The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – December 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
ProFundCom Report – Digital Marketing Review of Top 100 Hedge Funds 2025
Our Hedge Fund Report returns for its third year, finding that there’s still plenty of digital marketing opportunities funds should grasp to become leading, trustworthy brands.
It can only take a few clicks on a single webpage for an investor to make up their mind about placing money with a fund. With the face-to-face initial sale now taking place in the digital world, a branded website’s presentation and usability are just a few vital triggers leading to greater AuM in the long-run. Each year, we aim to discover how exceptional or lacking the globe’s leading hedge funds are in their digital marketing. From how easy their sites are to navigate, to how consistent and understandable their content is, our assigned scores craft a data-led look at where marketing improvements are needed across platforms and strategies.
Only 9 firms reached at least 75% satisfaction, which we feel is only the minimum threshold signalling very good marketing efforts. Any less, and firms risk losing their competitive edge and potential customers…
Marketing Week – Why most marketers are using AI wrong (and how to fix it)
A year ago, we had perfect jobs at LinkedIn – fascinating work, great pay, and the stability we needed with small children and big mortgages. Then we saw something that made us walk away from all of it. What we saw was the convergence of two revolutions: generative AI and marketing science. For the past year, we’ve been mostly silent about AI. Why? Because we were too busy using it, every minute of every day. We’ve been partnering with the most elite marketing organisations to discover where AI fails, where it excels and – most importantly – what jobs it should do. Today, we’d like to share our ‘three laws of leverage’. These laws separate organisations using AI for strategic advantage from those who are just playing with the newest tactical toy. Think of it as a field guide from marketing’s future. Read more
FMC Alpha – Five steps to achieving marketing team harmony
As “doing the same (or more) marketing with less” embeds itself as the unofficial mantra of the asset management industry, many team leaders are looking to their operating model for answers. Some conversations we’ve had from clients in recent weeks: How can I best structure my team and allocate resources to not solely get the job done but to do it effectively and efficiently and have some time left for evolution and innovation? Are centres of excellence the solution, or do they create greater silos within my team? Could I use growth and retention as a device to structure my team and allocate resources to ensure client experience sits at the heart of everything we do? There comes a time in every marketing leader’s career that they may want to revisit the structure of their team – whether new to the role or recently appointed. Maybe they feel their current set up is failing to deliver what is expected by the business, or they are concerned by the harried looks on the faces of even their top talent. Whatever the motivation, once the seed is sown that a restructure could help, the next question is usually: “Where do I start?” Read more
Cognito – How do you measure the success of organic social media in B2B financial services?
We all need something to measure and when it comes to social media, it’s far too easy to take impressions, engagements and followers as your metrics of success. I don’t actually think that’s all that helpful and sends the wrong message about what corporate social media is for. Consider these three issues. Impressions, engagements and followers are not entirely in your control. LinkedIn changes its algorithm all the time and it’s notoriously secret about it. Thanks to research from experts unaffiliated with LinkedIn, like Richard van der Blom, we know that company page content now makes up just 1.5% of the average feed post – with the rest of the space taken up by ads and personal profile content. Content that works well on LinkedIn often doesn’t align with how businesses want to be talking about themselves – for example, photo montages of teams participating in office socials or charity work far outperform product posts and thought leadership articles. This means you can ‘manipulate’ your metrics by posting culture content but you might well hear critiques from your executives who want to see less frivolous posts and more thought leadership. The same thing is true for followers – once you reach a critical mass, you’ll start to see a snowball effect where your followers are growing without you really having to do much. That might look great, but dive into the demographics of who those followers are and you might be less enthusiastic, with a large majority of students and jobseekers joining your follower ranks. If that’s true, then what is the point of corporate social media and how can you assess how well you’re doing? I’ll concede that it is still important to measure something and that can be challenging. Read more
Bruce Frumerman – Are You Misallocating Your Fund’s Content Marketing Budget?
Marketing content beyond just performance reporting is important for money management firms for two key reasons. First, it provides a means of expressing the intellectual acumen of management at the investment firm to prospective and current investors. This is vital because fund performance data is but a validation of how money managers think and run their strategy implementation. Second, content marketing increases the odds of an investment firm being top-of-mind at the right time when an investor who has been conducting due diligence on them decides the time has come to pick which manager on their short list of interesting funds is worth getting their new allocation. Read more
ProFundCom – 2025 Fund Marketing Outlook Report
The fund world has spoken. From our survey, see how industry professionals view the effects of digital platforms on common challenges from lead generation to analysing data. Where Should Marketing Priorities Lie? 2024 has been an exhilarating time for digital fund marketing. We’ve all witnessed the rise of online personalisation, AI’s status from talk-of-the-town futurism to a widely used automation tool, and moves from multiple platforms to single, consolidated sources of investor data. We hope this survey identifies areas for further consideration (and some helpful solutions) as we head into the new year. Until then, let’s delve straight into the results and continue surging forward! Download Report
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
