The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – April 2026
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.
Marketing Week – Top marketers on what effective marketing looks like
What separates effective marketing from the rest? Talking to senior marketing leaders, a consistent theme emerges: effectiveness is defined not by how much is spent or how visible a campaign is, but by its ability to deliver measurable business outcomes over time.
Munnawar Chishty, CMO of Carlsberg Britvic, points to the importance of alignment between strategy and execution. “Effective marketing is when clear strategy, creativity and execution combine to deliver measurable business outcomes,” she says.
She also challenges the role budget plays in defining success. “Budget affects the speed and scale of impact, but not the standard.” Instead, effectiveness comes down to deliberate decision-making: “Effectiveness comes from choices — where to play, what to prioritise and how consistently we invest,” she explains.
Alpha Agency – Institutional vs. wealth content: Where is the line blurring?
As investment marketers, we’re well-aware of the benefits of highly customized, segment-specific content.
As a content marketer in this space, I dream of –
Institutional: A sharp, strategic calendar of research-driven thought leadership paired with product-specific collateral and client-specific insights to arm relationship managers for every meeting.
Wealth: A high-frequency pipeline of skim-friendly, multimedia insights and actionable education to meet every need.
Firms with the resources and know-how to take such a targeted approach will often see impact.
Attention could be considered the most precious, finite resource of the digital age. Our Netflix, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Spotify algorithms get us, and are getting better at feeding us content that we like, keeping our attention. The success of these platforms is largely due to personalization.
In the world of investment management, the same conditions prevail. Investors are bombarded with content, and so are more selective than ever. Whether you’re communicating with an institutional allocator, an IFA, or a wealth manager, generic messaging no longer cuts through. Inboxes and feeds are full. Attention is short. And with so many options, the cost of irrelevance is highly relevant.
The investment managers that are winning today are those that treat personalization not as something that retail marketers do, but as a core part of their marketing infrastructure.
The artificial intelligence bubble feels fit to burst
Digitalisation has been lightning-fast this side of the millennium, and AI represents one of its most seismic underground to mainstream hits. It’s not just a talking point: it’s a data processing behemoth with a predictive analytical mind beyond comprehension.
So much so that an estimated $35 billion has been invested in fintech AI applications. The returns of which, however, have been diminishing. For all its positives for personalisation, automated outreach and data segmentation, funds are struggling to see how it empowers their marketers to set their offerings apart. Investment is a people’s industry requiring customer psychology, storytelling and relationship building to excel – areas where AI capability is constantly playing catch up.
Given these costly moves the financial industry has taken and the technology’s growing sophistication, AI is not going anywhere.
In this comprehensive report, we’ll cross-examine why firms are not currently harnessing its forecasted ‘revolutionary’ use, citing data quality, lack of expertise and contextual understanding, availability, over-reliance on automations, and ever-looming financial compliance, which are getting stricter with AI’s own legal hurdles.
Beyond the pitfalls that have claimed early adopters, we’ll also offer constructive ways to implement AI that do have proven marketing outcomes and leave room for the most powerful factor for decision-making: authentic, human creativity.
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
