Hearty congratulations and bubbly all around to the online marketing professionals who produced GetAlts.com, a microsite launched this week by Rydex|SGI to create attention for alternative investments.

I landed on the site with minimal expectations but some curiosity about the name. Compliance officers in my past would have killed “GetAlts” for any number of reasons so the first kudos goes to Rydex for delivering a name with some marketing magic.

More important, though, is the interactivity on the site. I’ve spent a bit of time on it now—long visits that the search engines will duly note and credit the site for—and haven’t read more than 200 words. Instead, I’ve been working with the interactive graphs and charts.

If you’ve been involved in the sales and marketing of mutual funds or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for any length of time, you’ll recognize all of these—the checkerboard of annual asset class performance, the efficient frontier graph, etc.

Distributing these in print or on the Web as flat communications has sub-optimized the information value of these charts. Rydex is changing the game for investment product marketers by animating our tried-and-true charts and adding audio explanations. They are showing what these data-heavy charts mean.

The marquee infographic is the Modern Markets Scorecard, which of course includes alternative investments as well as the standard asset classes. This ought to be powerful linkbait for the site—given that, I’d find a way to offer links to the rest of the good stuff on GetAlts.com.

My second favorite is the Alternative Portfolio Hypotheticals. The Efficient Frontier by Decade works far better than a flat chart but even with the audio explanation, it’s still not for beginners. Beginners can take a look at the The Historical Performance and Trends of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. All are excellent, I’d add a counter to the videos to let the viewer know how much more.

Well done, Rydex, for bringing meaning to what can be dense topics. We’ve been tracking the use of visualizations for a while now and are so pleased to see an investment company add some to the mix.

Will GetAlts produce business? It’s too soon to say but Marketing has done what it can by creating something worthwhile that will generate attention. Of course, the work is far from done. Now comes the rest of what Marketing does: measurement, the correlation of attention to leads and leads to sales, the ongoing site maintenance and refreshing, promotion, etc.

After Opening Night, comes the next performance and the next…there’s no business like show business.
 

Song selection. One of the maddening things about the American Idol competition is what consistently trips up the final 12. Their raw talent or personality gets them just so far but those who “go home early” fail to read the judges’ minds about the songs they should be singing.

Word selection. That’s the ground on which Web sites compete for search traffic. But unlike with the Idol wanna-bes, there’s no need to guess. There are ways to know which keywords drive traffic. The challenge for the leader of digital strategy at mutual fund, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other asset management companies is in persuading colleagues to use the more commonly used terms when they create content.

Amateur performers on Idol have youth and inexperience as their excuse for ignoring the judges' cues. But professional communications today need to cede to the easy-to-track "wisdom of the crowds.”

Journalists years ago agreed to follow the Associated Press style, and book publishers mostly conformed to the Chicago Manual of Style. But even companies that adopted either the AP or Chicago style tended to produce their own addendums documenting the instances when they wanted to deviate from common practice. Words are invented, hyphens are attached with abandon, spelling reflects individual manager’s preferences and then gets institutionalized. Nobody picks this bit of muscle-flexing as a battle that’s worth fighting.

But there’s a price to be paid for spelling and word idiosyncrasies, and your Web site traffic, your content, pays it. This is inadvertent, of course, and that’s why it’s up to you to point it out. Asset managers are publishers now and need to think of their readers.

We're going to take a look at a few generic examples but it's a safe bet that you have your own sacred cows worth toppling. Granted with the examples below, you can expect your content to be competing for attention in search results with serious heavy-hitters who publish more often than you do. Page 1, position 1 on Google may not be a realistic goal. At the very least, you want to make it possible for the people who are searching for Your Company Name + Generic Term to find the content they expect you to have. Especially since you probably do even if you call it something funky.

We reviewed the following using Google Insights for Search, limiting the search to the last 12 months, from within the U.S. and in the Finance and Insurance categories. You could also refer to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which will show you information about traffic and advertiser competition on your keywords as well as provide data on related keywords.

Example 1: “Unfortunate market anomaly,” "market meltdown," "uncertain markets" all might have been how your investment team preferred to refer to the recent financial crisis but that’s not how the rest of the world thought about it or—more to the point—searched for information about it. Companies that conformed by using “financial crisis” in their work had more takers. Those that shied away from the term were irrelevant.

Example 2: How do you refer to the narratives that present your company’s view of the financial markets? Years ago when I was a journalism school intern working at my first newspaper job, my editor published a column called "Looking Around with Orv." Does your narrative have a similarly precious title? Your Orv may not like it but it’s time for a change.

Here's your decision, though: Not all but most investment management companies seem to be settling on "market commentary." But look what people are searching for—more "outlook" than "commentary." What you call yours should reflect what it offers but if you're leaning toward "outlook," here's some data to start the conversation about expanding the scope of the content.

Example 3:There’s an abundance of high-value content on the Web today, and luckily there are several monitoring tools (e.g., Google alert) that enable people to keep up. When people set alerts, they’re not thinking of your company—they’re made aware of your content only when what you publish matches the terms they’re on the look-out for. That’s the argument for using common terms like "financial advisor" with an "o" and not an "e." "Financial professional" or "investment professional" are umbrella terms that appeal to marketers because they are not distribution channel-specific but they’re non-starters in search.

As I write this on July 1, just a few days from Independence Day, I can anticipate writers feeling that writing for search engines represents a loss in freedom of expression. I get that.

I remember conversations that I’ve had with journalists while recruiting them for marketing communications jobs. The transition to marketing does represent a compromise, not all of the words you first put down “on paper” are likely to survive the routing process. But for what you trade away, you gain in having a role in using your communications ability to advance a business. There’s a rush in that, in knowing that your content—including the words you chose purposefully—is succeeding in attracting information-seekers to your company. That’s what this is about. Findability isn’t every writer’s top priority, but it must be for a business communicator today.

Happy Fourth of July to our U.S.-based readers. Rock The Boat is goin’ fishin.

It’s been fun this week watching the growing social media success of State Street Global Advisors's exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing. A SPDRS commercial introduced in June is getting uploaded to YouTube, as well as to other video-sharing sites, and commenters love, love, LOVE “the video.” (Note how the commercial aspect shrinks when the message is sufficiently appealing.)

Reviewers like the dogs, they like the accompanying song so much they want to buy it…and guess what else? According to their comments, some say they might even give State Street a look.

Watch the commercial for yourself and then let’s bat around some thoughts.

 

What was State Street’s added expense for distribution via You Tube et al?
None, its production costs were unaffected. On the flipside, at fewer than 10,000 combined views as of this writing, it’s hard to claim that their added reach has reduced the expense.

Still…In “letting their content go free” (a social media maxim), the commercial is embedded on a Russian site, a Spanish site and a site that offers basic French lessons, among others. Now, it belongs to the world—and the video views are coming from markets that would be cost-prohibitive to buy into.

What’s different about appearing on television versus YouTube?
The question is too simply posed, maybe, but think of the different context of YouTube. All television viewers are aware that advertisers pay for their time and, on some level even if in some small way, that can discount the impact of a message.

Every uploader of this video is endorsing it for its content—that’s different. The engagement of “users” in uploading, commenting and otherwise interacting with a brand message marks a transition point. Do you remember the Diet Coke and Mento’s stunt? That didn’t belong to the brand, that belonged to the users who took what Diet Coke provided and turned it into something else.

The SDPRs commercial is becoming an homage to dogs. Dogs, animals, lizards all have been the center of commercials previously. But, video-sharing makes it possible to adopt the animals featured.

Below is a screenshot of the Statistics & Data of the highest-viewed copy of the video (not the video we link to above). The video that appears on this page was recorded off a television showing CNBC somewhere in Illinois. It was submitted in the Pets & Animals category (where it's doing very well) and attributed to an entity called State Street SPDR Financial.

Will the added exposure help State Street justify the marketing spend to the number-crunchers, if necessary? (It's easy to imagine CFOs struggling with the soft-sell of this ad, but we seem to remember that State Street is contractually obligated to invest in SPDRs marketing support.)
While State Street no doubt anticipated the popularity of this creative among pet-lovers, we doubt that it was a target customer segment. One of the benefits of being on the Web today is the ability to target, and yet the SPDRs example shows that social media can be messy.

If your professional work gets submitted to a content-sharing (video or otherwise) site, you can expect multiple files—including copies lacking the professional quality that you originally delivered. You can expect people to impose their own organization—e.g., SDPRs might have preferred an investment-related category to pets and animals. There is no dictating or controlling which group or groups may become fans.

Viral distribution is a compliment to the content producer but it also represents more work. When content is safe at home on your site, you know where it is. When it's socializing, you have the added burden to keep track of it and how it's being received.

Still and all, as most CFOs will recognize, added unpaid positive exposure for a television commercial is all upside.

How will State Street evaluate the impact of its new-found attention?
The commercial itself does not include a URL to the site and only one of the video uploads does. Search for “dog commercial” and SPDR or “dog commercial and State Street” and you won’t find the advertiser’s Web site. Now the social Web’s embrace of State Street's content is competing with them!

SPDR Marketing may need to fire up a Google AdWords campaign to secure a place on the first page of search results. We couldn’t find mention of the commercial on either the SDPRs or the State Street site, but adding a search-optimized page with content about the commercial and the file itself would be an idea. Once related content is offered on the brand's domain, the Web analytics team will be able to track how many “dog commercial” searches drove traffic to the site. We’d manage expectations, though—the commercial itself and its afterlife is all about creating awareness. It may be hard to find a cause-effect in the site analytics.

Congratulations to all involved at State Street—there's no doubt that the puppy love will drive video views further. After having endured everything short of famine, drought and pestilence in the last year, investment marketing is showing some life again, isn’t it?

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.

Today we're publishing the start of a social media directory for the asset management industry. We've aggregated what we can and now we turn to you for your contributions.

• Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Social Media
• Mutual Funds And ETFs Using Twitter
• Broker-Dealers Using Social Media
• Financial Advisors Using Social Media
• Financial Advisors Using Twitter
• Investment Media Using Twitter
   

As described in our recent eBook "Who Says You Can't? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media," social media is a mixed bag for those involved in the manufacture, packaging and distribution of investment products. It's trendy and seems like fun but for some, it's too new, too transparent, too unstructured. Overall, social media is too much for many highly regulated investment companies to be comfortable with yet.

As you'll see on the Mutual Funds and ETFs Social Media and Twitter directory pages, only a handful of investment product providers have seized the opportunities in communicating on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. (The broadest definition of social media includes blogs and the availability of RSS feeds, and our recent eBook does discuss them. For this directory we've elected to list companies and individuals that are participating off their domains. Let us know if you disagree.)

We hope that we've missed some in this first airing of the list of social media-active asset managers and we hope you'll drop us a note about any omissions at your earliest convenience. The same goes for the even sparser listing of broker-dealers using social media.

Why even bother with a directory at this time? Because in the investment product distribution chain, it's the financial advisor (your product distributor, if you will) who's closest to the investor, your end-user. The advisor does the lion's share of communicating, and lately that's been a make or break part of the job description. Independent financial advisors are showing interest in leveraging social media tools. And, this interest is notwithstanding their significant compliance considerations--our Financial Advisors Social Media directory page cites several excellent articles describing the guardrails.

In social media, advisors see ways to enrich conversations they're already having. Our position is that these tools present asset management marketers with opportunities to have conversations (listen, then talk) that were never before possible.

A listing of Twitter-using advisors can serve as a quick-start to know who to follow as a means of understanding what's important to them and as a step toward enhancing the relevance of your marketing, including communications and customer intelligence. This will be to the mutual benefit of your company and the advisors. We expect the Twitter and social media directory of individual advisors to build quickly, and its organizational structure will evolve, as well.

Finally, there's the media. As our Investment Media Twitter directory pages show, the media are out there on Twitter, listening and interacting. You and your PR support can learn from their 140-character comments and, if you're talking, you'll be part of their input, too.

So, check the directory pages out and let us hear from you on what we can do to enhance this as a resource as you and your company inevitably contemplate social media.
 

Little more than one month after our post about highlights on mutual fund and ETF Web sites (see 5 Random Highlights of Mutual Fund, ETF Sites)  we’re back with another installment, this time all about ETFs.

Exchange-traded funds offer the advantage of lower expenses. That’s a blanket statement that’s made when comparing mutual funds to ETFs. But, how does the cost of using ETFs compare to the cost of using no-load funds? This Rydex Investments trading expenses calculator considers all the variables and gets into the particulars.

Understanding the volatility of an investment is always important, but you might say that it’s critical for an investor considering leveraged index funds. To that end, Direxion Funds offers a volatility tool for 10-, 30-, 90- and 180-day rolling periods. To fully appreciate this, you have to see the graphic reset as the periods change. Note that the user can customize this list by selecting a subset of funds.

When added to an investment portfolio, an ETF typically has a specific job to do. Other sites have correlation calculators but we like PowerShares’, which licenses Smart Money functionality (in fact, it looks as if you’d have to pay for the correlation tracker on SmartMoney.com.)

We know from experience the work that goes into the development and testing of calculators on investment sites. Somebody must think they’re important to have, and we agree, maybe for a different reason. If you’re hosting a special calculator, it has the potential to serve as link bait to draw attention to your company or site.

But too often, Marketing teams err in thinking that the work is done when the site tool is launched. No. The next step is to execute on a promotion plan. A press release at launch, followed by periodic promotions/reminders and enlisting national account and Sales teams to include mentions in every capability presentation. Maybe tack on a Compliance-approved promo in the signature of all outgoing emails.

We urge you to do this for at least three reasons:

• To produce a return on the company’s investment. What opportunities were missed out on because getting the tool out the door was the top priority? Usage will justify the resource call.
• A promotion plan will build in metrics—it will guarantee that Marketing is focused on measuring the reception of this tool. You’ll want to tie promotions to milestones for usage and other analytics. If the promotion is succeeding in driving traffic to the tool and visitors are bouncing, that’s valuable information that may prompt you to pull the promotion and go back in the lab. At least you’ll know. Ultimately, you’ll want to base subsequent development of the tool and other tools on usage and feedback you're collecting and considering.
• If you thought that it was important for your site visitors to have the tool, why risk them using the site without knowing about it? I repeatedly find gems on investment management sites with no apparent Marketing or even on-site support—no press release, no callout on the sitemap, no cross-mentions on other pages. You market the work of other areas in the company, don't be shy about marketing what Marketing had a hand in creating.

Download our eBook

Mutual funds, Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) and other money managers: You are conspicuous by your absence in social media.

You're not included on the lists that are being compiled of social-media-savvy brands:

•Social Brand Index
•A List of Social Media Examples
•Ongoing List of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders

While financial advisors increasingly are creating their LinkedIn profiles, establishing Twitter accounts, posting videos and presentations to their blogs and "tuning in" to BlogTalkRadio shows, you're not venturing off your own domains.

And you are missed.

We know you've had a lot going on and we know that you have several regulated company issues to take into account. But trust us when we say that social media participation is not something you can risk ignoring. You have brands that would benefit, content worth distributing, new people to meet and to better understand. Social media has the potential to enrich your interactions and ultimately help advance your business objectives.

It's in this spirit that we've written an eBook: "Who Says You Can't? 5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media."

Included in the eBook:

• Social media adoption by financial advisors, including a guide to some of the most influential advisors online, their online support and media
• 5 friction-less tactics designed to enable money managers to benefit from social media
• A snapshot as of May 4, 2009, of what some money managers are today delivering in the broad category of social media.
(The current eBook download is a May 6, 2009, version, with the latest change reflecting the fact that Pimco has an active Twitter account--twitter/Pimco_tweets, and that Fidelity Investments and American Century Investments also appear to have Twitter accounts but are posting no updates. We're monitoring the top 25 fund companies and top ETF firms looking for obvious account names--it's conceivable others are out there using more stealth account names.)

We hope you find it useful and we hope it motivates you.

Would you like to be notified when the next Rock The Boat Marketing ebook is available? Send an email to info@rocktheboatmarketing.com.

Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?

It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That's why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!

A question to the managers of these sites: Are you leveraging them as the link bait you should in order to draw visitors to your site, first to that page and maybe to explore the rest of your value proposition?

1. Fidelity Investments’ Historical Yield Curve
Of all the gorgeous, exciting visualizations of data to be found on the Web today, this isn’t one of them. But it’s a true gem, very, very cool. A site visitor could spend minutes on this page learning. Marketing managers, when it’s time to hire again and you have a green marketing communications staffer, park them in front this.

2. Legg Mason’s Timeline
For a showier production (although less interactive), Legg Mason’s Learning the Lessons of Time timeline provides some perspective on the markets over time (“The Dates May Change But the Headlines Stay the Same”), as illustrated with Time magazine covers. There's also an accompanying brochure available in .pdf form.

3. Janus Funds’ Interactive Newsletter
Anybody and everybody can post the Adobe Acrobat file of an investor newsletter that was originally produced for print distribution. This newsletter takes advantage of the medium it’s delivered on—and notice the Web exclusives.

4. Russell Investments' The Economic Recovery Dashboard
Throughout the financial markets crisis, Russell Investments has been acknowledged by the media and financial advisors for the depth of its communications. The dashboard is the interactive part of its Helping Advisors microsite. This was launched at a time when others were just getting their analyses of the financial crisis out the door, making Russell’s focus on recovery look even more timely. We bet the producers wish, as we do, that its data refresh could be more frequent.

5. Barclays' iShares Exploring ETFs Video
In case we miss an opportunity to say so after Barclays sells its iShares unit, can we just say now how much we have admired Barclay iShares? From our vantage point, Barclay’s innovative marketing support of ETFs has played a significant part in the next-generation investment product vibe that ETFs have today. Check out this interactive and entertaining video. It will keep you waiting because it doesn’t load quickly but bravo on the look and the messaging. Also note that the heavily branded yet ETF educational video can be downloaded.

Net outflows from equity and fixed-income funds were at record dollar levels in October, according to Lipper, Inc. How did October’s market meltdown affect traffic to mutual fund, ETF and other investment company Web sites? We’ve been eager to analyze the data.

Below are charts from Compete.com, a free online service that enables the tracking of Web sites by basing estimates of U.S. traffic on a triangulation of multiple data sources, including Internet service providers (ISP), panels and toolbars. (Read more about how Compete estimates traffic.) Within the analytics industry and from our experience, the data estimates are reliable and most analysts use them with confidence. 

The Top 24 Fund Groups

We’ve chosen to look at traffic to the top 24 fund groups in long-term open-end funds and ETF assets as of September 2008, according to the Financial Research Corporation (FRC). Compete data is most reliable for 19 of the companies, which have at least 40,000 monthly visits. Compete qualifies the data for asset managers with less than that as “rough estimates.”

These comparisons can be considered no more than directional, for the following reasons:
• We chose to look only at the brand domains. Many of the larger and even some of the small sites use domains not represented in the data. For example, Columbia Management traffic is dispersed across at least three domains: ColumbiaManagement.com for its financial advisor site, ColumbiaFunds.com for its investor site and YoungInvestor.com for younger investors. We show data for ColumbiaFunds.com because it’s the most visited site of the three but realize that it’s not a direct comparison to other site reports, whose traffic includes all audiences.
• We looked at the top 24 in order of their AUM, according to FRC. The 24 include five companies that distribute directly to investors and could be expected to produce more traffic. Four companies are institutional and likely to have less relative traffic. We graphed the 24 in sets of three, which produced readable charts in most cases. Two exceptions are State Street Global Advisors and Dimensional Fund Advisors whose site traffic doesn’t appear to be in sync with same-size managers. Third in AUM, Fidelity.com is different from the others--much of its estimated 33 million visits in October have to be attributed to its transaction functionality.
• Traffic is a measure of heightened awareness, and we’ve compiled this to answer a single question: In a month when global markets were gyrating in a way that had rarely if ever been seen before, did people seek out asset manager sites? The path to redemptions is never exclusively via a Web site; we suspect redemptions predominantly took place by phone, whether via a call to an advisor or to an Investor Services number. The Compete graphs of site visits answer the question but can shed no light on the next logical questions: Who was visiting—new or repeat visitors? Financial advisors, the press, shareholders? Where did the traffic go—straight to the online access to check accounts? To read investment or product commentary?

Of course, executive and marketing management can get real, deep and even actionable data about what happened on their domains in October (and what’s going on now) from their own installed Web analytics. 

Vanguard, American Funds, Fidelity Site Traffic

 iShares, Franklin Templeton, Pimco Site Traffic

 T Rowe Price, Ssga, Oppenheimer Funds Site Traffic

Dodge & Cox, Columbia, Legg Mason Site Traffic

Black Rock, Dimensional, Janus Site Traffic

 Alliance Bernstein, JPMorgan Funds, MFS Site Traffic

 Van Kampen, American Century, Putnam Site Traffic

GMO, Davis Selected, SEIC Site Traffic

What’s the takeaway from these graphs?

• Traffic was up almost across the board in October. Most significantly, traffic for the big three (Vanguard, American Funds and Fidelity) was up a minimum of 15% over September. This is substantial given that their sites attract multimillions a month.
• But, overall the site traffic wasn’t off the charts. Excepting Fidelity, steeper moves can be seen in August/September. A few companies experienced higher traffic earlier in the 12-month period.
• Pimco was one of two companies whose site traffic, while up big for the year, was down in October. According to FRC, Pimco is one of only two (Ivy Funds being the second) in the top 50 fund groups with assets up, year to date and year-over-year. Traffic to Dimensional Fund Advisors also was down in October and for the year.
• Companies whose traffic for the year (but not October) is down: Van Kampen, American Century and Janus.

What Are Investors Looking For?

How does Marketing react to a spike in traffic that Marketing itself did not produce? Of course, you’d be pleased if traffic climbed in response to a promotion. But can you be neutral (or let’s hope not—uninformed) about high site traffic that external events generated? Your audience thought about your company--using high site traffic as a proxy--much more in the last few months. Shareholder/investment redemptions speak volumes but they don’t communicate everything. What are investors looking for? How deliberate are you in helping them connect with what you understand them to be seeking? Some investments don’t make sense right now, but others are “saleable.” And yet, many sites continue to present all products equally as if all were equal in terms of their current appeal. It is easier to sell straw hats in the summer.

Now while advisors and investors continue to seek information and going forward as the markets recover, you have an opportunity to tune your site to guide your audience to the best of what you have to offer. Experts in shifting investor preferences expect that marketers with ETF providers may have an advantage and marketers from mutual fund companies may have a disadvantage. Still, your rebuilding will be quicker and more relevant if you find a way to marry heightened site traffic, your understanding of what investors/advisors are looking for on your site and appealing, appropriate products.
 

It rained all weekend in the Chicago area. That’s my excuse for why I ran a Google Trends search on “mutual funds.”

I really was just wasting time on Google Trends. It was idle curiosity that drove me to see how “Lehman” searches spiked recently and I also ran a Bear Stearns search, both just to confirm my suspicions that they’d probably enjoyed relative search obscurity until this year.

But then I ran a “mutual funds” search. Early Saturday morning, I’d read a Wall Street Journal article about the “ostrich effect,” which quoted Vanguard as reporting that their mutual fund shareholders checked their account values far less often in June than they did in mid- to late 2007, when the market was up.

Typically, search volume is believed to be a proxy for relevance. In that context, the decline in searches for “mutual funds” at a time when mutual fund news references (see second, smaller graph) were actually higher than in previous years is just something that could cause one to invoke Jeff Foxworthy–you know, the comedian who tracks “things that make you go Hmm.”

As a P.S. but not to make a point because of course ETFs have been gaining awareness since 2004, I also ran an “ETFs” search. And noted the difference in the scale between the volume on the two search terms. Hmmm. (Still raining.)