The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – May 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 – Speed vs substance: Can marketers have both?
Today’s marketing environment moves at an unforgiving pace. Campaign cycles are shorter, creative work is scrutinised more closely and leadership teams expect results backed by reliable data almost instantly. At the same time, budgets are under pressure, and every new investment is expected to show ROI. Under these circumstances, poor insights can lead to missteps that damage consumer trust and risk brand reputation.
That leaves marketers facing a tough question: when time is short, is it better to move quickly with limited information, or slow down for the sake of accuracy and depth? For years, the assumption has been that speed and quality can’t coexist. But as research tools evolve, that trade-off is worth re-examining.
This article explores whether marketers really need to choose between speed and substance – and how the right approaches can deliver both.
Alpha Agency – Asset managers must not sleep on Reddit
Big buzzwords like ‘AI search’, ‘AI visibility’, ‘GEO’, ‘AEO’ and ‘LLMO’ are causing asset managers to completely revamp their marketing strategies and priorities.
It means marketers are all facing the same predicament: If AI platforms are where discovery is heading, how can we stay visible?
At first glance, it’s easy to assume that is a complicated question with multiple answers.
But, when we take a closer look at how these platforms generate answers, there’s only one voice that stands out…
Your audience sits in one of the most expensive advertising categories online. Finance and insurance keywords routinely cost multiples of retail equivalents. High competition and client value push prices up, particularly for tightly defined audience segments. North American-based audiences within this subset are even more expensive. Layer on precise targeting of allocators, advisers or institutional buyers and you are bidding in the narrowest, most contested pools.
Industry consolidation is narrowing the “reachable middle” meaning firms end up bidding on the same finite pools of decision-makers across the same premium environments.
McKinsey describes a widening gap between leaders and the rest, with the sector rebounding in AUM but not in profitability, which keeps pressure on costs (including marketing) and efficiency.
In short, your audience is valuable, scarce and increasingly costly to reach.
Cognito – AI search allows for a whole new level of disruption in banking. Will challengers take advantage?
The customer has already decided, more or less, before they open your app.
This is the part of the acquisition journey that challenger banks are not tracking, and it is happening at scale. Consumers are using AI search tools – ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overview – most heavily at the beginning of a purchase decision: the research phase, the comparison phase, the narrowing-down phase. Research from Cognizant is unambiguous on this. The Learn phase is where AI has the deepest penetration in financial services. By the time someone reaches the Buy phase, the shortlist is already formed.
Clients are evaluating products, comparing institutions, verifying credibility and narrowing their options before ever visiting a website. They are not arriving at your homepage with an open mind. They are arriving to confirm a view the AI already helped them build.
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
