Clients deserve to know. But they should also WANT to know.

As the business grew through acquisition, I developed a more scalable approach to client communication without losing the familiarity people already trusted. Behavioural evidence then helped turn that principle into a wider creative and content model.

The challenge

In March 2025 alone, seven adviser businesses joined the business, adding approximately £500m in assets under management and 25 employees. Thousands of clients were becoming part of a larger national organisation, often after years of dealing with the same adviser or local firm.

Growth created an obvious requirement for greater consistency. The less obvious risk was that standardisation could make the business feel less personal at precisely the moment clients needed reassurance.

My remit increasingly sat across that tension: establishing the communication approach, shaping how the business and familiar adviser voices appeared together, and coordinating Marketing, advisers and specialist teams around a model that could work repeatedly as the organisation grew.

The principle was simple: clients deserve to know what is happening, but they should also have a reason to want to know.

That became a creative standard rather than a copywriting line.

Protecting trust while the organisation changed

The formal legal acquisition confirmation was managed by the M&A team and issued through the acquired business. My work began after that point.

I developed a repeatable post-acquisition sequence that introduced the business without making the existing adviser relationship suddenly feel corporate. It opened with a welcome from the business’s CEO, followed by a dedicated newsletter explaining the organisation, what clients could expect and what joining the wider group meant. Familiar adviser voices remained part of the communication rather than disappearing behind a central brand.

That was an important creative judgement. Greater consistency was necessary, but consistency did not require removing the people who already carried trust.

It also meant thinking about executive communication as part of the client experience. The CEO’s voice established confidence in the larger organisation; advisers provided continuity and familiarity. Marketing’s role was to make those voices work together rather than allowing either to dominate.

When the full sequence was implemented, clients replied directly to both the business’s CEO and their existing advisers with positive feedback. The process also identified missing or incorrect email addresses during migration and was subsequently reused across further acquisitions.

Later behaviour strengthened the hypothesis. When Customer Thermometer feedback communications moved from individual advisers to a central sender, engagement reduced. The data did not establish causation, but it reinforced the importance of familiarity when deciding how communication should be structured.

Challenging what the usual metrics told us

I applied the same scrutiny to regular investment communications.

A traditional 20-minute market update was sent to 5,050 clients and generated 242 views, a 4.8% view rate. But clicks and views were not the interesting part. Viewers watched an average of 6m 18s, or 32% of the video. Only 35% reached halfway, 17% reached the final 60 seconds and there were 34 estimated full or near-full views.

The expert content remained valuable. The format was asking too much of the audience.

I used the evidence to challenge the assumption that comprehensive information automatically made better communication. We moved towards a more focused seven-minute version, shaped partly by the subjects that had previously held attention.

It reached 281 viewers from 5,300 clients, a 5.3% view rate. More importantly, average percentage watched rose from 32% to 70%. Halfway retention increased from 35% to 72%, final-minute retention from 17% to 49%, and estimated full or near-full views increased from 34 to 118, approximately 3.5 times as many.

The decision was not to make everything shorter. It was to design around the amount of attention clients were actually willing to give.

My working principle became: start with the shortest useful explanation, then allow people to choose how deeply they want to go.

Turning evidence into creative direction

That insight changed more than the next video.

I worked across Web Development, Design, Investment and Compliance towards a layered content model in which clients could understand the central point quickly, scan key information, use graphics and summaries, watch relevant video, access deeper commentary when wanted and find a clear route back to their adviser.

This required alignment between different priorities. Investment protected technical substance. Compliance protected accuracy and regulatory requirements. Web Development translated the experience into a functional product. My role was to establish and maintain the communication principle connecting them.

The Autumn Budget 2025 became the strongest test.

I changed the planning process so content development, approvals, technical preparation, adviser communication and creative development began earlier. That created enough space to develop a dedicated Budget Resource rather than defaulting to another piece of long-form expert commentary.

The final experience used modular content pods, graphics, imagery and anchor navigation to let clients move directly to relevant subjects and choose their preferred level of depth. Following the Budget announcement, it was completed, approved by Compliance, communicated to advisers and issued to clients within 24 hours.

It generated 650 page views and 417 active users, with average engagement time of 1m 52s per active user. It became one of the ten most-viewed pages on the website during the reporting period and the fourth-largest landing page shown in the report, with 532 sessions and 385 active users.

The business’s always-on Investment Insight page recorded average engagement of 51 seconds per active user. The temporary Budget resource achieved approximately 2.2 times that engagement time.

The point was not that one page had beaten another. It was that clients were demonstrably willing to spend time with complex financial information when the experience respected how they wanted to consume it.

What changed

The work moved client communication beyond producing and distributing information.

A repeatable acquisition model helped the business’s senior leadership, advisers and Marketing communicate as one organisation without erasing local trust. Behavioural evidence changed the format of investment communication and informed a broader digital content model. Earlier planning gave creative, technical and regulatory teams more room to produce stronger work under compressed deadlines.

I also introduced clearer ownership and templated approaches for adviser reallocation communications, categorising messages as critical, informational or marketing, and worked with Compliance on when clients should be contacted. CRM Customer Insights exploration began creating groundwork for more detailed behavioural analysis and personalisation, without claiming a capability that was not yet complete.

The outputs were different, but the creative leadership problem was consistent: identify what clients were actually doing, make a judgement about what needed to change, align the right people around that judgement and turn the strongest ideas into something the organisation could repeat.

For a growing advice business, that became the standard: clients deserve to know, but they should also have a reason to want to know.