The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – January 2026
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 – Digital Marketing Review of the Top 100 Hedge Funds 2026
It’s our pleasure to present ProFundCom’s fourth annual digital marketing review of the world’s 100 largest hedge funds.
We’ve refreshed the criteria this year, analysing the websites of these top hedge funds according to UX and design, content marketing, social media, and products and services. When executed effectively, these core marketing strategies can significantly broaden a business’s reach, attract new leads, and drive substantial growth in assets under management.
This year’s rankings have shifted as some firms strengthened their marketing efforts and climbed several places, while others slipped after being outperformed by competitors. Eight firms achieved standout results, scoring 80% or higher against our assessment criteria. 53 hedge funds reached scores of at least 50%, while 47 fell below the halfway mark.
Notably, 12 firms scored 25% or less, indicating significant room for improvement in their websites.
For these major hedge funds, there is untapped potential to better leverage their digital marketing, an opportunity that could translate into meaningful growth in assets under management. Improving website navigation, content marketing, or social media presence often requires only modest changes. Small adjustments could substantially enhance many of the sites we reviewed, boosting ProFundCom rankings and widening digital reach.
This report highlights practical digital marketing insights designed to help generate new leads and support AuM growth.
Marketing Week – Year in Search 2025: Moving at the speed of culture
2025 was the year culture moved at speed, and people moved with it. From surprise reunions to viral micro-trends, every moment triggered a surge of curiosity as people turned to Search not just to follow events but to make sense of them.
This behaviour is happening at an extraordinary rate: Google gets over 5 trillion searches around the world annually,1 giving marketers unparalleled visibility into emerging intent.
Across sport, entertainment and retail, the same behaviour emerged: cultural moments triggered immediate spikes in Search. Fans searched for fixtures for the Women’s Euros and England’s men’s cricket series. Glastonbury performances fuelled contextual search spikes. The suspense of the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors sent people looking for when the next episode would air.
But what defined 2025 wasn’t just how much people searched but how they searched, with longer, more conversational, more complex queries on the rise.
People are now searching the way they speak in real life, using natural language to explore, understand and get richer answers, not just short keywords to complete a task. As queries become broader and more expressive, Search captures intent earlier, surfacing emerging purchase considerations. For marketers, this creates a clearer window into emerging demand and the moment when cultural interest starts to turn commercial.
Living Group – Living Ratings of Asset Managers 2025
Following on from last year’s theme, “Building Brand, Building Reputation,” this year’s focus is all about amplifying your brand — ensuring it’s not only visible but also meaningful, differentiated, and future-ready.
Over the past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented level of brand activity across the sector. Around 10% of the Top 100 firms have undergone a rebrand or repositioning, while many others have launched high-profile brand campaigns aimed at sharpening their market presence and reinforcing their purpose.At the same time, the rise of Private Markets and the growing democratisation of alternative investments has signalled a new era of investing. This shift has expanded the landscape, bringing more private equity and alternatives firms into the Top 100, alongside a wave of new partnerships between traditional asset managers and private equity players.
Such rapid business and sector transformation demands brand transformation. The question for firms now is clear: how do you position and amplify your brand so it remains relevant, distinctive, and memorable — not just for existing audiences, but for the next generation of investors?
Alpha Agency – What 20+ peer reviews told us to expect in 2026
Every year, the industry talks about change – new wrappers, new channels, new client expectations. But when you spend your days immersed in messaging houses, websites, adviser journeys, and product narratives, it becomes clear, quite quickly, which changes are bubbling up to the surface and will become strategic priorities and which are just noise.
This year, our team completed over 20 peer reviews for asset and wealth manager clients. They covered 120+ competitors across an incredible spectrum of alternatives, multi asset, ETFs, sustainability, infrastructure, adviser platforms and institutional distribution.
Our research helped us understand how firms are telling their story, how they differentiate, how products are framed, how digital journeys actually function, and where white space exists.
From these peer reviews, we have been able to identify four top themes from 2025.
Peregrine – The Global 100 Asset Management Marketing Report 2025
This is now the 8th year that we have put out our annual analysis of the world’s largest asset managers. In that time, we have had thousands of downloads, been asked to share our findings at many conferences, run more than a few strategy sessions, had our research cited by the biggest management consulting firms, and have been covered by the key media in our space. But more than anything else, we have valued the myriad conversations it has led to with asset managers of every size. It has helped us develop and refine our thinking about how to build, evolve and protect investment firms’ brands.
With that said, nothing stands still, nor should it. Which is why we are very excited to unveil a refresh to our thinking for this year’s Global 100. The Brand Diagnostic will, of course, remain – it is an invaluable tool that helps us benchmark whether our clients are building their brands. We have always wanted to find a more methodical, more evidence-based way to help firms consider their competitor positioning, and now we can.
So, with this year’s Global 100, please welcome Peregrine Frame, our new analytical tool to help asset managers assess how distinctive their positioning is, how common, or otherwise, their key messages are. It is already clear that firms that score better for the distinctiveness of their positioning are more likely to be among the biggest winners when it comes to growing AUM. We hope you’ll find this as useful as we do.
ProFundCom – Fund Marketing In 2025: What’s Really Changed – and What Hasn’t
Marketing in fund management has never been harder. With thousands of funds competing for attention, new technologies reshaping distribution, and investors overwhelmed by content, standing out feels increasingly elusive. Yet, as this wide-ranging discussion between Stuart McDonald, Paul Das, and John Green makes clear, many of the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed at all – even as the tools and expectations have.
Despite massive advances in technology, human behaviour remains remarkably consistent. Investors still want to belong, still fear missing out, and still respond to status, trust, and storytelling. Whether it’s a caveman choosing a tribe or an allocator choosing a fund, the psychological drivers are largely the same.
What has changed is the frame of reference. Twenty-five years ago, fund marketing was product-led: performance numbers, complex strategies, dense documents, and a belief that sophistication alone would win. Today, marketing spans emails, portals, websites, events, data rooms, automation, and analytics – often creating more noise than clarity. Ironically, every new marketing channel tends to make organisations less efficient. Marketers find themselves producing content for content’s sake, analysing metrics instead of shaping narratives, and acting more like data scientists than storytellers. The result? Activity without impact.
This shift has created a new demand: marketing must now prove its contribution to inflows and AUM, not just brand awareness. Once marketing speaks the language of capital flows rather than colours and copy, it finally earns credibility inside investment firms.
Status, Power, and Internal Friction
One of the most insightful themes is the role of status inside asset management firms. Investment professionals – portfolio managers, traders, CIOs – hold the highest status because they generate returns. Marketing success, if poorly framed, can feel like a threat rather than a complement.
The solution isn’t ego, but positioning. The most effective marketers frame their success as amplifying the brilliance of the investment team – translating performance into narratives investors can understand and trust.
Marketing doesn’t replace alpha; it makes alpha visible.
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
