to request a follow-up meeting? Unknown.

In the absence of content-level and contact-level analytics, even the best marketing team is left guessing.

This isn’t just a missed opportunity — it’s a liability. As CFOs and managing partners apply pressure to tie every dollar of spend to results, marketing is being asked to show its direct impact on fundraising, deal sourcing, and client retention.

And the stakes are high. In 2024, financial services firms are spending upwards of 8–10% of revenue on marketing and client engagement, per McKinsey’s Financial Marketing Benchmark. Yet few can defend that spend with real behavioral data.

Meanwhile, the firms that can — those using advanced engagement analytics — are already gaining competitive advantages through data driven outreach, content optimization, and sales alignment.

AI Has Changed the Rules — But Not the Mindset

AI has transformed investment analysis, portfolio construction, and even compliance workflows. But its application in client intelligence — particularly in understanding how institutional audiences interact with content — remains underutilized.

Why? Because many firms still treat marketing as a distribution function, not a source of intelligence.

Forward-thinking teams are now using AI to analyze reading time, document navigation behavior, and intra-firm sharing. This reveals intent long before a prospect fills out a form or replies to an email. It allows firms to see not only who is reading — but what they care about and when.

In capital markets, where timing and trust are everything, knowing exactly how your materials are performing can be the difference between a missed opportunity and a closed deal.

Marketing Deserves Real Measurement

Your team is already doing the hard part — crafting thoughtful, compliance-approved materials that communicate your value to sophisticated stakeholders. What’s missing is the intelligence layer: the ability to measure that work meaningfully and use it to drive decisions.

Financial professionals don’t rely on gut instinct to manage risk or allocate capital. Marketing shouldn’t either.

Sources:

• Forrester, B2B Marketing Measurement and Attribution Benchmark Survey 2023

• McKinsey & Company, Marketing in Financial Services: Benchmark Report 2024

• Gartner, CMO Spend and Strategy Survey 2024

• Deloitte, State of AI in Financial Services, 2023