Hi there!

New year, new decade. Here's hoping it rings in a whole new burst of creativity for marketing at asset management companies.

First, I confess I got a chuckle over a chart that appeared on The Reformed Broker blog right before the holidays. Here's a snippet of it but be sure to go to the post for the rest—plus comments.

Assuming you're in the right mind, we hope you'll laugh, too. Oh, those Aughties. By the end of them, mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing communications had gotten pretty predictable, not very informative let alone inspiring. (And the Reformed Broker is making some larger points about the products themselves.)

The asset management industry is getting out of the 2000s just in time. That was then and this is 2010. What and how are you going to communicate in this brand-new year?

In our last post, we reviewed some of our "must-read" and "great" financial services tweets. We've mined our tweet stream for the "cool" stuff, augmented with a few additions, to compile the list that follows. You may have your own virtual notebook of the cool and creative—naturally, we'd welcome your Comments below.

We gave you Monday to re-enter, Tuesday to re-engage but today let's think about revolutionizing the way you communicate online. Do the following spark any of your creative juices?

Shake Up Your Unsubscribes

Of course, you offer your email list an unsubscribe option. Check out this screencast to see how one company acknowledges unsubscribes. While you're not likely to "punish" an employee, could you add any flavor to those vanilla Unsubscribe confirmations?
 

Interactive Goal Planning

Investors use your products to achieve their financial goals. Lots of words on your site are dedicated to coaching them or helping support financial advisors' coaching. This planning roadmap toward financial goals is far more visual—and maybe more effective? Powered by Boulevard R, we spotted it on financial advisor Russ Thornton's site so that's what we've linked to.

Depicting Characteristics of Companies

Here's a screenshot from Tableau Software's interactive visualization of a group of companies—Inc 500 in this case. Don't you regularly communicate about sets of equities your products invest in? Hmmm.

In the same vein but a little further out there, here's an interactive data visualization that maps parameters of stocks in the S&P500 to animated visual outputs. It's called a STOC (Stock Ticker Orbital Comparison).

Commenting In Context

While we know that the vast majority of you are not accepting comments on your sites just yet, take a look at the state of the art—the addition of dimension to commenting. Poynter.org provides a great explanation of it below and you can see it in action toward the bottom of this WashingtonPost.com page. 

Media Mashup

Is there a business reason for your Web site visitors to mix their message with a more venerable one? In this creative example, users can add their message to Bob Dylan's signs.

OK, have at it. While we'd love to work with you, we understand that some of you are going to head off on your own. That's cool, too. All we ask is that you keep us in the loop. We'll be updating the Rock The Boat Marketing Best Practices page in the coming weeks and it will have plenty for room for your work. 

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.

This is such an imaginative time to be a marketer and especially a digital marketer. As busy as we know the next few weeks will be for most, here's hoping that you can find some time to follow the links below to some outstanding content that collectively aims to describe what marketers will be working on in 2010.

We're counting on your liking predictions as much as we do because our next post is devoted to them, too. We’ll be publishing Rock The Boat Marketing's 2010 predictions for digital marketing at asset management companies early next week—subscribe to our RSS feed now or please remember to check back then.

Broad Marketing Trends

11 Smart Marketers Shared Their 2010 Predictions is a MarketingProfs round-up from a motley group of marketers representing agencies, consulting firms and a municipality’s Zoning Board of Appeals.

Examples: One of the ad hoc panelists says that tailored campaign microsites with unique URLs will be abandoned, and social media networks will become destination sites/pages for product launches. Another expects 2010 to be the year when the practice of allowing Sales and Marketing to operate as separate, conflicting silos ends once and for all, due to an urgency to get online and social marketing right. In a statement that a few commenters push back on, a third predicts "2010 will be the year that 'true' mobile marketing takes off."

Social media silliness will give way to private social networks. Video will become increasingly important for selling higher ticket items that require repeated exposure and graduated commitment to complete the sale. As video becomes commonplace it will make sense to develop content creation processes that simultaneously lay down all three types of media (video, audio and text). Those are among the 5 Bold Marketing Predictions from direct marketing consultant Clayton Makepeace’s The Total Package Web site.

Email And Contact Strategy

In keeping with the season, there’s an evergreen quality to a few of the email predictions on EmailInsider (e.g., opt-in processes will become friendlier and landing pages will convert better). But writer Chad White’s comments on how ISPs evaluate engagement metrics when making deliverability decisions and the expected heightened use of email preference centers are worth your attention.

Let’s include a few forecasts in this post on predictions. Almost half (48%) of businesses are increasing overall marketing budgets next year, according to a StrongMail survey reported on this Research Brief on Mediapost.com. Email and social media are two channels that offer high ROI, StrongMail notes.

Source: 2010 Marketing Trends Survey, StrongMail

Marketing Automation and B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 were written by Eloqua's Steven Woods, whose book Digital Body Language we’ve recently read and highly recommend. Now that companies can learn so much from customer and prospect behavior online, expectations of physical meetings are being reset, Woods says.

"In 2010, in sales organizations we will see a rapid recognition of the new reality that buyers are less willing to take an initial call from a vendor salesperson with an assumption of only exchanging basic information,” says Woods. A more productive first meeting should be the benefit of getting to know a prospect's online profile.

Brand

“A brand can’t just say it stands for something and make it so. The consumer will decide, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement,” writes Brand Keys’ Robert Passikoff in his top 10 brand and marketing trends for 2010 on PizzaMarketplace.com.

Oh and also, according to Passikoff, “Consumers are on to brands trying to play their emotions for profit."

Online Creative

8 Experts’ Predictions for 2010 gathered by iMedia Connection provide creative agencies’ views of what will work next year. Experts from Razorfish, Mediasmith and others say that “Want better marketing? Create a better product” will be a relevant theme, and better products will determine the brands likely to succeed. As for agency work, effective execution of ideas won’t cut it—“agencies need to help clients build brands that do something” as opposed to just helping them formulate effective messages.

Social Media

If 10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010 is your first exposure to Mashable.com, the exceptional social media blog, make it a two-fer. Read founder Pete Cashmore’s survey of what’s going on and what’s coming and then find time to browse Mashable. The demand for real-time information, location-sharing and the “voluntary erosion of privacy” are among the trends Cashmore names.

The Church of the Customer offers a too-short Out/In list. Blogger Jackie Huba's thesis is that social media will get boring in 2010 as businesses seek to integrate social media into business functions. That means policy-writing, and business goal and team alignment.

When you think about it, why do we have to go to a separate site just to search? One of the 5 Social Media Predictions for 2010 on this Social Media Today list expects Search to be phased out as a separate function next year—“users will receive meaningful, personally relevant search results within the context of whatever they are currently doing.”

See you back here next week for Rock The Boat Marketing's 2010 marketing predictions for asset manager digital marketers.

Web strategist and Forrester Research consultant Jeremiah Owyang this week wrote about the effect of letting a Web property get SNOWED—his acronym for Stakeholder Needs Overwhelm Web Experience Design.

That’s an issue that asset management marketers struggle with in trying to provide equitable support for multiple business lines—mutual funds, unit investment trusts (UITs), retirement plans, annuities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), separate accounts—sometimes in multiple geographies and seemingly always led by warring managers.

You may start by working with a single business in a single market as a beta test for a new, cool design. But what’s produced in the test stage is almost never what’s delivered once all the various stakeholders get their crack at it, is it?

Who knows—maybe the American Airlines case study that Owyang cites can provide a neutral starting point for you to start chipping away at this matrixed approach to Web work. For today let's consider a related but less daunting challenge that calls for you to use logic, reason and expertise to appeal to your colleagues in Marketing.

Here's an older video that brilliantly presents the problem. Thanks to Owyang for calling out to it in his post.

Like Microsoft, financial services marketers need to follow brand standards. Standards are created to control the effect of too many cooks following their own recipes. Standards preserve order, leverage enterprise investments and, not incidentally, they typically originate from Marketing! There’s no undermining the importance of standards.

But when communicating digitally, in small spaces, in quick bursts, there is a tightrope to walk between slavish adherence to rigid or narrow standards and fresh canvas expression devoid of all reference to the brand. When the branding is choking the effectiveness of the digital delivery, those of us responsible for leading digital strategies (and achieving digital success) need to speak up.

Here’s where we see the tensions surfacing:

• Online display advertising: The logo, the tagline, the line drawing of the corporate headquarters—all cannot appear on every frame of the ad. Not if you also have a message to convey. Something must give.
• Brand identity in widgets: In providing valuable information as opposed to marketing messages, widgets are almost the antithesis of online banner ads. Fight the reflex to weigh the widget down with intrusive elements. The available real estate will be even smaller when you're designing for a mobile phone application.
• Branding on Twitter: Your Web site is where you show off your brand plumage. The point on Twitter is to be conversational—you know, less about your firm as an entity and more about its place in the world. If you can do this, starting with your profile, your background, your phrasing of your tweets, you’re likely to attract more followers. (For much more about Twitter, see our Social Media directory.)

• Email subject headings: No doubt your approved editorial style is the result of a hard-working thoughtful committee that produced guidelines, all of which assume that communicators have more than 1 second to attract attention. This is not a safe assumption online. We could point to any number of examples but think of just the email subject heading, the thinnest of all communications and yet one of the most powerful.

  Marketers find comfort in the production efficiencies of re-using templates and subject headings yet lament about low open and click-through rates. It's common practice for asset managers to standardize on subject headings—to wit: "In The News," "Quarterly Commentary" and our favorite: “Another Update from Company XYZ.” Stop the madness! Creativity matters more in digital communicating, not less. Each email sent deserves its own unique heading.

We encourage you to take on the tyranny of the standards. Gather your analytics, collect some examples, including from other industries, and call a meeting to put the question on the table. “What room is there for our communications standards to be more flexible to support the business objectives we intend to achieve using digital tactics?”

Confronted with the facts, right-minded, well-intentioned marketers will find a way to reach a compromise.

Dan Miller, Key Accounts Sales Executive for Discovery, is always good enough to update us on the developments in his world of financial intermediaries databases—which the smartest investment management firms use to augment their “organically grown” customer relationship management (CRM) systems. We checked in with him Tuesday after yet another Investment News article about financial advisor migration.

All marketers, not just those responsible for digital work, need to focus on this industry phenomenon. (See our related post How Aggressive Are You Willing to Be to Help with Customer Data?)

Losing touch with part of your database is like mis-placing a building, an employee or any other corporate asset. It’s a risk all investment managers are dealing with now as financial advisors change firms at what Discovery expects to be an unprecedented pace.

The risk is minimized for Discovery clients because every firm and every advisor record in the Discovery database has a unique identifier, enabling records to be updated when an advisor moves from one firm to another.

“We’re seeing much more interest in the last six months to get CRMs cleaned up, and my sense is because Marketing is getting involved. In fact, we’ve been increasing our data stewardship services, looking at our clients’ data, matching up what they have, doing de-dupes. We’re seeing much more interest in that," said Miller.

Still, there is a potential for delay in updating the records. “If a rep moves today and we picked up the data from that part of the country yesterday it may take us a while to get all the way back around the circle,” acknowledged Miller. "But my team works hard—consider that we have 535,000 reps in the registered representative product—to make sure the information is accurate.”

Advisors in motion have consequences firmwide, as they can impact an investment manager’s channel support, territory assignments, wholesaler compensation.

All of this movement couldn’t come at a worse time for marketers. At many firms, Marketing is finally being given the ball and asked to demonstrate what can be done to engage and nurture advisor relationships online. Stale contact information will diminish the efficacy of these efforts and could threaten email reputations at organizations where bounce management is lacking.

(And don’t overlook the implications for all who trade in contact information. Are you purchasing email lists or buying print advertising to reach advisors? It stands to reason that you’ll be buying fewer good addresses.)

For a picture of the industry in motion, look at two reports Discovery publishes.

As shown, more than 3,100 reps changed broker-dealers in January 2009, with more than 40% of the movement from wirehouses.

According to Discovery, almost seven out of 10 advisors moved to other wirehouse firms.

Miller couldn’t hazard a guess on what part of these moves were the result of individual decisions and what part the result of business consolidations. “The dust is still settling,” he said, “we just don’t have a clear picture on that yet.”

The January data is generally in line with last year’s pace. “January is when bonuses are paid out so we wouldn’t expect a hike in the activity then,” said Miller. But he expects advisor moves in the first quarter of this year to "spike," exceeding the number of reps who moved in the first quarter of last year (17,000).

Since noting increased activity last year, Discovery has been publishing a Break Away Broker Report, which reports on the numbers of reps who have moved from a broker/dealer firm to a Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) in the last month.

Marketers will want to take particular interest in the growing RIA database. RIAs are typically the least well known channel and the most difficult for a wholesaling force to service.

And yet, last week, TD Ameritrade Institutional reported that 60% of surveyed (RIAs) reported an increase in clients, many of whom are coming from broker/dealers and wirehouses.

Your CRM, of course, is the best place to keep track of what your enterprise--not just Sales--knows and continues to learn about your customers and prospects. If you haven't focused on it lately, now would be the right time to call a meeting.

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.