The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – November 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
Living Group – Living Ratings of Asset Managers 2025
Following on from last year’s theme, “Building Brand, Building Reputation,” this year’s focus is all about amplifying your brand — ensuring it’s not only visible but also meaningful, differentiated, and future-ready.
Over the past year, we’ve seen an unprecedented level of brand activity across the sector. Around 10% of the Top 100 firms have undergone a rebrand or repositioning, while many others have launched high-profile brand campaigns aimed at sharpening their market presence and reinforcing their purpose.At the same time, the rise of Private Markets and the growing democratisation of alternative investments has signalled a new era of investing. This shift has expanded the landscape, bringing more private equity and alternatives firms into the Top 100, alongside a wave of new partnerships between traditional asset managers and private equity players.
Such rapid business and sector transformation demands brand transformation. The question for firms now is clear: how do you position and amplify your brand so it remains relevant, distinctive, and memorable — not just for existing audiences, but for the next generation of investors?
Peregrine – The Global 100 Asset Management Marketing Report 2025
This is now the 8th year that we have put out our annual analysis of the world’s largest asset managers. In that time, we have had thousands of downloads, been asked to share our findings at many conferences, run more than a few strategy sessions, had our research cited by the biggest management consulting firms, and have been covered by the key media in our space. But more than anything else, we have valued the myriad conversations it has led to with asset managers of every size. It has helped us develop and refine our thinking about how to build, evolve and protect investment firms’ brands.
With that said, nothing stands still, nor should it. Which is why we are very excited to unveil a refresh to our thinking for this year’s Global 100. The Brand Diagnostic will, of course, remain – it is an invaluable tool that helps us benchmark whether our clients are building their brands. We have always wanted to find a more methodical, more evidence-based way to help firms consider their competitor positioning, and now we can.
So, with this year’s Global 100, please welcome Peregrine Frame, our new analytical tool to help asset managers assess how distinctive their positioning is, how common, or otherwise, their key messages are. It is already clear that firms that score better for the distinctiveness of their positioning are more likely to be among the biggest winners when it comes to growing AUM. We hope you’ll find this as useful as we do.
Bruce Frumerman- Investors Want Managers’ Writings — Are Yours Worthy?
Everything old is new again
Observations my financial communications and sales marketing consulting firm has been sharing with money management firm clients for decades relating to the importance of marketing the beyond-the-numbers intellectual acumen of the portfolio manager when selling investment products to sophisticated institutional investors has resurfaced in the form of a new survey report of that very group of investors and their investment consultants.
Chief Investment Officer magazine recently wrote, “Institutional investors value managers’ investment content, which overwhelmingly informs investment decisions, CoreData Research finds”. The magazine went on to state that “The report found that 99% of institutional investors said con- tent from asset managers influenced their investment decision-making, with 48% of respondents saying it has challenged their thinking on strategic asset allocation and portfolio construction.”
ProFundCom – How Digital Platforms Add the Human Edge to Hedge Fund Marketing
Each of the financial world’s sub-pockets has its own love-hate relationship with digital. Much of this depends on how ‘with the times’ they are: have they implemented new technologies and upskilled themselves? Or have they chosen to turn a blind eye, thinking old-school investors will want more of the same from their marketing like the past half century?
Hedge funds are one sect that’s found difficulty playing catch up. It’s true that it’s a people business, given the intricate nature of hedge funds and the needs of their clientele. However, there’s no stopping investor journeys starting, continuing and (potentially) finishing online without a manager ever having met them. It’s been a while since the pandemic, and many are not rushing back to the office. A presentation, coffee meet or handshake in public feels lost to lore and perhaps erased for the future!
That’s not to say that hedge funds should feel hard done by. Digitisation is an asset when used correctly, and makes all the difference in displaying one fund’s personality over another if personalised properly. With thought leadership, strategies, risk analysis and more available to potential clients conducting their own due diligence online, a hedge fund whose expertise is a step above should see the (digital) leads flocking into the sales workstream.
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
