The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – February 2025
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
With Intelligence – Hedge Fund Outlook 2025: Post-Covid expansion set to continue as industry matures
Challenges remain but the industry’s maturity will support growth opportunities. Hedge funds can look toward 2025 with a degree of optimism, although the allocator floodgates are far from opening. Investor sentiment has steadily improved since the industry offered protection from 2022’s market drawdowns and many now see hedge funds as a central tool to ride out future volatility.
It can be a fool’s errand to make market predictions at this time of year. But the deregulatory agenda of the new US Administration and divergent global economic policies and fortunes could provide fertile ground for a range of hedge fund strategies.
Evidence of the industry’s increasing maturity is hard to miss. Launches are larger, but overall numbers down, while hedge fund firms are keen to show the world (and potential investors) that they can be sustainable long-term asset management businesses. This can be seen in the way they are expanding globally, moving into new asset classes, toughening up liquidity terms and bulking up on talent.
Not everything is rosy, and investors will continue to push hard on fees. But they will also increasingly pay a premium for alpha and funds with a proven track record of delivering uncorrelated returns.
Marketing Week – Ignore anyone who tells you to forget about targeting
If you are any kind of marketer with any kind of budget you’ve recently been told not to worry about targeting. Your digital agency mate or a salesperson from one of the mega platforms explained that you don’t need to worry about all the old-fashioned target market stuff anymore. Just handover your ad, drop it down the digital mineshaft and through the power of Big Data, amazing AI and the magical healing power of algorithms your ad will find its perfect consumers while you sleep or watch 80s movies or gaze out of the window and wonder why you have a niggling feeling of despair. 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 – Why you need media monitoring beyond a Google search
Coverage in the press only matters if you know about it. There are thousands of publications, from the most obscure trade journal to international news organisations like The New York Times and CNN. And it’s vital that companies know when they appear in the pages of these journals and in what context. I’m familiar with how difficult this can be. I remember during my first internship ten years ago, I would spend hours refreshing searches, walking down to the newsstand and preparing endless slides with clippings. Public relations have long struggled to accurately report the value of their efforts. An incomplete view of what’s been achieved only complicated the situation. Read more
Marketing Week – ICO to review top 1,000 websites in the UK for cookie compliance
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has expanded its review of cookie compliance online to the top 1,000 websites in the UK as it looks to clamp down on poor practice in the industry. The regulator assessed the compliance of the top 200 websites in the UK last year and issued concerns to 134 organisations that they were contravening data protection laws. From that review 52 websites introduced changes Read more
Bruce Frumerman – The Potential Investor’s Question That The Portfolio Manager Couldn’t Answer
I was recently approached at an alternative investing industry event by an emerging manager who I had been seeing at such occasions for a number of years. More than a year had passed since we had last bumped into each other and spoken. I asked him what progress he’d made over the previous twelve months with growing his one-man investment business. His performance was doing well, he said, up over 60% during that time. However, his assets under management remained stalled at the same low level they had been over the previous handful of years. Allocations were all small SMA accounts for around two handfuls of accredited retail investors, none of whom were friends and family. Why, with his good performance, he asked, did he continue to have no success in winning over any family office investors? Read more
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…Download Report
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
