The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – October 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.
Post of the Month
With Intelligence – Dubai Reigns Supreme as Middle East Hedge Fund Hub
Is Dubai the Future of Hedge Fund Expansion? One in four of the top 100 hedge funds have now registered a presence in Dubai, according to the latest With Intelligence research. At least 37 billion dollar firms managing more than $510bn in hedge fund assets have now set up in Dubai. Compare this to local rival, Abu Dhabi, who count at least seven billion dollar firms with regional offices. Download Report
Features
Marketing Week – Marketers are often playing a second game of chess against an unseen opponent
Marketers usually know when and where to pick their battles – but an unseen change in approach can fundamentally alter everything they’ve planned in an instant. Every couple of years Byron Sharp writes to me and sends me a copy of ‘How Brands Grow’. Flattering though it is to hear from the professor, the imposter in me wonders if he actually thinks my marketing stinks so much, he has to keep sending me his little masterpiece in evidence-based marketing science. But re-reading this excellent book for the third time reminds me of how easy it is to get brand strategy wrong. To forget that behaviour often drives attitude, that the biggest brands have more customers that stay with them for longer, and that these very same customers often use competitor brands too. But perhaps the most poignant reminder is that building and maintaining brand salience must be the foundation of any decent brand strategy. Read more
FMC Alpha – 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
Cognito – Off the Record or Not? The Real Meaning of the Chatham House Rule for Financial Events
The Chatham House rule is widely misunderstood, and that can be a source of risk for companies. With Sibos and Money2020 coming up, clarity is important. The confusion is this: many involved in financial services marketing and events have learnt by osmosis that the Chatham House rule means “off the record” – i.e. you can’t publicly use material that you hear in this or that session. In fact, the Chatham House rule means “not for attribution”, as you can see on Chatham House’s website below. You are entirely at liberty to use anything you hear; you simply can’t say who said it or identify others present. The risks to a corporate speaker from that vary. If the information discussed is generic – e.g. many software companies are discounting prices – it’s probably not a problem. But if a speaker says “Since we’re under the Chatham House rule, I can tell you that we at ABC Software company have been discounting” – that’s more likely to be a problem, both in terms of the information disclosed and the fact that the likely source is often apparent. Read more
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
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
