The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – July 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
The Drum – Google abandons third-party cookie deprecation plans
Google is scrapping its tumultuous, years-long effort to eliminate third-party cookies on Chrome. In an announcement made Monday, the search giant indicates that it plans to keep third-party cookies up and running for those who don’t disable them. However, to enhance user privacy while preserving advertising effectiveness, Google plans to roll out a new solution: a one-time prompt that enables users to set preferences that will apply across Google browsing experiences. Google, which commands more than 90% of the search market, however, has dragged its feet as it seeks to balance user privacy with advertisers’ demands. In January 2020, Chrome promised to phase out the technology “within two years.” However, as it became apparent that the ad industry was ill-prepared for the change, Google extended its timeline. Since then, the tech giant has pushed back its deadline two more times – most recently, in April of this year, citing regulatory concerns about Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the company’s suite of proposed cookie alternatives. Just months earlier, as testing began, Google had disabled third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users globally. Read more
Features
JPES – JPES publishes paper on Culture in Asset Management
JPES Partners recently hosted a Masterclass Seminar on the role of Culture in Asset Management, exploring how firms can better understand, define, and demonstrate their own corporate culture to external audiences such as clients, consultants, and prospects. There are several ways firms can begin to define, measure and track their own culture, using existing frameworks such as ACT by City Hive and the Thinking Ahead Institute’s culture assessment. Articulating that to external audiences in a way that truly resonates, however, can be a difficult exercise. Our 2024 JPES Partners Asset Owner Study found that 97% of those who were surveyed believed that the ability of an asset manager to demonstrate a positive corporate culture was a key part of their selection criteria, yet almost the same proportion felt that asset managers were falling short in being able to do so. It was clear from the research that choosing which asset manager to work with goes beyond an understanding of how portfolios are constructed and their investment track record. Clients increasingly want to also understand how this is achieved and how the culture of the business contributes to building a sustainable business. Download report
White Marble – How to craft your content strategy
Your audience is busy, which means any opportunity to grab their attention must not be wasted. Anything you put in front of them must speak to their needs, not yours. It must get to the point quickly, convey information in the clearest way possible and give them a clear path of action. But how do you decide which message to put into the market and when? At the heart of every content plan should be a clear set of principles and goals that closely align with your company’s overarching strategy. If the two are not in sync the messaging and audience will get confused. There is no ideal time to build an in-house content strategy. Some will argue that 1 January is the most sensible kick-off date, while others will say the start of the financial year or the end of summer. It genuinely doesn’t matter. There is no reason to delay until a specific time of the year, the best time to start building a strategy is now. Read more
ProFundCom – 9 Habits of Highly Successful Fund Marketers
Like any great scheme, success starts with a best-laid plan. Even the most detailed marketing campaigns can veer into unaccounted-for lanes as they progress, but delving into the analytics shows why having an upfront go-to-market (GTM) strategy in the first place is so important. The digital marketer’s toolbox is expansive to adhere to whatever channel an investor may use to discover fund performance, investment strategy or market analysis content. This has led to a shopping spree for technology promising the slickest, cheapest ways to share socials, press releases, emails and more. As wonderful as many of these platforms are, they collectively slow operations to a grinding halt – our own research has indicated that every added digital channel contributes 15% inefficiency to business-as-usual practices. Read more
Marketing Week – Marketers can unlock budget by being finance friendly
Finance feels like a black box to most marketers. It is full of arcane terms like EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation), ROCE (return on capital employed), and alpha generation.This is financial jargon that marketers may know are important measures of performance for their business, but which can be difficult to use as guides for making marketing decisions. Read more
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
