It was published years ago, but the book How to Read a Person Like a Book and underlying concept of body language has found a home in at least one high school I know of. What’s being taught is that nonverbal cues can be a shortcut in understanding a person’s motivation. At least that’s what I assumed until my niece Meg corrected me. “No, I told you about that when I was taking Speech class. We studied it as a way to communicate to an audience,” said Meg, who always knows better—and in this case her explanation fits better, too.

Keyword Density Checkers accomplish a similar purpose. The keyword cloud created by the free Keyword Density Checker from WebConfs.com provides a quick, undebatable picture of how the site is communicating to its audience. We’ve been using it lately to help Web site publishers visualize why their Web sites aren’t sitting on top of search engine rankings.

What topics is your company an authority on? Let’s say that you’re the rare asset management company that is also an expert on tacos. As such, you’d expect to attract Web searchers looking for “tacos.” The logic works on the condition that you actually have a predominance of taco-related content on your site and that Google and the other search engines are able to find it. If you don’t have the content, the Keyword Density Checker’s keyword cloud also serves as a reality checker.

WebConfs.com provides this explanation of its tool:
Keyword Cloud is a visual depiction of keywords used on a website, keywords having higher density are depicted in a larger fonts. Ideally your main keywords should appear in larger fonts at the start of the cloud. Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your webpage. It is important for your main keywords to have the correct keyword density to rank well in Search Engines.This tool will crawl the given URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and Analyze the density of the keywords.

Here’s how it works when everything works. Pimco, known for its market commentary, would have to be pleased with this visual depiction.

But below are just a sampling of other asset management companies' keyword clouds. We show them below not to single any one out but to comment on the similarities:

• The keyword clouds suggest that there’s a lot of talking about ourselves (not that there’s anything wrong with that on a brand site but you do have to read the body language—in this case, bounce rate).
• It really says something about our communicating when Compliance and Legal's influence (note the prevalence of "carefully" and "privacy policy," for two examples) predominate. Lots of random, potentially business-building terms but where is the evidence of a content director deliberately working to present a body of work on a style of investing, a type of investment product, something the company is known for...
• Other checkers we’ve run just for fun have .pdf as one of their most prominent keywords. The industry's reliance on Adobe Acrobat as the sole means of delivering valuable online content really has to be checked, and maybe using this checker will help some Website managers kick the habit.

The best way to attract valuable traffic to your Web site—and by that we mean traffic from visitors interested in what you have to offer—is to produce appropriate valuable content and make it findable by search engines. The work may not be easy and Sales may wonder why your people are “spending all their time writing” (!), but the work is noble and for the greater good.

Many experts (including this report from Marketing Sherpa) expect email to get a workout in light of shrinking marketing budgets. But email marketing is something that requires a lot of attention to get right. It hasn’t been a strength at many investment management companies previously, and we’d caution against a kneejerk decision to just stoke up the email machinery as you’re cooling off on your direct mail and other print communicating. There’s a high probability you run the risk of burning through some of your high quality contacts.

We'd argue that CRM/database growth—as opposed to depletion—should be the objective of just about any marketing effort. (And see our thoughts on Marketing’s role in helping maintain the database.)

A recent study from Silverpop provides some benchmark data about business-to-business lead management practices (using email). Financial services companies were represented among the 250 BtoB clients whose data were analyzed.

Most relevant to our space, perhaps, are the insights on the extent to which others are tracking database changes. (If you listen closely, somewhere in your distant past a professor is still pounding the desk and insisting, “You cannot MANAGE what you do not MEASURE.”)

The full Silverpop Benchmark Study of Lead Management Practices can be downloaded but here are two highlights:
• The typical BtoB database is growing at a monthly equivalent rate of about 5% to 10%. “An average size database that isn’t growing at least 5% per month is probably underperforming,” the study says.
• The study provides detailed data on open, click-through and click-to-open rates by quarter and by type of campaign. You’ll know best whether these work as benchmarks for your organization but one high-level survey finding seems plausible. According to Silverpop, drip campaign response rates outperform single-message campaigns by 2:1 and 3:1 in some cases.

Marketing wants to send even more emails even more often? This is something that the reactionaries in your midst could have a problem with. If you think your campaigns could benefit from two and three times your current results, you might want to call a meeting and enlist Sales, Compliance and other interested parties in collaboratively drafting a drip plan.

The report also includes some data and commentary on form completion rates. One additional thought we’ll add relates to the inability to set communications preferences on most money manager sites. A Kitchen Sink approach to communicating with investors and financial advisors is bound to drive more unsubscribes than if you enabled your site visitors to sign up for only what they’re interested in.

Although it’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison because none of the offers relates to a step in a lead generation process, here’s a good example of preference-collecting from Thornburg’s site.