The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – January 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
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…
Features
Marketing Week – Why AI could be the best thing to happen to marketing
Once viewed mainly as a tool to streamline workflows and automate routine tasks, AI is now empowering marketers to think bigger and innovate boldly. At MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit, this urgency came into sharp focus: 85% of business leaders say they have less than 18 months to deploy an AI strategy, or they will see negative business effects. But this isn’t just about efficiency – it’s about unleashing unprecedented creativity and unlocking innovations that were once beyond imagination. Read more
FMC Alpha – Hello, 2025: How investment marketing trends will evolve this year
The chestnuts have been roasted and the candles lit; the holidays are over and it’s once again a new year. Among investment marketers, January can bring both excitement and apprehension. Potential new budgets, motivated leadership and a well-rested team can create momentum, but each year presents new obstacles as well. Here at Alpha Agency, our team speaks with dozens of clients across the industry at any one time. From our conversations and research, we’ve picked up on trends that we see as increasingly relevant for the coming year. Is your marketing team ready? Read more
Cognito – The rise and rise of the micro-culture
Do you smash that like button? Do you leave a comment and let them know what you think? Do you subscribe and set alerts for your favorites? What’s your “micro-culture”? You know you have one. Maybe it’s high-brow like rare books or classical music? Or functional like gardening or home improvement? Or cosmetics? Or finance? Or politics? Or you love Star Wars? Or you hate Star Wars? If I tell you mine, will you tell me yours? I love (LOVE) YouTube channels that obsessively discuss, unbox, and review the latest and greatest DVD releases. Beautiful, well-packaged, limited edition, uncompressed, and stocked with special features DVD releases! Much to my wife’s chagrin – these channels – this “micro-culture” of dedicated film nerds has significantly influenced my consumer behavior (while creating a variety of shelf space issues). And I suspect I’m not alone.In fact I know I’m not alone! YouTube is ground zero for the “micro-culture” – and taken in aggregate, the single most important mass media platform in the world. YouTube is the most influential media platform in the world and its reach is growing. 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 – Investors’ Confessions: How They View Your Conference Meeting Pitch
There was an event recently where industry experts were sharing insights with attending portfolio managers about marketing investments to prospective institutional investors at conferences designed for that purpose. There were a wide variety of panelist types on the buy side who followed my early session lead-off to the day. One was an in-house due diligence vetting gatekeeper of portfolio managers and strategies for an institutional plan sponsor. A comment he made to the audience didn’t just potentially strike a chord for those investment firm attendees; it definitely struck a chord to many other of the other panelists speaking that day. 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
ProFundCom Whitepapers
- How To Boost AuM By Aligning Your Fund Distribution & Marketing Teams
- Five Powerful Automations That Will Boost Your Fund Marketing
- Six Quick Wins That Help Fund Marketers Raise And Retain AuM
- Five Steps To Creating And Distributing Great Fund Marketing Content
- How Can Funds Use A CRM To Raise And Retain Assets?
- The ProFundCom Guide To Effective Thought Leadership Content
- How To Use Automation To Improve The Investor Experience
- Four Digital Marketing Trends That Will Help You To Raise Assets
- How AI Can Shape The Future Of Your Fund Marketing And Help You Boost AuM
ProFundCom Free Tools
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
If you want to find out how ProFundCom can help you use digital marketing to raise assets schedule a demo here