The Month in Digital Marketing for Finance – September 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
Cognito – Why comms can help financial firms reap value from AI
A year ago, the use of AI for many white-collar workers was speculative. Now, it’s an everyday reality in our lives. Consider this piece of evidence. We asked our guests at our first AI event six months ago to raise their hands if they had used Chat GPT – only a few hands went up. But things were different at our event last week. The people were mostly the same, but they had a different outlook on how integral AI is becoming to their overall marketing and communications strategy. We’re particularly interested in use cases for generative AI in financial services and fintech. We present here a few reflections, incorporating insight from industry experts who gathered in our offices recently. McKinsey research shows that the industries which rely most heavily on knowledge work will see the highest impact from Gen AI. GenAI should add 5% of global industry revenue to the banking sector – one of the largest gains of any part of the economy. (A similar study from Accenture this spring suggested 6% growth in just three years.) For an industry estimated to have a global worth of more than $10 trillion, this represents a significant shift. Read more
Features
Marketing Week – Is the KPI still a good indicator of performance?
Has any other acronym done as much damage to marketing effectiveness as ‘KPI’? The KPI is coveted everywhere as a thing of gargantuan significance, but as with all pieces of jargon, it gets massively oversimplified and misunderstood. There’s nothing wrong with measuring stuff and knowing what works. Indeed, we can do this better than ever before. But the issue with the KPI is that it has been squashed into itself, and in the process it has lost its intended meaning and adopted another. This happens with lots of pieces of jargon; our attempts to simplify things make them simplistic and they pick up a life of their own, often different from the original intention. Read more
White Marble – Crafting your story to sell a solution, not push a product
We all know how it feels to be talked at. It hardly leaves a positive impression. When a speaker is so focused on getting their message across, they often overlook the most important part: how (dis)engaged their audience is. Getting that first meeting with a fund selector is hard. Depending on the sector, it can take weeks, months and even years to build up sufficient interest and trust. And all that effort can be for nought if, in the presentation, the salesperson / fund manager (FM) leads with ‘I/We’, instead of ‘You’. It’s like going on a bad date when the other person won’t stop talking about themself and shows little-to-no palpable interest in you. They are unlikely to make it to date number two. But there are a few simple steps that you can take to set yourself up for success. Read more
Bruce Frumerman – When Should I Start Marketing My New Fund?
I get asked this very good question about a dozen times a year. It is a legitimate question for founders of relatively young investment management firms to ask — from the just launched to those under three years old — as there are many costs attached to initiating an asset raising effort as well as consequences for taking missteps. So, before turning from only managing your own assets in your fund as you grow your track record to asking others to invest with you, what should you consider? There is the time and effort cost for preparing to begin to explain yourself and your offering to outsiders. There is a financial expenditure for developing the right content and then producing the physical and electronic versions of marketing documents that your firm will need to share with prospective investors throughout the selling cycle. There are also two potential lost opportunity costs. One is pitching people too hastily to invest before the portfolio manager has locked down how to tell the story the right way (sophisticated investors will not allow an emerging manager a do-over). The other is waiting so long to get around to creating awareness that the firm and product offering even exist that the ramp-up time to prepare properly to market can add months onto how much time it might take to begin to generate positive marketing results. Read more
Many funds will agree that the ‘old ways’ of reaching investors feel like aeons ago.If you dug up a marketing time capsule, you’d find a range of dusty monthly periodicals, ‘80s business cards and a FundForum brochure. Nowadays, everything has been replaced with a laptop or an iPhone, and so have the channels they showcase. Time has inexplicably changed how potential investors research and engage with a fund before deciding to part with their money. But it’s taken fund marketers some time to catch them up, let alone stay ahead. While it’s still unknown which future digital paths investors will take, the only surety is that they are likely to muddy the waters even more. After all, the modern buyer journey comprises multiple destinations – touchpoints through social media, websites, portals and subscription forms – where each contact joins at any non-linear stage. Only the most prepared funds will capture their attention to generate and convert leads. 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
