What role does SEO play in your firm’s Marketing? Many companies we work with don’t invest a lot in search engine optimization. But the companies that do tend to swing over to the other extreme—they tend to have a deeper appreciation for how search drives website traffic and, because of this, they invest many of their hopes and dreams into their SEO efforts.

In many cases, that’s not practical. SEO can’t on its own rescue an online presence, and particularly not if an SEO team is siloed. What an organization knows and understands about SEO can be leveraged many times over once the search professionals are mainstreamed with the rest of Marketing, including writers and producers involved in creating content to be marketed and syndicated.

Whether you’re a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) company that today invests in SEO or not, the presentation I’ve embedded below has relevance for the work you’re doing to market with thought leadership. It may start too far back for some of you or go into too much detail, but be sure to pay attention to the insights starting on slide 51.

The “Death and Rebirth of SEO” by Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, provides concrete examples of how SEO and search awareness can work effectively with content marketing, social media, analytics and public relations. It’s an excellent point-in-time report that I think you’ll get so much out of.

Google’s new Think Insights, announced last week as a project designed to “help marketers make smarter decisions,” includes two 2010 research presentations that shed light on investors’ search for information online:

• “The Role of Search in Brokerage Account Shopping,” citing Google/Compete 2010 data
• “Inside Look Into The Financially-Minded Digitally-Connected Baby Boomer” with Google/Nielsen Online/Sterling data

Both are embedded below and here are a few notes from my review. By the way, Google doesn’t number its title slides so the slide numbers I refer to below are to enable you to enter the number to go to the slide. It will be one off the number that appears on the slide.

Searchers Likelier To Apply, Bring Larger Account Balances

It doesn’t happen often but sometimes the Universe helps with the blog-writing.

All week I’ve vacillated between two disparate topics: the Roth IRA Conversion Centers that are appearing on asset managers’ Web sites and pay-per-click (PPC) content advertising. Thanks to the Universe for showing a way to address both topics in a single (OK, little long) post.

When there’s a change requiring investor education and a deadline to take action—as is the case with the change in the IRA tax law enabling taxpayers to spread the taxes related to a 2010 IRA-to-Roth-IRA conversion over two years—this is an opportunity for asset management marketers to use marketing to raise assets.

According to Google Insights for Search, interest in Roth IRA conversion as a search term (and related derivatives) peaked in January. That was before many firms had published their Roth IRA conversion content but interest remains high. The opportunity is ongoing.

We’ve gone directly to the Web sites of the largest investment management companies to check out the Roth IRA conversion content developed to attract interest and possibly meet new customers (advisors and investors). Note that this isn’t the way newcomers will get to the sites—if they’re new, Search in all likelihood will have to bring them.

What we’re seeing are a few videos (examples: Nuveen and Putnam), limited HTML content and, as usual, lots of Adobe Acrobat files.

The conversion decision lends itself to calculations, and most firms that have created dedicated Roth IRA Conversion Centers offer at least one calculator. It makes sense that some firms have turned to third parties for interactive tools rather than develop their own. T. Rowe Price uses a Morningstar calculator and Standard & Poor’s powers American Century’s Roth Conversion Analyzer, for example.

But while we acknowledge the speed-to-market motivation that may be driving the decision, we’re not crazy about the use of tools or the hosting of content off a domain, as is the case of Dreyfus’s center and, to a lesser degree, Oppenheimer’s calculator which is off the domain and on a page devoid of all Oppenheimer branding.

Content that’s not on your domain won’t lift your domain in search engine rankings and, in these instances, the user experience suffers.

All in all, it’s not a super search engine-optimized showing for the asset managers, and we have our doubts about how the investment manager content is going to rocket to the top of search engine rankings. One notable exception: Fidelity.com, which consistently ranks high on retirement planning search terms.

Which sites are winning the Search competition for Roth IRA conversion-related terms? That’s how the Universe leads us to pay-per-click (PPC) content advertising.

Enter Pay-per-click (PPC) Content Advertising

A handful of sites command the rankings for the top Roth IRA keywords, according to broad and exact match search analytics data from Compete and a few paid SEO tools we use.

But before we get to them, let’s digress by taking a look at an outlier site that’s consistently ranking high in Roth IRA searches: It’s an LPL financial advisor’s blog, Good Financial Cents by Jeff Rose.

Take a moment to contemplate this accomplishment. Asset manager marketing communications staffs are especially lean right now, to be sure, but an individual advisor has managed to produce enough content and establish enough authority to “beat” asset managers at a game they should have an advantage in. Rose is among the savviest content marketer/financial advisors, but a legion of marketing-minded advisors are right behind him. You can read more about Rose’s strategy in this WiredAdvisor interview.

Given the nature of the other high-ranking sites, asset manager content offerings are not likely to be able to “fight” them. But if you or your online advertising resources (if you have them) are willing to explore your options, there might be a way to join them and other retirement planning-focused Web sites.

At this point, I should disclose that several weeks ago I was asked if I’d be willing to review Customers Now, a book on pay-per-click content advertising. As it happened, I regularly listen to the author David Szetela’s PPC Rockstars podcast and I’d been hearing about this book coming together. I accepted the publicist’s offer, received the 84-page soft cover book and have been meaning to get around to writing the review.

I remembered the commitment this week as I saw who was winning the Roth IRA conversion traffic. It’s content aggregation sites, including: www.rothira.com, www.fairmark.com and www.money-zine.com. All of which are supported by Google AdSense ads, a program that involves Google sharing ad revenue with the Web sites.

Cheesy, right? I’ve always thought so, too. But in demystifying how the ad placements work, Szetela makes a convincing case for the practice. It’s germane to this discussion as a viable tactic to consider in driving awareness and attention for your Roth IRA conversion content.

According to Spyfu.com today, 22 advertisers are bidding for “Roth IRA conversion” as a pay-per-click (PPC) keyword phrase displayed on the search engine results pages. A leading proponent of PPC search advertising, Szetela nonetheless says that such a search takes place later in an information-gathering process. In contrast, pay-per-click (PPC) content advertisers attempt to reach readers on content pages (not Search engines) earlier, during their research and discovery phases.

Advertising on content networks enables advertisers to reach many more people online and before the competition takes place on crowded search pages, Szetela says.

The difference between PPC content and PPC search is that PPC content starts by targeting the customer on relevant but typically niche Web sites. This book serves as a practical guide to using the Google Content Network (whose sites include The Wall Street Journal, Seeking Alpha and Barron’s) and ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ Exchange (whose site says it offers inventory of more than 8,000 vetted publishers).

Szetela describes the significant work required to control the content-matching algorithms to “laser-target” ad placements. Through trial and error, advertisers can adjust the ad creative (yep, Szetela makes the case for the dancing-baby-like animations), target demographic groups and overall assure that their ads appear in context of appropriate, “brand-safe” content.

Will your ad appear on the top sites for Roth IRA terms and will that placement materially help your overall initiative? Maybe, maybe not.

What we can say with near-certainty is that publishing just a limited amount of suboptimized content on your site will not draw visitors on its own. Not on such a competitive topic where content aggregation sites got there before you.

This morning, by the way, we saw T. Rowe Price, continually one of the industry’s most aggressive PPC advertisers, on Fairmark.com. T. Rowe is going for it.

More and more, asset managers are going to conclude that publishing content on their own site is just step one of a two-step process. The second step is to promote the content, using an array of tactics.

To learn more about PPC content advertising as a possible tactic, here’s a (free) Adobe Acrobat file of the Szetela book.

On Friday, May 7, Pat will be moderating a “Connecting Today: How Asset Managers Are Using Social Media and Why” session at ICI’s 2010 Operations and Technology Conference. Vanguard, Northern Trust and Stradley, Ronon Stevens & Young, LLP will be the panelists.

In addition to tracking marketing predictions (see our 2010 Marketing Predictions, Part 1 post for a round-up and see this article for 100 more), we’ve been keeping an eye on business predictions for 2010. And, the short version is that asset-gathering isn’t going to be any easier.

If you’re a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer, you can expect competition to heat up as your marketing counterparts do what they can to encourage investors to return to equity funds, evaluate their Roth IRA conversion prospects and use new, improved tools and expert advice for investment portfolio-building and re-building.

Digital marketing strategy and tactics will be at the center of all of these, that’s a safe guess. Below are five Rock The Boat Marketing’s predictions for asset manager digital marketing strategy in 2010, sprinkled with a smattering of wishful thinking.

1. It’s catch-up time for asset managers and how they interact on the Web.

We liken the modus operandi of most asset managers on the Internet today to the neighbor who moves into a bustling subdivision, pulls the shades, keeps the kids from playing outside and refuses to take part in the block party. In 2010, we expect some asset managers to more fully participate as citizens of the World Wide Web.

Of necessity, we expect to see some companies introduce or step up practices that others have been following for years. Linking to other Web sites (which is done minimally or on an exception basis by most money management firms today), developing content designed to draw links from other sites, introducing multiple email newsletter offers, adding RSS feeds. We expect to see more marketing communications writers being tasked with writing search engine-optimized copy. “Unfriendly” URLs that are so prevalent on asset management sites are going to be rewritten.

The current M.O. dates back to a different time, when the assumption was that someone would come to your site and take the time to browse it. Oh no, they won’t. An earlier Rock The Boat Marketing post commented on the decline of traffic to destination sites across all industries, including asset management. The asset manager that stands still next year and makes no change to its current approach to Web publishing will suffer a loss of visibility it can ill-afford.

A few money managers are developing new plans, ones that acknowledge the value of using content to pull information-seekers to them (and what’s required to do so) while simultaneously recognizing that most content will be accessed on sites other than their own domains. Also a part of the plan: how to support mobile phone users.

2. Some asset managers will rethink financial advisor sites.

Having worked on asset management Web sites since the beginning, we recall the original objective of advisor-only areas of asset manager Web sites. The intent was to drive engagement—registered advisors would be more than just users of mutual fund products, they would be advocates, or so the argument went.

It’s time for a reality check on exactly what advisor-only sites are accomplishing today. Multiple surveys (including kasina’s What Advisors Do Online and the SwanDog/Morningstar Marketing To Today’s RIA) suggest that these sites are lightly used by advisors.

American Funds and other managers that command significant market share or have thoroughly and completely committed to the channel may be pleased with advisor reliance on and use of their sites. But the majority of firms that pop the Web analytics hood and look around will see a gaping discrepancy between advisor registrations and log-in activity. Just about everywhere else on the Web is livelier and more engaging than a dusty advisor site that is mostly a document repository and makes no pretense of offering community. Junior advisors who could be expected to most benefit from the resources of an advisor-only site are especially likely to recoil in disappointment after an initial visit.

In 2010, practical asset managers will resolve to objectively look at the site usage data and feedback. We think a few will pursue alternatives and deploy resources in other ways to provide more meaningful value to advisors as a means of engaging them.

3. Relationship-building will become a group exercise, with the digital marketer one of the exercise leaders.

As a digital marketer, you may have a reputation within the company as being a “techie.” In 2010, we predict that you’ll play a pivotal role in Marketing’s responsibility for relationship-building. Relationships will be even more important in 2010 as countless firms set their sights on independent advisors and specifically registered investment advisers (RIAs), whose online reliance is well documented.

We see many changes coming (and needed) in how asset managers manage their online relationships. One example: Having communicated so long via print, many asset managers continue the mindset online. The economics of paper and ink dictated the development of a mass message, but many-to-one communicating isn’t the only nor is it the best way online.

Cogent Research’s Advisor Touchpoints 2009, released in November, quantified the volume of communications that advisors are being bombarded with today. According to Cogent, the average advisor has 14 asset manager relationships that produce more than 100 e-mails, phone calls and mailings per month. The most active communicators among mutual fund firms average 16 client contacts per month; ETF providers average five per month.

Next year will be no different than this year—advisors will open and read the emails that are the most engaging and relevant. The difference in 2010, we predict, is that many firms will be tuning their communications with the help of enhancements to their customer relationship management (CRM)s and based on intelligence from their email and Web analytics systems. With your perspective, you’re in a position to add lots of value to what should be a cross-functional mandate.

Look for progressive asset managers to segment their email communications and sequence their messages based on individuals’ response. For those managers, conversation about (and Sales’ pushback on) the number of emails sent will have evolved. How effective are online communications in initiating and nurturing relationships? That’s the question for the new year.

4. The benefits of social media will drive its evaluation.

At least a few companies in 2010 the focus of the discussion on social media will switch from the risks to the benefits.

As the differences between the relationships that asset managers have with their clients (advisors and shareholders) stand in stark contrast to the transforming dynamic between other companies in other industries, some asset managers will want in. Barriers and sticky issues—and there are plenty—will be ordered and addressed.

Adoption will be incremental. We’ve watched Vanguard pursue this path as it offered content ratings on its site, launched a YouTube page, a Facebook page and later enabled comments on it, and introduced a blog on Vanguard.com. The same is true of TIAA-CREF who just today used its Twitter account to announce its iPhone application.

The Rock The Boat Marketing Twitter list of investment managers now includes 17 companies including Fidelity, The Hartford, Nuveen Investments, MFS, Lord Abbett and Putnam. Throughout most of the year, we’ve commented on the marketing uses of Twitter. But it’s a bona fide customer service channel in some industries, and we regularly see tweets that suggest that investors expect fund companies to be listening, too.

Why don’t you have a social media strategy in development? Is the answer “Compliance won’t let us”? While wariness of social media might have been considered an appropriate, measured stance in 2009, we predict thinning patience for this in 2010. At some point, clients and executive management are going to interpret it as an excuse for inaction.

5. Ambivalent, tepid marketing will give way to aggressive, spirited content marketing.

Our work requires us to spend lots of time on asset manager sites. There is a sameness to them. It’s no wonder advisors and investors forget where they saw what. But it’s in the content offerings where we see companies differentiating themselves today.

You and your colleagues in 2009 have delivered phenomenal market analyses, for example. It’s clear that you made them a priority this year and we know from experience how you needed to work your relationships with Investments and Compliance personnel to get Sales what they needed and were no doubt clamoring for. …And then you “posted them on the Web,” right? Or maybe a day or a week later sent out an email to your entire database with the tantalizing subject heading: Whitepaper Updated. (We kid because we love, always remember that.)

Next year some companies will realize that Sales isn’t the only audience for the thought leadership they provide and that they’ve been hiding their light under a bushel (or buried within an Adobe Acrobat file, as the case may be).

Some companies will take a look at the budget they invest in new product hoopla, for example, and re-allocate a portion of it and FTEs to public relations, advertising, email and even social media tactics designed to leverage the marketing potential of the content. Each whitepaper, interview transcript, portfolio update will be announced externally with the same zeal it’s announced to Sales.

We’re looking forward to the promise of next year. 2009 and 2008 were not for the faint of heart, to be sure. But they required largely defensive marketing. We think the environment will be conducive to a little more rockin’ the boat in 2010.

What do you see in the new year? Do you agree with our predictions? Do you disagree? We welcome your comments below.

Happy Holidays to all! We won’t post next week but will be back the week of December 28. Throughout of course, follow us on Twitter—@RockTheBoatMKTG and our alter ego @AdvisorTweets.

July brought new looks (and some information re-design) to several asset management Web sites, including:

• Alger
• Calamos Investments
• Eaton Vance
• Mainstay Investments
• RidgeWorth Funds

Besides a fondness for blue (good for you, RidgeWorth, for daring to use a red!), the publicly accessible areas of the new sites have some features in common—multiple searches/sorts, quick links, RSS subscriptions. With their Most Popular capabilities, MainStay and RidgeWorth take navigation a bit further by offering visitors the benefit of what previous visitors valued. You’ll want to check each site out yourself.

Just for fun, below we show screenshots of relatively recent previous versions of the sites, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. The screenshots we show of the new sites are of the individual investor pages. Click on the images of the new sites to go to them.

Congratulations to all involved in getting these sites launched. Across the board on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) providers’ sites, we’d like to see more differentiation and the use of social media to fully explore unique value propositions online. (For some ideas, download our free e-book.)

Still, we appreciate what it takes to get collaborations like Web site redesigns—especially when they’re part of rebrandings, as was the case with Alger, Eaton Vance and MainStay—out the door. Launch, refine, rinse and repeat.

And, always, analyze! (For more on essential Web analytics, see our recent post “Are You Ready for a Web Analytics Grilling?”)

BEFORE: Alger Web Site as of Feb. 5, 2008

AFTER: Alger Web Site as of July 2009

BEFORE: Calamos Investments Web Site as of Nov. 14, 2007

AFTER: Calamos Investments Web Site as of July 2009

BEFORE: Eaton Vance Web Site as of Feb. 13, 2008

AFTER: Eaton Vance Web Site as of July 2009

BEFORE: MainStay Investments Web Site as of July 13, 2007

AFTER: MainStay Investments Web Site as of July 2009

BEFORE: RidgeWorth Funds Web Site as of Aug. 2008

AFTER: RidgeWorth Funds Web Site as of July 2009

I turned to Google Trends today just to satisfy a curiosity, but the trends data makes me wonder about the opportunity ahead for IRA marketers.

Based on the data filtered for the U.S. only, searches for the term “IRAs” are well off their historical pattern. As you can see, interest in IRAs in the previous four years began to climb toward the end of the fourth quarter and peaked the next spring, just before April 15.

But at the end of 2008, interest in IRAs as a term was still muted.

Are search trends predictive? A few months ago, Google demonstrated its belief in them when it introduced Google Flu Trends. Google had compared its flu-related search queries with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some searches were popular exactly when flu season is happening. Now Google is using the flu search data to estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

Back to financial services, here’s my logic in calling attention to the IRA trend. We are at a time of year when searches should be on the upswing. Add to that the thousands of people involuntarily leaving their jobs with 401(k)s to be rolled over. I think this sets up for a ferocious level of searches for valuable IRA content in the next few months.

A Google search of IRAs today produced close to 7 million pages of results and 24 pages of 287 sponsored links. (Really? You AdWords buyers think that makes sense?) And yet, look at the natural search results and you’ll see that no single provider dominates the results. If I were searching, I think I’d find these results wholly unsatisfying and revert instead to social search sites like Delicious or Yahoo Answers or even Twitter.

What will the IRA season be like? How much of it will be researched and conducted online? Clearly, competition will be fierce but my bet is that there will be big winners. More important, I believe that there is immense opportunity to win this year not with the traditional advertising messages but with content that creative marketers distribute far and wide.

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.

The CEO ranks second only to Marketing as an influencer on digital marketing strategy in financial services. That’s according to the recently released Digital Marketing in Financial Services study produced by MarketBridge, a global professional services firm focused on sales and marketing effectiveness, and Source Media, which provides authoritative information, analysis and insight for the financial services, investment, insurance, accounting and related technology industries.

Source: Digital Marketing in Financial Services, 2008

The survey was conducted in the third quarter of 2008. A total of 237 respondents representing a mix of executive management (38%), marketing (35%) and sales (17%) answered questions on digital marketing and budgeting; usage of digital marketing channels; analytics; resources; and attitudes and beliefs about digital marketing.

We’d encourage you to download the full study from but here are just a few additional highlights.

• 50% of respondents said they’re spending more on digital marketing in 2008 than in 2007, with 30% saying they were spending at least 20% more.
• Asked to rank the effectiveness of the various platforms, respondents ranked search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) toward the top and newer Web 2.0 tools such as viral video, social networks and blogs lower on the list.
• Respondents equally cited a lack of experience and the inability to prove ROI as their top concerns about adopting digital marketing
  tactics and programs. (This is in spite of the fact, the survey producers noted, that “ROI can be proved through the use of the majority of digital tools.”) Regulatory issues were cited by more than one-third of the respondents.