What is Marketing Materials on Demand (MMoD)?
Merrill Lynch financial advisors use an online tool to create their own marketing materials. As originally designed, the Marketing Materials on Demand (MMoD) platform wasn’t meeting their needs and they were expressing their frustration.
I was tasked by the marketing team with analyzing and improving the user experience.
By simplifying the existing user flow, streamlining the interface, and expanding the design template options, overall site use increased between 35-50%.
Financial advisors clearly appreciated the effort and so did the Gramercy Institute, which selected our team for a Financial Marketing Strategy Award.
We sought feedback from financial advisors who had been using the platform. Their input helped identify pain points, including the need for:
• a simplified process
• a more user-friendly interface
• templates that could accommodate larger teams
• templates that allowed advisors to list all of their professional designations
• templates with multiple photo options, including larger team and individual photos
We identified missing functionality and captured new requirements, which became the building block for the interface and template redesign.
In focus groups, advisors told us that:
• they found the original site to be confusing to use
• the platform did not provide all of the choices they needed to create their own custom digital marketing materials
Our team was able to streamline the user flow to just six logical steps.
Working in conjunction with our external technology vendor, LiveTechnology, we were able to modify an off-the-shelf platform to better meet the needs of Merrill Lynch financial advisors.
When logging into MMoD, advisors now experience an easier-to-use interface and a greater range of design options that allows them to select, customize, and create digital marketing materials that tells their story to their clients and prospects.
With redefined requirements identified, I created a lockup that visually defined how a financial advisor would be represented.
Variations were created for Primary and Secondary team members. The number of team members and the size and format of the selected template helped determine which content would be available for inclusion.
The advisor lockup became the building block on which all modular templates would be based.
The biggest takeaway from focus groups was the need for more template variations. Advisor teams wanted more options to tell their story to their clients and prospects.
Using the modular lockup, I created new templates for flyers, fact sheets, event invitations, and a variety of brochure sizes. Each template was designed to accommodate a range of team sizes and align with new strategy initiatives from Merrill Lynch.
Since the introduction of the new templates, fact sheet template requests increased by over 35%; brochure template requests increased by 50%.
