The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – March 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
Marketing Week – AI is going to eat your search traffic – don’t let it eat your brand
We can all agree the world is in a bit of a mess. From stagnating economies, trade wars, real wars, and, of course, high taxes. It’s all looking a bit grim. Thankfully, help is on the way in the form of artificial intelligence. There’s just one issue. To enjoy the benefits of AI in our lives, it needs feeding. So far, it’s been on a diet of information, but next up comes your brand. And unless you want your brand to be swallowed whole, you’ll want to read this. Read more
Features
ProFundCom – The Silent Drain: Bot Farms, Click Fraud, and the Erosion of Fund Marketing ROI
The hyper-connected digital landscape, while a boon for fund marketing, is constantly assaulted by sophisticated bot farms. These automated armies, far beyond simple click bots, are designed to manipulate online engagement, distort data, and ultimately bleed marketing budgets dry. Akamai’s historical examples, like Clickbot.A’s $500,000 click fraud, pale compared to today’s bot operators, capable of generating millions in fraudulent ad impressions daily. For fund marketers, this translates to:
Wasted Ad Spend: Inflated click-through rates (CTRs) and fake impressions on paid campaigns, eroding ROI and distorting performance metrics.
Skewed Analytics: Bot-driven traffic pollutes website analytics, making it impossible to assess campaign effectiveness and understand genuine investor behavior accurately.
Damaged Brand Reputation: Artificial engagement and manipulated social media metrics can mislead potential investors, damaging credibility and trust.
Inefficient Marketing Automation: If bot traffic is not filtered out, automated marketing workflows become useless, sending valuable content to fake leads and wasting resources.
Marketing Week – Ignore anyone who tells you to forget about targeting
If you are any kind of marketer with any kind of budget you’ve recently been told not to worry about targeting. Your digital agency mate or a salesperson from one of the mega platforms explained that you don’t need to worry about all the old-fashioned target market stuff anymore. Just handover your ad, drop it down the digital mineshaft and through the power of Big Data, amazing AI and the magical healing power of algorithms your ad will find its perfect consumers while you sleep or watch 80s movies or gaze out of the window and wonder why you have a niggling feeling of despair. Read more
FMC Alpha – Where investment content marketers can use AI right now
There’s no denying AI’s impact on financial services. We are seeing firms set lofty ambitions and take great steps forward. At the end of the day, though, there’s often still a large gap between high-level strategic talk and tactical, day-to-day implementation. For investment marketing content in particular, our clients have long spoken about wanting to implement AI for greater efficiency. Coming off years of constrained resources and reduced team sizes, these content marketers are yearning for a tool that can create greater bandwidth and efficiency in their roles, so they can then devote more time to strategic, truly human tasks – AI’s supposed biggest benefit. Read more
Cognito – Finding and keeping your voice: Why tone matters in copywriting
The sheer volume of content flashing across our screens these days is overwhelming. The average person can read thousands of words, even without sitting down for a long evening with a novel. The vast majority of these words float in and out of brains without much comment. And yet, some manage to leave an impression. Why? Why do some messages encourage action, change opinions and enter long-term memory when so many others don’t. I would argue that the tone of voice matters more than anything else. Maintaining a consistent tone of voice is crucial when communicating with followers, clients, or potential prospects. Read more
Bruce Frumerman – How Are You Marketing Specialized Expertise To Differentiate Your Fund?
Morningstar has previously written about traits asset managers need to succeed. In addition to having consistent, repeatable performance (which no firm has every year, forever), cost-competitive fees and willingness to adapt to competitive changes in the marketplace, they said a money manager should have a differentiator. Differentiators that they noted an investment firm could have were “specialized expertise in a product, asset class, channel, or geography.” Agreed. But there are two challenges to this. First, a portfolio manager and team need to have actual expertise in one or more of these things. Next, outsiders must be aware of, acknowledge and then value that expertise. 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
