Stopping the guesswork. How to create campaigns that can be tested, learned from and scaled

By Darren Lassiter, Senior Partner at Arthur

Struggling to decide where to allocate marketing spend?

Every year, asset management marketing teams face the same debate,
more sales events, more advertising, more partnership activity  or simply repeat last year and hope for better results.

These conversations recur because little is ever conclusively proven. Activity shifts, budgets move, but learning rarely carries forward. Planning resets each year.
That is the cycle asset management marketing needs to break.

The real problem - activity without evidence

Most asset managers are not short of marketing activity. Advertising runs, events take place and content is produced in abundance. What is missing is confidence about where spend genuinely makes a difference.

That’s because testing usually focuses on ads, formats or channels. These tests may improve execution, but they don’t answer the bigger question, which marketing activity actually drives the business forward?

The most useful evidence doesn’t come from optimising individual executions. It comes from observing what happens when campaigns are planned, run and compared over time.

What we mean by a campaign

A campaign is not an ad or a burst of media.
A campaign is a system, a connected set of activity built around one organising idea, designed to work over time.

Typically combining:

• advertising to build familiarity and preference
• content to establish credibility and relevance
• events or experiences to create commitment
• sales enablement to support real conversations

Testing only works at this level, because this is how marketing actually influences decisions.

What effective brands do differently

The most effective brands treat testing as a planning discipline, not an optimisation exercise. They vary campaign systems, commit long enough to learn, compare approaches and carry learning forward. Over time, evidence compounds instead of disappearing when activity ends.

What this means for asset management

Asset management has all the conditions that make campaign-level testing essential, priority accounts, long decision cycles, multiple stakeholders and complex buying journeys.

Aligned to sales reality, campaign testing allows teams to answer questions such as:

• Does a campaign built around a category entry point enhance product first messaging across priority accounts?
• Does sustained, consistent presence improve the quality of sales conversations over time?
• Do integrated campaigns deliver stronger AUM outcomes than disconnected product pushes?

These are not theoretical questions. They reflect how decisions are actually made.

Ending the annual reset

Campaign testing replaces opinion with evidence. Learning accumulates. Marketing aligns more closely with sales objectives. Decisions become easier to defend. Planning stops being an annual reset.

This is the lens we apply with clients moving away from ad-led thinking and towards campaigns that can be tested, learned from and scaled.

For more insight into how we help asset managers make the case for a campaign approach to testing, please reach out to darrenlassiter@arthurlondon.com