Why Blogs Are Still Essential For Hedge Fund Websites Today

From our investigation into 100 leading hedge funds, we identified that 43% exhibited no blog at all. Given the credibility of blogs for decades, it got us thinking: are they old hat for a new multimedia digital-verse, and is the age of the hedge fund blog over?

Back in the day, it was totally normal for allocators to find opportunities through trade magazines and by attending lavish industry events. Things changed quickly once blogs burst onto the scene: a more direct digital route to quickly understand a hedge fund’s style, routinely, and completely in their own time.

Fast forward to now, where most (if not all) institutional investors have moved their due diligence to online channels. When an experienced investor knows what they’re after, they’ll first look at a fund’s blog content to learn about their philosophy, purpose, investment strategy and educational expertise – alongside all-important fund ranges and performance metrics – well before picking up a phone to a salesperson!

So, despite the glaring absence of one at many of the largest global firms, a centralised blog is part of the fabric, and its value as a resource centre actually remains unchanged. Without it, the ability to assess a fund brand becomes much harder for an LP to do. Especially so considering that our online attention spans are dwindling as much as our tolerances for poor online UX.

Human, trustworthy and articulate guidance from advisors and industry professionals is a key driver of investment decisions. All of that stems from an accessible blog dedicated to unique content, strategically planned in line with a fund’s joint sales-and-marketing investor profiles.

Thinking About ‘What the Investor Wants’

A tale as old as time itself is the fact that people want stories. From the aural tales of ancient nomadic tribes, to fables in children’s books, and even to monthly investment commentaries. It can be irksome during a quick scour on LinkedIn to see plenty of creative B2C marketing types self-professing themselves as ‘storymakers’. However, this does stress that fund marketers are inherently tasked with making their firm’s background resonate with prospects before any sort of digital buyer journey even begins.

Everyone has a financial problem they need help with. Managing money is universal, no matter how idiosyncratic their backgrounds. Nobody sets aside large sums on a whim. Touching on emotional needs involves contextualising a fund’s role in an ever-changing macroeconomic world: how it can address individual challenges, and craft a portfolio that’s right for individual situations, potentially over months or years.

Many hedge funds may have basic content. What a lot of them lack is the ‘relatability’ factor. Weak viewpoints and infrequent visibility lose investor interest, and distances a manager from the end consumer. Whereas a blog can deliver streams of inspiration, in whatever frequency a fund can handle, via the written word or through videos.

So long as blog pieces remain truthful to how a fund fundamentally helps their ideal investor audience, they make for entertaining, expert narratives to explain market fluctuations caused by political shifts, specific to various jurisdictions. They may touch on ‘hot topics’ too, like AI innovation, biodiversity and sustainable investing that drive the hyper-real world changes we are currently experiencing.

We can think of the blog’s place today as an investor-centric tool to compete with daily newspapers, or weekly episodic releases to Netflix or a podcast service. Today’s investors expect a hedge fund blog that is a reliable constant, bringing investment stories to them often and acting like an old friend (or indeed a cosy rewatch of The Office).

The Lead-Generation Power of a Blog

Another thing hedge funds are typically insistent about is that prospects really want to hear investment advice on personal Zoom calls. That’s largely untrue. Even conducting that task to scale is impossible given how many prospects and existing investors there are out there, all at different stages in their digital journey. They want to discover fund information and blog content themselves at first, and not be hit in the face with it. Especially affluent, high-net worth individuals that are certainly not new to the game.

A blog is a central focus for that discovery, from initial brand awareness and beyond. As a full repository of insights, it can be an interlinked nervous system of related fund information or thematic content that investors may not be aware of initially. This prompts further research into portfolio diversification and ‘widening’ content interests, which fund marketers should identify from their touchpoints to better personalise future nurture campaigns.

Blogs are therefore drivers of downloads and social shares, which can spur conversations with a sales team. They are the 24/7 middleman that maintains communication between the audience and a firm’s C-suite, advisors, and managers, gaining organic engagement metrics consistently.

When behaviours are tracked across a well-visited blog, it becomes obvious to hedge fund marketers and IRs who are returning the most, and prime for a call or upsell. They seek helpful content, and maintaining a trustworthy reputation can quicken the pace of notoriously slow hedge fund sales funnels.

The Components of Modern Fund Blog

Ultimately, the three main content areas that fuel a financial blog are…

• Market commentaries
• Your unique investment strategies
• Analysis of sector news

…and while thousands of hedge funds can do this, stand out examples are instantly recognisable for their clarity: how they approach investment topics from angles that nobody else sees. They instil confidence that the firm invests in this very way. When advisors’ daily activities are aligned to the knowledge they share in a blog, brand consistency will be pronounced!

Achieving clarity is less complex than it sounds. By creating a coordinated team of blog contributors that ‘live the brand’ – be it chairmen, key stakeholders, portfolio managers or external investment writers (with editorial oversight) – this writing/production crew becomes as unique to a fund as the original investment strategies they first adopted. Even an advisors’ slide deck or CEO’s event presentation can be transcribed or reinterpreted into other formats. Importantly, no two pieces of content will be exactly the same, keeping things fresh and appealing to different investor demographics.

Everything should be educational, even fun when necessary, especially when content ‘lengths’ can achieve different things. Short post-it memos can draw an investor into what matters to them today, while long-form research can illustrate historical market shifts or delve into fluent, personal opinion pieces focusing on a manager’s real lives and interests rather than dull, jargon-filled PDFs.

Increasingly popular are videos and podcasts, used as bitesize blog pieces. Investors can learn while multi-tasking, with complex or abstract ideas conveyed quickly and in a relatable manner. Younger investors are turning to ‘finfluencers’ that hedge fund marketers see as competition, who should take inspiration from social media styles that can be repurposed for a hedge fund’s snappier on-the-fly insights. Curating a suite of multimedia formats shows attention to detail, and care for investors’ preferences and expectations – no matter if it’s as inexpensive to produce as purchasing a microphone, two chairs, and posting to a free YouTube channel.

On the ubiquitous subject of quick-win AI-driven content, an NLP tool can be incredibly useful for structuring a content plan, or a series based on your investment strategy, or identifying your blog’s most popular topics. But AI-generated articles are easy to detect these days, insubstantial, and lack the distinction of an investment professional’s mind. They diminish trust in content altogether.

Effective thought leadership provokes reactions and conversations away from the (digital) page, particularly when addressing the world’s pertinent investment talking-points. Interestingly, although we believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) blog content is vital to engaging investors with the ‘human’ side of a fund’s work, only 37% of firms display robust DEI propositions. It is a consideration many should think about to improve their brand image.

Content’s Formidable Future

Alongside being a hub for financial advice, a hedge fund blog also displays company culture, charitable causes, and corporate responsibility. It is just as important for executives and general partners as it is for layman investors: introducing a fund’s USPs to prospects, and ultimately building relationships on the digital sphere over the short- and long-term.

Understanding investor intent is extremely important for raising assets, and evolving the humble blog into an interesting, thoughtful multimedia tool establishes an evergreen lead generation machine that finds out what’s hooking readers – particularly toward eventual inflows. In our view, long may the age of the hedge fund blog continue!

ProFundCom assists hedge fund marketers drive investor engagement through blogs using digital marketing strategies and tools, including:

• Thought Leadership Promotion: Leverage ProFundCom to promote thought leadership content, whitepapers, research reports, and industry insights to showcase expertise and credibility within the financial sector.
• Content Recommendations: Personalise content to website visitors based on their interests and engagement history to enhance user experience and increase lead conversion rates.
• Social Media Integration: Amplify brand messaging across various social platforms by sharing content, engaging with followers, and participating in industry discussions.
• Unified Data Management: Fund marketers can consolidate customer data, engagement metrics, and campaign performance from various sources to gain a comprehensive view of their audience and marketing activities in one platform.
• Lead Nurturing Campaigns: Guide prospects through the sales funnel by delivering relevant content, educational resources, and timely follow-ups, nurturing leads and converting them into investors.