The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – August 2024
The ProFundCom team has curated the best events, opinions, insights and resources relating to digital marketing from the previous month and looking forward to the month ahead. The team not only look to bring you the best articles for investment managers and hedge funds but also articles, in general, that marketers find useful.
Many funds will agree that the ‘old ways’ of reaching investors feel like aeons ago.If you dug up a marketing time capsule, you’d find a range of dusty monthly periodicals, ‘80s business cards and a FundForum brochure. Nowadays, everything has been replaced with a laptop or an iPhone, and so have the channels they showcase. Time has inexplicably changed how potential investors research and engage with a fund before deciding to part with their money. But it’s taken fund marketers some time to catch them up, let alone stay ahead. While it’s still unknown which future digital paths investors will take, the only surety is that they are likely to muddy the waters even more. After all, the modern buyer journey comprises multiple destinations – touchpoints through social media, websites, portals and subscription forms – where each contact joins at any non-linear stage. Only the most prepared funds will capture their attention to generate and convert leads. Read more
Features
Marketing Week – System 1 and System 2 aren’t in competition – they are equal partners
While no one can argue that the market research industry hasn’t been successful using mainstream methods, likewise no one can argue that we haven’t had our fair share of misses when it comes to new products, brand strategy, and predicting consumer behaviour. Because as we all know, people act differently in the moment than how they say they do or will in the future. The majority of consumer research, both past and present, heavily leans on direct questioning of respondents in the form of quantitative questionnaires or qualitative interviews. We have learned over the years that in most cases, consumers try to be honest and accurate but also respond with rationalisation, untruths, inaccurate estimations, or, in some cases, can’t explain their behaviours at all. Read more
White Marble – Make your marketing more efficient and cost-effective
Knowing your audience is the secret to success for any company, in any sector. Demonstrating that you understand their needs, wants and fears is the key to showing why your company’s products and services are best for them. Where most companies go wrong is not being absolutely clear on who their target audience is and not knowing where/how they consume information. What seems like a very simple task is in practice very difficult. How granular do you go? Not being precise can cost you in time, effort and budget. Read more
Bruce Frumerman – Are You Misallocating Your Fund’s Content Marketing Budget?
Marketing content beyond just performance reporting is important for money management firms for two key reasons. First, it provides a means of expressing the intellectual acumen of management at the investment firm to prospective and current investors. This is vital because fund performance data is but a validation of how money managers think and run their strategy implementation. Second, content marketing increases the odds of an investment firm being top-of-mind at the right time when an investor who has been conducting due diligence on them decides the time has come to pick which manager on their short list of interesting funds is worth getting their new allocation. Sophisticated investors in their due diligence vetting of funds and their managers are looking to ascertain what a portfolio manager’s investment beliefs are, as this shapes the approach managers take to investing in their asset class of choice. Also, they want to be able to understand and buy into how the portfolio manager assembles and manages his or her basket of holdings. Only with this information in hand can investors make their subjective judgement call as to whether they think a manager’s returns were more likely due to skill than luck, and what differentiates them from similarly performing competitors. Read more
Resources
Benchmarking
The ProFundCom Digital Marketing Benchmark provides real-time access to all of ProFundCom’s digital marketing data from over the last 20 years, giving users the ability to compare how their marketing campaigns are performing versus sector peers. Further details of how other organisations are carrying out similar processes and the associated results are also available. The anonymised data is over 10 terabytes in size (which interestingly is the amount of data produced by the Hubble Space Telescope per year!) and will be split into different industry sectors as well as AuM. Access ProFundCom Benchmarking here
As a fund marketer, testing your email marketing campaigns on different devices and email clients is one of the most important tasks. Couple that with compliance, avoiding the JUNK folder, and avoiding getting added to blacklists. What most fund marketers have found is that generic mailing platforms just don’t have that ability. Whilst ProFundCom has this built into our platform, we have made this available as a free service if you are a financial marketer. If you provide us with the HTML in the form below we will run the following tests on the email
Instant Previews – Instantly see how your email will appear on over 70 different email clients Instant Blacklist Report – See whether your sending address is blacklisted on popular domain blacklists Instant SPAM Check – Rate how likely your email will end up in Junk folders Instant Compliance – Compare your email’s content against compliance heuristics
