The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – March 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
Bruce Frumerman – Why Some Funds’ Asset Raising Efforts Fail (Part 1 and 2)
Bruce Frumerman is founder and CEO of Frumerman & Nemeth Inc., a 36-year-old financial communications and sales marketing consultancy whose work has helped money management firm clients attract over $7 billion in new assets, yet they are not third-party marketers. Missing the obvious? It is important that investment management firms make the most effective, informed and focused use of their asset raising time. Unfortunately, many do not. This is an issue for money management firms of all sizes but can be a particularly big problem for emerging manager-sized firms that burn their time and effort in pursuit of investors who they will not win over, at least in the near- to mid-term. Worse, some portfolio managers overly focus on such investors, to their detriment. What are they getting wrong? Often, they are missing what should be obvious. Read more
Features
White Marble – Supercharge your marketing with personas
The cardinal rule of business is to know your audience, a task that can seem relatively straightforward but is, in fact, quite complicated. Take, for example, an asset manager operating within a single country’s confines. Its pool of clients could include myriad institutional investors, wealth managers, charities, family offices, high-net-worth individuals, investment trusts, etc. Each with its own set of needs, wants and responsibilities. Read more
ProFundCom – 5 Considerations For Advisers: SEC’s ‘Marketing Rule’
Advertising performance makes up the bread and butter for fund marketers. However, US-based investment advisers should double check strict requirements of the SEC’s ‘Marketing Rule’ to make sure their processes fall on the right side of the regulatory line. Effective since May 2021, the directive looked to replace existing rules under the Investment Advisers Act in one single action, addressing the changing nature of investor communications through technology and the expectations of prospective investors. Advisers will be familiar with the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS), which lay out fair disclosures of fund performance. But it’s no longer enough to end compliance efforts there. The Marketing Rule gives clear parameters around how advisers can market fund performance. Generally, it prohibits untrue, unsubstantiated or omitted statements of facts, anything that purely implicates performance or misleads, and ‘cherry-picked’ results that misrepresent a performance or time period. Read more
Marketing Week – Is this applicable to B2B marketing? Please stop asking
So, I did a thing this week. An online talk. You know the type. I bang on about some marketing stuff. We show a few saucy pictures of Korean dictators and a partially eaten wildebeest. I bang on a bit more. And then we do a Q&A. I could have predicted this before I even opened my mouth, but one of the first questions off the rank – and another about 60-odd questions later – was the same old chestnut: how much of this is applicable to B2B marketing? I’ve been asked this same thing (and this is no exaggeration) more than 1,000 times in my career. Since my earliest 20th-century days as an assistant professor, there was always a bastard hand somewhere in the back of the room throwing a bucket of B2B water over whatever we had just discussed. It’s never an out-and-out repudiation. No one has ever said, “This shit just isn’t relevant to my work in B2B,” and stormed out. It’s gentler than that. A query rather than a contradiction. And more annoying as a result. But it’s as regular as a squeaky wheel on an otherwise well-oiled bike. Every talk. Every class. It always ends with the same B2B query. And while it’s a fair question, it is also a dumb question. Read more
JPES Partners – Pushups For Your Re-Ups – Increase Your Chances for New Commitments and Flows
Niels Andersen is a Consultant with JPES Partners, representing our company in North America. He has over 30 years of business development experience with investment management firms, inspiring trust and confidence in clients, consultants, and other stakeholders. His capital-raising experience spans sovereign wealth funds, public and private pension plans, non-profits, and high-net-worth investors in EMEA and North America. In his latest blog for CAIA Association, a global professional body for investment management, Niels shares valuable insights for asset managers facing the challenges of a competitive market. He emphasises the need for innovation in fundraising strategies, leveraging technology and data analytics. He also highlights the importance of updating marketing techniques to attract new commitments and improve inflows effectively. Read more
ProFundCom – ProFundCom Report – Digital Marketing Review of Top 100 Hedge Funds 2024
We’re following up on our inaugural edition to see what improvements these top-performing hedge funds have been making to their websites since we reviewed them in 2022. We based our 12 assessment criteria on the accessibility of information and quality of engagement, adding a couple of extra points to this year’s edition to give a new angle. After hours of thorough research and analysis, we concluded that many hedge funds use digital marketing, but not all use it effectively. Just three firms scored highly according to our criteria, with totals of 80% and above, and only 47 firms scored over 50%. A staggering 25 firms scored 30% or less. That means a quarter of the world’s biggest hedge funds have average to poor digital marketing, with significant room for improvement. If these hedge funds made small tweaks, they could dramatically improve engagement and make information more accessible, bolstering their ProFundCom ranking. 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