The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – July 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
Bruce Frumerman – How Marketing A Portfolio Mistake Can Help Your Asset Raising
In portfolio manager and investment process due diligence analysis by financially astute, sophisticated institutional investors, there is something that they want to get detail about that can strike fear into the hearts of portfolio managers being vetted: mistakes they’ve made in managing their portfolios.
While it’s more likely that a sophisticated investor will query portfolio managers under consideration about mistakes they have made, even an investing novice can spot what might be signs of portfolio management errors within their live performance record.
Over our decades of communications and sales marketing consulting work with a wide variety of money manager types and strategies we have seen a pattern repeated by investment firms of all sizes. If there was something that the portfolio manager or the manager and his or her investment team missed or got wrong in the past, they were loath to bring it up. This left the family offices, the institutional plan sponsors and their gatekeepers to bring it up and ask. In such scenarios any response, even if a good one, comes off as being defensive.
I’ll give you two real life examples of what investment process related portfolio management mistakes can look like and how building this into fund marketing can help the asset raising effort.
Cognito – The investor relations sections of many corporate websites are remarkably recessive. Why?
Corporate websites have to cater to many audiences. I’m surprised, though, that investor relations pages are often not prominent in corporate sites, given both that shareholders are a crucial audience for public companies, and the emphasis on more integrated stakeholder communications.
I looked at 30 publicly traded companies across two fields that interest me – financial technology/infrastructure firms, and regional banks – categorised the routes by which investor relations content fits into the site architecture.
A “meganav” (or mega menu) is a large navigation panel that appears when a user clicks or hovers over the main menu. It typically spans the full width of the page, with links grouped into columns and sometimes supported by related content blocks or images. The line between meganavs and simple drop-down menus is increasingly blurred, as many drop-downs are now designed with more complex layouts that resemble meganavs.
Marketing Week – Don’t make brand models harder than they already are
Nothing in marketing is easy. You name it, there’s a reason it’ll keep you awake at night.
Intelligent segmentation. Size-of-prize analysis. Pricing strategy. Briefing new pack design. Hitting back at regs when they’ve put a line through everything you’ve been planning for three years. Negotiating with the trade for, pretty please, a better location on shelf. Hard, all hard.
Even something as seemingly straightforward as getting two agencies to turn up to the same place at the same time with an understanding of the same objectives can involve a torture beyond the imaginations of your peers in other disciplines. Ask any junior marketer who’s tried.
But some exigencies in our discipline contrive to combine unusually high levels of difficulty with unusually high levels of importance. Completing your brand model is one. If we had a marketers’ Boston matrix with ‘kinda hard’ and ‘really hard’ going up the vertical axis, and ‘it matters’, ‘it’s critical’ across the top, the task of setting down an agreed definition of the brand would sit firmly in that top right box.
Alpha Agency- What marketers can learn from industrial design
At first glance, industrial design and financial services marketing have little in common. One is focused on shaping the physical products we use day-to-day, such as toothbrushes and phones. The other is about promoting intangible products and services designed to help people invest and save.
However, as with most things in life, seemingly unconnected areas can offer up ideas that challenge the status quo and elevate the final product.
Alpha Agency graphic designer Aman Paul’s first impression of financial services design was “it is very similar, conservative, corporate, with lots of blue”.
ProFundCom – Fund Marketing Emails That Work: A Guide to Mastering Templates
Never Underestimate the Humble Email
Sifting through emails is a universal experience. Coupons and promotions, shopping cart reminders, or a wedding invite to RSVP to. Investors likewise hope to receive updates from the fund they place their money with, so making them stand out in their inbox is imperative.
This presents amazing fund marketing opportunities: emails cover a range of content formats from product releases to monthly factsheets or a plug for a new video series on ESG investing. Plastered with a logo, colour scheme or people photos, they do a lot of brand awareness hefty lifting without much effort.
That is so long as there are templates in place. They work as a blank canvas with swappable components, making sending off personalised versions to every subscribed investor much quicker, without the headache of failing compliance. When this distribution can be automated, the sky’s the limit for reiterating great investor experiences.
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
