The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – August 2023
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.
Sentiment Tracking
Post of the Month
ProFundCom – Benefits of Using AI in Fund Marketing 2023
Whether you start the day with coffee and a newspaper, a scan through social media on your mobile, or by opening your laptop to a web browser, you will be familiar with artificial intelligence (AI). It’s no longer a futurism from the pens of science fiction writers. Instead, its very current power lies in the fingertips of fund marketers everywhere. In our eyes, this is far from a bad phenomenon. A few years ago, AI only echoed in the office corridors, as public knowledge of it being used on a practical day-to-day basis was minimal. Now, things seem to have changed very rapidly with ChatGPT entering the mainstream, spinning up pages’ worth of readable material. It has helped many understand that, in reality, marketers have been honing AI for their outreach campaigns for a while – an even bigger digital helping hand for communications-based teams than some may have been aware, no matter which industry. But that being said, the financial sector still has a lot of catching up to do. Big tech players have entered the chessboard, using applications and platforms driven by the expertise of computer scientists looking to future-proof the current practical uses of machine learning, then supercharge it to new levels. It’s time for fund houses to stay up to date. Luckily, AI can be implemented right away. In this ProFundCom guide, we hope to help familiarise you with its four main marketing benefits, all through using digital platforms you may be familiar with. Let’s begin. Download Report
Features
Cognito – Andrew Grill & Tom Coombes: Using AI to cut through the noise
Experimenting with AI, advising clients and accounting for growing risks, find out Cognito’s outlook on AI with Account Directors Vanja Lakic and Larissa Padden, joined by our CEO Tom Coombes and experienced Futurist Speaker Andrew Grill. We’ll also discuss how AI is transforming PR and communications, why humans will still play a central role in AI’s potential and what the next six months look like for the industry. Listen here
White Marble Consulting – White Marble US Trends Report: Harnessing Your Brand Identity
Drawing upon the timeless wisdom of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet ponders “What’s in a name?”, one might be inclined to contemporize this query for today’s complex marketing environment: “What’s in a brand?” Much like The Bard’s exploration of identity, a firms’ brand encapsulates a rich tapestry of elements, underscoring the timeless truth of the complexity that lies beneath a simple label. The multi-dimensional nature of asset and wealth management firms’ brands can stump even the most seasoned marketers. Defining and amplifying a firm’s brand requires the harmonious blending of diverse elements such as investment philosophy, performance, client service, expertise, corporate culture, and leadership. In this edition of our quarterly US trends report, we focus on the multifaceted universe of branding. We cover: Current industry trends shaping investment marketing brand discourse;How benchmarking tools can be used to measure brand efficacy; and Effective techniques for articulating your brand through digital marketing strategies. Download Report
ProFundCom Report – How To Boost AuM By Aligning Your Fund Distribution & Marketing Teams
When it comes to funds, alignment is good. Everyone who works at a fund – whether they are talking to clients, analysing data, handling payroll, or making the lunchtime sandwiches – should understand and appreciate the role of each department.Because when there is cooperation and alignment across a firm, it leads to a consequent boost in AuM. But this is easier said than done, as each department has its own responsibilities, priorities and aims, which often don’t align easily with that of other teams. And one area where this is particularly true – but where alignment is so desperately needed – is the relationship between the fund distribution and marketing teams. These two teams, both with the same ultimate aim of raising and retaining assets, often operate as separate silos. Although they are both working to achieve the same thing, they have a different stake in the process and can end up falling out and resenting the other. Download Report
Marketing Week – The value of differentiation will only increase as more brands follow the AI herd
I went back to work this week after eight busy weeks of paternity leave. I had to speak at the ADMA conference in Sydney. ADMA are one of the most influential marketing bodies in Australia and its Global Forum, which Scott Galloway opened and I had the honour of concluding, is a Very Big Deal. I was trying to be on my best behaviour. I have not exactly had two months of rest but I’ve been away from the marketing scene and was hoping this pause would translate into a more patient, positive reflection on our discipline. But as I was being introduced by the ever-genial Steve Brennen from Zip, he shared an official count of the most mentioned words across the day’s talks. At the top of the list, smashing all others, was AI with some 300 mentions on stage. 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 15 years, giving users the ability to compare how their marketing campaigns are performing versus sector peers. Further detail 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
