The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – June 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.
Google’s search algorithm is one of the world’s best-kept secrets. So secret, a whole community and sub-sector of the Marketing industry is dedicated to ensuring companies’ websites, copy and other content have been created and optimized to appear favourable on this unconfirmed algorithm. This is Search Engine Optimisation, usually just called SEO. You would be forgiven for thinking that the recent Google Content API Warehouse leak in late May was a big deal. However, having allowed enough time for the dust to settle – how much of a turning point is this for the world of SEO and marketing? Let’s get the basics out of the way: the Google cheat codes have not been leaked. Despite what any SEO agency salesperson tells you, we don’t suddenly have all the answers. More than 2,500 documents, full of previously unconfirmed insight, spread widely across the internet after being shared by SEO heavyweights Rand Fishkin and Mike King. The leaked documents consist of technical information meant for the consumption of developers; they are nearly impossible to read or understand for even seasoned SEO professionals without the aid of a developer. Read more
Features
Nielsen – What comes after cookies?
For nearly thirty years, third-party cookies have played a critical role in online advertising, content design and analytics, enabling advertisers to serve relevant ads and personalized experiences to consumers—and measurement companies like Nielsen to provide valuable campaign and content viewership data. Today, 75% of marketers across all major industries still rely on cookies to run their campaigns, and 45% spend at least half of their marketing budgets on cookie-based activations. This adds up to a lot of money. Programmatic display, for instance, is a $160 billion business in the U.S. alone, and the vast majority of it is still based on third-party cookies. Read more
White Marble – How to launch a lead generation pilot – business processes
In part one of this series we outlined how to map the client journey and in part two it was about how to best use the technology and data tools at your fingertips. So, you have generated a bunch of leads for your sales team to speak to. Job done, right? Not quite… The way these leads are handled after the marketing team has generated and nurtured them is often an afterthought, but it shouldn’t be. After all, what’s the value in generating leads for the business if they aren’t then qualified by sales and converted into new business? Read more
ProFundCom – Your AI Roadmap For Fund Marketing
Whether you start the day with coffee and a newspaper, scan social media on your mobile, or open your laptop to a web browser, you will be familiar with artificial intelligence (AI). It’s no longer a futuristic concept from the pens of science fiction writers. Instead, its current power lies at the fingertips of fund marketers everywhere. In our eyes, this is far from a bad phenomenon. A few years ago, AI only echoed in the office corridors, as public knowledge of its practical use was minimal. Things seem to have changed rapidly, with ChatGPT entering the mainstream and spinning up pages’ worth of readable material. It has helped many understand that marketers have been honing AI for their outreach campaigns for a while—an even bigger digital helping hand for communications-based teams than some may have been aware of, no matter which industry. But that being said, the financial sector still has a lot of catching up to do. Big tech players have entered the “chessboard”, using applications and platforms driven by the expertise of computer scientists looking to future-proof the current practical uses of machine learning and then supercharge it to new levels. It’s time for fund houses to stay up to date. Luckily, AI can be implemented right away. Download Report
Marketing Week – Social proof and scarcity helped Monzo soar to success
It’s highly likely that, at some point over the last few years, you’ll have seen one of Monzo’s day-glo pink bank cards in the hand of the person in front of you at the checkout. Chances are, over the same timespan, far more people in front will have paid with a Barclays card. Or a TSB card. But you wouldn’t have noticed that. Those cards are so bland and interchangeable they’re hard to spot. And that noticeability is crucial to Monzo’s success. Why did this trick work so well? It taps into the powerful bias of social proof. Following the crowd. We humans just love to copy what everyone else is doing. It gives us a sense of confidence in our decision, especially when we have no easy way to evaluate our options more rationally. You can use social proof directly and plenty do. Messaging like “9 million happy customers” is an easy way to do it. But you can also communicate popularity more implicitly. 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
