Financial Media Exchange Marketing & Branding

FMeX delivers a powerful, intelligent and intuitive app experience that allows you to easily and securely deliver the most relevant content directly from your desktop and mobile devices.

Financial Media Exchange Problem

The stakeholders of Financial Media Exchange (FMeX) had a vision and a business plan. The FMeX platform would help Financial Advisors manage their entire content marketing process on the FMeX platform. Being able to manage content creation, distribution and measurement on one platform, it makes the Advisor’s marketing and lead generation quick and easy: Ultimately generating more valuable communication with clients and leads, and growing their revenue stream.

The stakeholders of Financial Media Exchange (FMeX) had a vision and a business plan. The FMeX platform would help Financial Advisors manage their entire content marketing process on the FMeX platform. Being able to manage content creation, distribution and measurement on one platform, it makes the Advisor’s marketing and lead generation quick and easy: Ultimately generating more valuable communication with clients and leads, and growing their revenue stream.

What the stakeholders did not have is the FMeX application itself, or any creative digital and print marketing material to promote and sell the application to prospects. This is where me and my team came in.

Financial Media Exchange Creative Marketing Strategy

Along with the FMeX stakeholders, I devised a plan to implement the development of the web application as well as the marketing to support the sales of the application.

Along with the FMeX stakeholders, I devised a plan to implement the development of the web application as well as the marketing to support the sales of the application. This section details the Creative Marketing Strategy. The target goal was upfront and simple, get the prospects to ultimately sign up for a free trial. Once a trial user, our internal sales and automated email marketing would guide them through to ultimately buy a subscription at the end of the trial of FMeX.

The initial target was what we called the retail channel. Gathering information about the end user, we devised personas to market to. These personas were technology inclined Financial Advisors, both men and women, between the ages of 30 – 55.

Knowing whom to market to, we set about devising what deliverables would be required to sell the application, and to make it easy to sell by offering a free trial of the platform. There were obvious factors, this demographic is more inclined to use social media, email and the web. We still needed traditional print marketing for drip campaigns, to remind the prospects of FMeX.

What we found we needed is a gamut of deliverables: visual brand identity, a marketing website, social media content campaign, html email campaigns, a print marketing campaign to include mailers, sales sheets and brochures, tradeshow and conference banners and signage, and variations of these deliverables for white label sales.

Financial Media Exchange Solutions and Deliverables

This is an overview of the deliverables created for FMeX, including their marketing website, postcard mailer, business cards and sales product sales sheet.

The deliverables to create the brand identity and creative marketing strategy for Financial Media Exchange included: Brand / logo guide, FMeX marketing website, social media profile creation (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram) and content creation as well as management. Additional digital marketing included html marketing emails, email and website advertising banner ads, both static and animated, website promotional landing pages. Print collateral included sales sheets, brochures, custom mailers, tradeshow banners and booth artwork, print advertising as well trial card and sleeve to mail and handout.

The marketing of Financial Media Exchange is an ongoing process, in under 2 years we have seen the business grow to thousands or retail and enterprise subscribers. The Marketing efforts to promote the FMeX application have done a tremendous job in building awareness in the Financial Tech Industry and with Financial Advisors. FMeX has gained many content and technology partners such as Redtail Technology and Morningstar, as well as channel partners in the industry such as XY Planning Network, BNY Mellon and Fidelity to name a few.

Since the soft launch of the product and marketing campaign for Financial Media Exchange in late September 2015, we generated a great amount of interest and traffic through digital, print and social media marketing. Over 50,000 unique sessions and 80,000 page views from soft launch through October of 2017. We also on boarded thousands of clients through the same time period.

My Contribution

  • Creative/Art Direction
  • UX/UI Design
  • Web/Graphic Design
  • Front End Development
  • Copywriting

Project Deliverables

This is an overview of the deliverables created for FMeX, including their marketing website, postcard mailer, business cards and sales product sales sheet.
We devised a plan for social media publications that included custom generated imagery, using branding guidelines. We posted on a regular basis on topics such as financial news, financial factoids, product updates and FMeX business partnerships. The ongoing social media campaign grows awareness of the product in the industry and converts prospects to trial users. Social content designed and developed in Photoshop an Illustrator.
An essential part of the sales kit, the application walkthrough is used to present the application to potential clients and channel partners alike. Shared with a larger firm or office with multiple users, this piece is a follow up to the live demonstration of the FMeX application, and a secondary marketing piece to the product sales sheet and marketing website. Layout and design done in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.
The cornerstone of FMeX’s online presence, the Marketing website is a living, breathing entity. Constantly being updated for upcoming demonstrations, New news and resource publications, the website gives you all the information you need about FMeX in once central, easy to navigate location. The websites UI was designed in illustrator by myself and my graphic designer, and then was built by myself and my backend developer using technologies such as AWS, SASS, CSS, HTML, PHP, JS, AJAX, MySQL. This is a dynamic website, we custom built publishing features to easily be able to add content to the website, and pull content from the FMeX application itself.
I created this 1 page logo and branding guide so that internal and external designers and users would be able to know how to use our logo and what company fonts and color pallet are designated for Financial Media Exchange. The layout and design was done in Illustrator.
My designers and I created a plethora of responsive HTML marketing emails for different FMeX marketing campaigns. I oversaw and had my hands in the design, development and actual sending of the campaigns and follow up emails, managed through MailChimp and our internal FMeX web application.
I, along with my team, created the print and direct mail marketing materials for FMeX, including product sales sheets, trial cards, application overview brochure, business plan design and layout, FMeX postcards, direct mailers and much more. We also created co-branded and white labeled versions of our marketing material to share with FMeX’s channel partners.
Additional to the main marketing website, I created microsites and landing pages for our channel partners to be able to market and sell the FMeX application. This included XY Planning Network and Redtail Technology to name a few. These we designed in Illustrator and Photoshop, then developed with technologies such as AWS, SASS, CSS, HTML, PHP, JS, AJAX, MySQL.
Along with direct mail, social and email marketing, a big part of breaking into the FinTech (Financial Technology) industry for FMeX is attending financial conferences to showcase the FMeX application in direct view of its intended audience, the Financial Advisor. Over the past few years, my team and I designed and developed targeted, and well thought out pull up banners and booth artwork to promote the FMeX product. Large scale designs designed in Illustrator, pull up banner sizes are 33” x 90”, and booth artwork (not shown) is 10’ x 10’.