The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – October 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
Bruce Frumerman – Is Your In-person Fund Pitch Coming Across Like The Spanish Inquisition?
Congratulations! You’ve got the attention of a sophisticated investor in search of new allocation opportunities. Before you do anything remember that skeptical, financially educated, sophisticated investors will not invest until they get a satisfactorily detailed and transparent explanation about the investment process the questing portfolio manager follows. If such experienced investors do not buy into your offering’s strategy implementation, they will pass.
Expect to be called upon in your first meeting to give a verbal, detailed walk-through explanation of your investment process. This can take place in person or in a video discussion. This information will need to be delivered later in print, but that’s a story for another day.
At your meeting, your sophisticated investor will probably listen to you with laser-like focus. Bear in mind that you’re in the big time now. Your prospect or your prospect’s gatekeeper will demand more detailed information than what the ‘low hanging fruit’ investors you may have previously pitched and won over asked of you. Marketing to sophisticated investors means being subjected to more extensive due diligence.
This is a significant contrast to the easier to convince investors you may have come across whose allocation decisions were either primarily based on overweighting the value of pedigree (they were impressed by where the manager used to work or went to college, and that ‘trust buy-in’ sufficed) or to performance chasing (where they were allocated to a top quintile performing manager running a similar strategy whose performance dropped and so they go hunting for today’s top quintile replacement).
Marketing Week – Half of B2B marketers grappling with AI skills gap
As B2B brands continue to experiment with artificial intelligence, could they run into problems when the tech’s capabilities outpace the marketing skillset?
According to Marketing Week’s 2025 State of B2B Marketing research, three-quarters (75.9%) of the 450 respondents say focus on AI has ramped up in their business over the past 12 months. This is true in 77.6% of SMEs (250 employees and under) and 74% of large corporates.
Marketing Week – Escaping digital overload: How marketers can reclaim time for creativity
Marketers are never short on ideas; they are short on time. Too often, that time is swallowed by the grind of chasing files, retracing feedback and juggling content across multiple platforms.
What you’d imagine to be a smooth creative process can quickly turn into a fragmented scavenger hunt. Think of the creative director trying to piece together feedback hidden in Slack threads, or an account manager searching for the latest deck across a maze of shared drives.
This information overload has become a constant drain on creative energy, leaving teams frustrated and leading to agency owners questioning whether it’s the creative or the process at fault. The reality is, it’s neither.
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.
Cognito – Can Europe’s banks keep ahead in the transaction banking marketing marathon?
Nothing reveals SWIFT’s European roots more than the fact that six decades after the first Sibos in Brussels, wine is still served to delegates at lunchtimes. Sure, JP Morgan accounts for over 26% of SWIFT messages, and it and other US banks have always been crucial in payments, but transaction banking is a field (perhaps only along with wealth management) where European banks continue to play in the premier league.
EMEA accounts for six of the ten constituents in Coalition’s transaction banking index. The question now is how can those banks defend those franchises in a radically different future – and we at Cognito spend some of our time thinking about how intelligent communications and marketing can contribute to that.
The EMEA transaction banking revenue pool is about the same as the US – the scale and complexity of cross border flows make this a relatively more important business in Europe than the US (whereas US investment banking revenues are double Europe’s).
European banks have slipped since the 1990s – PNC in Pittsburgh is now bigger by market cap than ING, Barclays, Deutsche or Crédit Agricole – but transaction banking and securities services have been a bulwark for the Europeans. And crucially nearly 60% of Europe’s payments revenue pool is corporate, versus just 35% in the more retail-driven US. The stickiness of that corporate transaction banking business has underpinned the franchise of several European banks even as they retreated in investment banking.
ProFundCom – Unlocking Hidden Digital Alpha: Secrets Top Fund Marketers Use
Become the Director of Great Buyer Journeys. Investors will probably never meet your fund’s marketers, investor relations teams, or other stakeholders in person. It would be lovely to chat about their individual financial needs on that level to tailor a portfolio that suits them. Unfortunately, the days of networking in hotel lobbies have almost wholly given way to digital exploration.
By the time a fund marketer first interacts with a prospect, they’ve likely already scoped out the product range, signed up for webinars, read through a blog or two or interacted with a LinkedIn post. These ‘invisible’ investors are not faceless apparitions. They’re real people determining whether your brand will be a perfect fit for their investment lifestyle using thorough due diligence.
If you’re waiting for all that to happen before sending them a pitch deck, you’re too late. This is why financial marketers must use all their domain expertise, resources, automation platforms and psychology smarts to build an ‘Investor Journey’ that presents the fund’s thought leadership in the best light, no matter if they’re new to your brand or a seasoned investor.
Whether a marketing team is a one-person show, made up of multiple creative and data technicians at a boutique or a large fund house with budgets to experiment with, these distilled techniques are essential to creating, distributing and analysing campaigns that engage investors and boost ROI.
Ready to become brilliant craftspeople for your fund? Step this way, and we hope you’ll find these tips useful for all future go-to market (GTM) planning.
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
