The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – May 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
FMC Alpha – Why metadata is marketing’s hidden superpower
Most financial marketing teams these days run lean. Tight deadlines mean every initiative must justify its ROI, so it’s easy to overlook something as behind-the-scenes as metadata.
For wealth and asset management marketers who are juggling everything from content creation to campaign execution and performance reporting, dedicating time to metadata may feel like a low priority.
But that assumption comes at a cost.
When implemented properly, metadata makes content easier to find, reuse, personalize and measure. It reduces manual effort, improves collaboration and brings structure to content operations that can often feel fragmented.
Marketing Week – Marketers’ worth can’t be reduced to a line item on a spreadsheet
If imposter syndrome is a gremlin, for marketers, the ROI debate is that gremlin’s rocket fuel.
When Marketing Week research exposed the startling reality that over 80% of marketers wrestle with imposter syndrome, it made me think about ROI and how we are in a unique position where we often (although not always) have to justify our existence.
The relentless pressure to justify marketing’s value isn’t new, but the continued shift toward short-termism and the ease with which digital numbers – though often misleading – can be plucked from dashboards have intensified the demand for a single, absolute ROI figure.
In one of my recent workshops, a senior marketing leader said: “We’re in this weird space as marketers and creatives where we’re being asked to prove the value of what we’re doing. But even when we try to get there, the boards or CFOs turn around and say: ‘I don’t believe that number.’”
Cognito – How AI is rewriting search for financial brands
We’ve been talking about the impact of AI on organic search, but it seems like in the last week I’ve had more conversations about it than in the entire year prior.
Perhaps we as an industry have suddenly caught up to the idea that we’re reaching a tipping point.
Everything is changing so fast, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. I’m here to help move the conversation from where things are to what needs to be done in response.
Last week, two articles made the rounds in our offices. The Wall Street Journal, using Mailchimp research, predicted websites’ primary function would be AI data sources. Semafor wrote on the importance of journalism in training AI bots.
They raise a few questions: Will anyone come to my site? How can I prove that my marketing is doing anything if they don’t? Do we need to keep investing in SEO? Is my brand showing up in ChatGPT? How can I know and give it the best chance of appearing there?
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.
Let’s give your firm the benefit of the doubt and assume that the first challenge has been met: you have specialized portfolio management expertise with your product offering. Congratulations. Now for the remaining challenge: getting prospects and those who influence them to learn of and buy into your expertise as being a leading factor they consider for allocating to your fund.
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
