Navigating the Complexities of Portfolio Allocation with the Real Assets Compass
A modern digital marketing tool that enables financial advisors to make a sophisticated sales process thought-provoking, educational, and powerfully engaging.
Cohen & Steers, a long-time client of MBLM and a leading investment-led manager best known for private and listed real assets, wanted to create a tangible execution of its ambition to provide education in the real estate asset class, arm its sales team with sales enablement tools, and generate leads.
In addition to targeting institutional buyers, Cohen & Steers markets to the advisor and wealth community members who recommend portfolio allocations to their clients. These financial professionals need modern ways to support their sales conversations and increasingly rely on digital experiences.
The Real Assets Compass enables advisors and their end clients to explore the benefits of adding listed and private real estate to their portfolio allocations. The tool facilitates the comparison of the risk and return of different total allocations to real estate and adjusts the mix between listed and private. After exploring these differences, the advisor or prospective client can download a customized report that represents a snapshot of the investment allocations they have made. This can create a talking point in subsequent sales conversations, arm the investor with concrete data when discussing the matter with other stakeholders, and serve as a branded artifact that ties back to Cohen & Steers.
MBLM worked closely with the client’s digital marketing and IT team to develop and refine the proposed user flow with which a prospect would explore portfolio data. The user interface design was seamlessly extrapolated from the robust user interface design system we had previously developed. Given the nature of today’s content consumption on the go and in brief moments, MBLM optimized the experience for mobile devices and incorporated animation and a dynamic user experience to create a delightful feel. Our role in the visualization of complex data that represent portfolio allocations, along with 10-year expectations for the growth of a representative million-dollar investment, was to make the data as visually impactful, simple, and refined as possible. The MBLM design team enjoyed the challenge of balancing available screen area with UI elements and data representation to create a seamless whole.
Having designed and built the Cohen & Steers corporate website, MBLM recommended integrations with multiple areas of the site for promoting the Real Assets Compass. MBLM put a funnel measurement approach in place and is continuously monitoring the tool’s performance. We are making adjustments to the user interface and flow regularly with the objective of reducing friction and increasing the conversion rate from site visitor to marketing qualified lead.
