The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – February 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
White Marble – Sustainability in 2024 – What investment marketers need to look out for
The past year has been a particularly challenging one for sustainability and ‘ESG’ investing. It is inevitable that an element of fatigue starts to set in when a topic has dominated the conversation for so long, but the strength of the backlash in some corners has taken many by surprise. At its heart, sustainable investing is about putting money to work in a way which does minimal damage to the planet, has some measurable benefit and delivers an investment return. When done with authority, integrity and genuine adherence to the overarching principes; ESG, responsible or sustainable investing is pretty difficult to argue against. That hasn’t stopped many people from trying, however. White Marble’s Benjie Elston, Head of Sustainability, shares the top five trends he believes investment marketers should keep an eye on in 2024. Read more
Features
Cognito – The arrival of generative video brings new promise – and new challenges
Calling it “text-to-video” undersells what’s actually going on in the latest innovation from OpenAI. The company’s Sora programme allows for the creation of “realistic and imaginative scenes” from simple text inputs. An example shown on the company’s website is a 25 second crane shot that pushes through a sepia-toned 19th century American town with dirt roads, grazing horses and a variety of wooden buildings. The first seconds are particularly striking as we move through a creekbed, flying towards low hills dotted with scrubby pine. There’s so much detail, and it’s hard to believe the only given prompt was “Historical footage of California during the gold rush”. Unveiled last week but not yet made available to the public, the very existence of Sora has caused waves of discussion and analysis. American director Tyler Perry said he was pausing work on an $800 million expansion of his studio in Atlanta, primarily because of the increasing availability of AI tools. Read more
ProFundCom – 5 Considerations For Advisers: SEC’s ‘Marketing Rule’
Advertising performance makes up the bread and butter for fund marketers. However, US-based investment advisers should double check strict requirements of the SEC’s ‘Marketing Rule’ to make sure their processes fall on the right side of the regulatory line. Effective since May 2021, the directive looked to replace existing rules under the Investment Advisers Act in one single action, addressing the changing nature of investor communications through technology and the expectations of prospective investors. Advisers will be familiar with the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) laying out fair disclosures of fund performance. But it’s no longer enough to end compliance efforts there. The Marketing Rule gives clear parameters around how advisers can market fund performance. Generally it prohibits untrue, unsubstantiated or omitted statements of facts, anything that purely impicates performance or misleads, and ‘cherry picked’ results that misrepresent a performance or time period. Read more
Marketing Week – More data does not always mean more effective marketing
“You know, I think we’ve already got enough consumer data, introduced enough personalisation, and leveraged enough advanced adtech in our programmatic media buying.” That’s certainly not something you hear very often in marketing circles. In fact it remains broadly taboo within the industry to suggest that we’re on anything but an inevitable march towards hyper-personalised and -targeted communications, in which owning consumers’ data is as valuable as their actual custom. To suggest anything else marks you out as a backwards Luddite who does not understand the power of new technologies. Read more
JPES Partmers – How Consumer Duty is set to reshape fund distribution and client relations
Mikkel Bates, Regulatory Manager at FE Fundinfo, returns to the JPES Partners studio to discuss the impact of Consumer Duty on fund distribution and client relations. In this podcast, Mikkel looks at an essential area of regulation in financial services that everyone should know about: Consumer Duty. It came into effect in July last year, but many firms found they needed more time to prepare for it. In conversation with Mies Donohoe of JPES, Mikkel talks about what fund managers should be doing, particularly those in distribution or product development. Listen here
ProFundCom – ProFundCom Report – Digital Marketing Review of Top 100 Hedge Funds 2024
We’re following up on our inaugural edition to see what improvements these top-performing hedge funds have been making to their websites since we reviewed them in 2022. We based our 12 assessment criteria on the accessibility of information and quality of engagement, adding a couple of extra points to this year’s edition to give a new angle. After hours of thorough research and analysis, we concluded that many hedge funds use digital marketing, but not all use it effectively. Just three firms scored highly according to our criteria, with totals of 80% and above, and only 47 firms scored over 50%. A staggering 25 firms scored 30% or less. That means a quarter of the world’s biggest hedge funds have average to poor digital marketing, with significant room for improvement. If these hedge funds made small tweaks, they could dramatically improve engagement and make information more accessible, bolstering their ProFundCom ranking. 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
