There’s a lot of promise in research released yesterday by the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) and Anderson Analytics. MENG is a national group representing senior marketing executives from across industries. Until the revolution when digital marketers claim their rightful place as eCMOs or some such, these are the people who green-light online plans. (At this point, I should say that I’m a MENG member, agitating on your behalf from the inside.)

It’s good news that two-thirds of respondents to the Third Annual Marketing Trends Study have a more optimistic business outlook for 2010. Marketing budgets are being increased (by 24% of respondents), innovation and research and development (R&D) is being funded (36%) and about 30% of executives say they’re hiring.

You can find a complete copy of survey results at www.mengonline.com/visitors/newsroom. We went straight to the Online Marketing & Social Media Strategy part of the report and there it was. Overall, marketers intend to spend 45% of their budgets online this year, 55% offline. Nice, very nice.

Company size factors into the spending. Large companies (defined as having 2,000 or more employees) will spend just 30% of their budgets online versus 48% spent by small companies. That’s OK, large companies have bigger budgets. The dollars will be there.

Research is conducted to answer questions, but one looming question emerged out of this research: Will the results of heightening spending be there?

The MENG/Anderson survey is comprehensive and covers a range of topics from executives’ assessment of growth in geographic markets to their own job satisfaction. We were interested in the list of marketing concepts that respondents consider “the most important to pay attention to.”

Marketing executives’ top marketing concept for 2010? Marketing ROI. And, Social Media ROI ranked as #15.

Return on investment, that again. The ROI mandate is inescapable this year (see our post on asset managers' special challenge in demonstrating social media ROI).

But take a look at the marketers’ list of top 15 marketing concepts. Where’s Web analytics? How can anything online be evaluated without a focus, at the top of a marketing organization, on analytics?

Digital marketers, this is your call to arms. Web analytics—and we’d broaden the term to make sure it encompassed analytics of off-site strategies, too—ranks #19 on the MENG/Anderson list of marketing concepts that executives are focusing on. That’s too low for what needs to be demonstrated and understood in 2010.

This data, which may or may not reflect responses from asset management marketing executives, confirms what asset managers’ Web analysts already know. At too many organizations, analytics is a siloed capability, typically too low in a marketing structure and almost always focused on reporting as opposed to taking part in planning, anticipating, learning, testing and sharing.

In this year of “Where’s the ROI?” digital marketers need to seize the moment to communicate the value and limitations of analytics. Don’t fault the marketing leaders for analytics not being top of mind. It’s your job to command their attention. Find a way to present insights (not auto-generated reports) that widen executives’ eyes as opposed to glaze them over.

Your work, your organization’s online presence and its future effectiveness depends on your speaking up this year. Take another look at that list—how hard could it be, really, for Web analytics to unseat Blogging as a top marketing concept? Go.

Participation, engagement, community—asset manager Web sites have a long way to go to foster these. Ultimately, in all likelihood, most companies will cede community-hosting to Facebook or other social networking sites.

But don’t be too quick to assume that you can’t deliver community-like value for your Web site visitors. Two unconnected news items took place last week that might trigger some ideas.

Example 1: It was an impressive accomplishment Thursday when the 10 billionth song was sold in the iTunes store, but it was a long time coming. And ultimately that story was about Apple’s innovation.

Concurrently, Apple released a list of the top 25 most-downloaded songs. To us, this was the more interesting announcement. Each of us knows what we bought from iTunes, but Apple aggregated all of those 99-cent (mostly) purchases and told us the rank order of what we all bought.

Example 2: Earlier in the week we were intrigued by the basis of an InvestmentNews.com article. “The ETFs financial advisers can't get enough of” wasn’t based on sales, performance or even survey data.

Rather, it was a list of the top 10 ETFs advisors researched most in 2009 using the Morningstar Advisor Workstation (and provided by Morningstar). Morningstar, Investment News and ETFTrends.com (which provided an expanded analysis of each ETF on its site) all saw the information value in advisor searches. (Are the searches predictive? We wished one of the media sites compared the top-searched to top-selling.)

Here again, users of the Advisor Workstation knew what they were looking for last year. But Morningstar was in a unique position to rank and share what all financial advisors were looking for.

By now you’re getting the idea, right? What insights could you share, externally and internally, about your customers’ use of your Web site and other digital products? Most viewed, most downloaded, most emailed, most ordered, most searched content all are possibilities for you to consider publishing.

Common on many sites today, most popular or trending lists are few and far between on asset manager sites. We’ve seen them on Vanguard’s site (list shown at left) and behind the password on BlackRock’s financial professionals site. If you’re aware of others, please fill us in by commenting below.

Adding such lists to your site will provide a few benefits. You’ll see that many users use them as navigation, more so than your “What’s New” listings.

By definition, “What’s New” is driven by your firm’s timetable. With their views, your users are pointing to valuable content for others who follow them (and if you haven't been paying attention to your Web analytics, there may be some surprises for you). Publishing a list of “Most Popular” content is as close as your FINRA-regulated site may get to users’ endorsements.

But don’t stop at just publishing the lists online. You can create content based on your users’ content consumption trends and preferences, the more segmented the more valuable.

As unformed as it may be, there is a community of users on your site daily. What would it take for you to begin representing their collective interests to one another and to your firm?

“That wouldn’t apply to us because… [wait for it] we’re in a regulated industry.”

There’s an underlying current in asset management marketing that trends that affect other industries don’t apply here. It’s an illusion that is almost never true online—what’s affecting other Web sites is probably affecting your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) site, too.

We’ve written about how Facebook and other social networking sites are gaining at the expense of asset manager and other destination Web sites.

But there was a report this week about Facebook’s influence in driving Web site traffic that merits attention. Compete.com data cited by the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday suggests that Facebook is now a more important traffic driver than Google.

“Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites,” the Chronicle reported.

Other types of sites even including investment manager sites? Yes, according to Compete.

Here’s what we found when we took a look at the Compete referrer data for the top 30 (based on assets under management) mutual fund and ETF sites for January 2010. Facebook.com appears on Compete’s lists of the top five traffic referrers to five investment company sites: AmericanFunds.com, DavisFunds.com, Dimensional Fund Advisors (Dfaus.com), Fidelity.com and GMO.com.

 Facebook Ranks Among Top Referrers to 5 Investment Company Sites (January 2010)

Source: Compete.com

The sites experience very different total traffic levels. Given the Davis Funds' site relatively low traffic and few (24) sites referring traffic to it, Facebook's appearance as a top referrer in a given month might be easy to understand.

But Fidelity and American Funds are industry behemoths and, try as we might to produce alternative explanations, there’s no denying Facebook’s breakthrough as a top referrer. Fidelity.com is the 157th largest site, according to Compete. More than 12,000 sites refer traffic to it and yet Facebook catapulted over those to rank as the fifth top referrer in January? Fidelity's self-directed investors could help explain the popularity and influence of Facebook. But a heavy retail bias doesn't help explain Facebook traffic to American Funds, sold exclusively through financial advisors.

The implications of Facebook supplanting Google as a top traffic driver is being contemplated across all industries this week. We invite you to provide your own interpretation and comments below. Here are a few of our thoughts:

Your Referrer Data

The San Francisco Chronicle report was based on a single month's data (December 2009), and this post is based on one month, as well. One month is what Compete makes available at no charge. In fact, if you follow the links included in the table above to the Compete profiles after the January 2010 data rolls off, you may see a different result.

It's possible that other fund companies are getting more Facebook traffic in absolute numbers but, because their other referrers are more dominant, Facebook is lower on their list of referrers.

Site traffic is reported using multiple measurement methods. Compete reports clickstream data based on a 2 million-member panel of U.S. Internet users. It’s common for Compete, comScore and Experian Hitwise and Quantcast data to be at odds.

Bottomline: The availability of the Compete data makes this comparative analysis possible. If you’re responsible for digital strategy at your firm, you need to dig into your own Web analytics to better understand where your Facebook traffic is coming from, where it’s going and its quality.

Facebook Links To Investment Sites

Of the five firms, Fidelity has a Facebook page with little more than 1,000 fans, and American Funds has a page for members of its Web group only. We couldn’t determine whether advertising links from Facebook count as referred traffic by Compete. Even if it is, our guess is that only Fidelity would be a likely aggressive Facebook advertiser of these five.

In the absence of robust Facebook pages or ads, that must mean that the Facebook traffic is coming from links posted in the Notes areas. Amazing, almost incredible. Congratulations to these companies for producing content that others think enough to link to. To get a sense of it, do a dfaus site:facebook.com search on Google and see the links from Facebook pages of advisory firms. Institutional firms that have thought that social media is just for retail investors might want to think again.

Forget Search To Focus on Facebook Optimization?

Some have interpreted the ascent of Facebook as a traffic driver, often accompanied by a decline in Google-referred traffic, to mean that people are no longer searching and increasingly prefer to discover content socially. Such a shift in Web user behavior would have significant implications for search engine optimization (SEO) and search marketing. That’s true in particular for digital strategy planning in this business, where much SEO remains to be done.

We agree with this post on Search Engine Land that aims to put the Facebook findings in context. The work involved in thinking about how searchers frame their information requests and the measurement and analysis of the effectiveness of various keyword phrases can result in deeper customer and prospect understanding. Please don’t think that you can skip the work now that Facebook users are recommending investment site content—especially if these recommendations are not as a result of a deliberate strategy of yours.

Facebook—and its 400 million users—is awesome. But maintaining a Facebook presence requires a well-considered strategy and ongoing resources. In an October 2009 post, Facebook: Don’t Expect A Lot of Warm And Fuzzy, we noted a certain crankiness toward investment companies by Facebook commenters. (We saw the same early this month in the early reactions to Fidelity’s Be The Green Line YouTube contest.)

But while your Facebook page may be on a backburner pending strategy, policy and resources, we suggest you take this January 2010 referrer data as inspiration to learn more about Facebook. Your firm doesn’t need a fan page in order for you to explore more about how investors are interacting with your content and how they may want to interact with you. 

I like to experiment with Google AdWords, and today I received a report on the performance of an AdvisorTweets.com campaign that’s been running for a few weeks. I was shocked: Out of the 237 clicks on my ads, 188 were on mobile devices with full browsers. Almost 80% of those searching for “RIAs and twitter” (my Google AdWords keywords) were using phones?

This report is just another tiny piece to throw onto the pile of data about mounting mobile phone usage. Also in the Inbox today was an email about ComScore’s "The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review" including an analysis of the drivers that accelerate mobile phone use. Note that 3G phone ownership is now at 43%, according to ComScore.

Oh and in its latest research, kasina reported that four out of five advisors use some type of mobile device and that the phone is how many access the Web.

Out of curiosity, I wandered over to the iTunes App Store to search for “investing” apps and then “mutual funds” and “ETFs.” In an industry with almost 8,000 mutual funds and 800 exchange-traded funds, guess how many investment companies have iPhone applications? Exactly two: Vanguard and TIAA-CREF.

Maybe you're working on your mobile strategy right now. If so, we'll keep this short so you can get back to it. But if your firm thought you had at least a year to think through your brand experience on a phone, you might want to reconsider your timing. 

Can you afford not to provide a mobile Web site, at the least, this year?

FINRA held its long-anticipated Webinar on social media guidance today. (A replay will be available in a few weeks, social media vendor Socialware has posted a summary and we wrote a brief AdvisorTweets blog post.)

When we commented on the release of the guidance last week, we characterized it as FINRA kicking the ball into Compliance’s court. Well…not so fast—there’s somewhere else the ball has to go first and that’s to management. Management needs to be on board that “social media” is an appropriate use of what will be significant resources. (Read the Socialware document for a sobering look at what compliance with FINRA’s recordkeeping and supervision requirements entails.)

What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of social media? It’s a question being asked across all industries, but it’s especially germane to the highly regulated investment industry. At companies in other industries, maybe, a skunk works can be formed for experimenting on the cheap. Or the work might be outsourced at first. But that wouldn't work in this industry. Before the first tweet can take flight, expensive resources have to be consumed, ideally developing strategy and certainly focusing on risk mitigation.

And, for what? What are the stated expectations of social media? Or are managements being asked to take a flier? (Good luck with that.)

I had just completed presenting a Social Media Overview Webinar Tuesday afternoon when a question came in from one of the participants: “I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but how does it make me more money?”

When that’s the question that’s being asked, it demonstrates that we haven’t been broad enough in our discussion. That we haven’t focused on the transformation that’s going on in communications, with many of the trends leading away from what asset management companies rely on today. Interruption advertising, vanity collateral and product-based email blasts are fast becoming passé.

We haven’t been sufficiently disciplined in measuring what we do to understand that the effectiveness of our traditional communications is declining.

Can you think of a time when more people were talking about investing and the markets? It's not that investment managers’ products, services and personnel aren't relevant—it's the communications that are static and stale.

The idea that “markets are conversations” was a thought first articulated more than 10 years ago in the Cluetrain Manifesto. Web site users began talking to one another years ago on message boards. The online sharing of words and pictures and videos started in the last millennium, too, and today social bookmarking buttons and RSS feeds are ubiquitous on most Web sites.

Investment companies’ digital communications (and maybe the systems underlying them?) have trailed behind. FINRA's social media guidance cited Pew Internet and American Life Project research that 46 percent of American adults who use the Internet logged onto a social networking site in 2009. And yet, investment management communications rarely figure into online conversations. Out of sight, out of mind.

Online, where marketers compete with content, the rich, well-substantiated (thank you, Compliance) commentaries, whitepapers and other research you and your colleagues produce are overlooked by search engines. Web searchers looking for the very information your company offers end up reading inferior, shallow content on SEO-optimized article submission sites.

Social media represents a full-on assault on the way communications are planned, processed, published and evaluated within many investment management companies today. Even setting aside the compliance parameters, there is a lot of work to do to figure out how asset managers can meaningfully interact online.

What's the ROI of social media? That's the right question for management to ask. But if you're asking for a social media budget, we encourage you to recast your question. You don't need funds to develop a Facebook application or invest in an archiving solution. You need support to disrupt current communications practices and seize cross-functional time and attention to focus on a more contemporary, more effective, better measured approach to communicating and marketing.

Does your company want to grow? Do you need to raise awareness of what you do and how you do it? Would you like to know your clients better and respond to them more quickly and more relevantly? How close are you to the market? How fresh is your product development? Could your organization stand to be more competitively alert?

Companies that are active on the social Web point to these as benefits, and that's where we'd start the conversation about the payback of a comprehensive social media strategy.

Have your repeated requests to speed up your Web site been falling on deaf ears? There’s a change in the works that might give you the argument you need for IT to move site optimization up to the top of the priority list.

Watch this video from Google on the global benefits of a faster Web and then let’s consider how their advocacy on this could affect the success of your firm’s digital marketing strategy.

You’ve figured it out already, right? Of course, if Google wants the Web to be faster, the search engine is going to reward fast sites and slow sites can expect to sink in search engine rankings.

This isn't an arbitrary position on Google's part. Faster sites drive visitor satisfaction and conversions—they’re a win-win for site provider and user.

To get a rough idea of how your site will fare as search engine attention is directed to site speed, go to WebPageTest.org and run a test.

Below is a video of the test we ran. But first here’s some background. In a blog post a little more than a year ago, we used Google Trends to note slowly building interest in the search term "IRAs" toward the end of each year. But search interest was off toward the end of 2008, prompting us to suggest a compressed opportunity in the first four months of 2009 leading up to April 15.

That turned out to be true, as you can see in the graph below.

It’s essential to be discoverable by searchers when they’re looking, especially when the search term is important to your business. To illustrate the importance of winning speed races on key search terms, we're using an updated search term ("rollover IRA") and comparing the site speed results of three pages that currently rank on Page 1 of Google’s results.

They are pages on rollover IRAs from WellsFargo.com, Schwab.com and SmartMoney.com. To round out the quartet, we added a landing page from T. Rowe Price.com, a pay-per-click advertiser on the term.

We'll tell you what you're about to see and then watch for it in the video.

The results:

1. Wells Fargo (bottom right quadrant in the video) was on top of our Search results and fastest to load at 4.5 seconds.
2. T. Rowe Price (upper left), the pay-per-click advertiser, comes in second. Page speed is already a factor in Google AdWords quality score. We expected T. Rowe to do well and, in fact, it loads in 6.5 seconds.
3. Loading at a slow 9.5 seconds is Schwab (bottom left).
4. SmartMoney, which we included because publishers’ content-rich sites are among your toughest search competition, takes 14.5 seconds to fully load.

Is your site as fast as it needs to be to win rankings on Google? Our recommendation: Get with your IT partners and make sure they're aware of what's happening. (Maybe do a few competitor comparisons of your own.) To quickly bring them up to speed, refer them to WebPageTest.org. Also, Google maintains an excellent site on Web performance resources. Oh and better hurry!

The following was also posted at our AdvisorTweets.com/blog.

At about mid-day today, FINRA released its 10-page Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites. (A tip of the hat to @BillWinterberg who was first among our tweeps to spot the regulatory notice.)

Others might disagree or read something in between the lines, but to us the guidance seems reasonable. Of course, FINRA will insist on record-keeping and supervision. And specific investment product recommendations are obviously trouble--in fact, FINRA says a prohibition would be a best practice unless the content posted was previously approved by a registered principal.

But we think that the door to the marketing potential of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for financial advisors and firms swings open with FINRA's distinction between "static content" requiring the prior approval of a registered principal and "non-static content," which does not require prior approval.

FINRA acknowledges that Twitter and Facebook provide for non-static, real-time communications, such as interactive posts. "The portion of a social networking site that provides for these interactive communications constitutes an interactive electronic forum, and firms are not required to have a registered principal approve these communications prior to use," FINRA says.

This could have been the deal-breaker. What FINRA describes as static content on social networking sites--profile, background or wall information--must be approved by a registered principal prior to posting. It's more work for a Compliance review group but it's manageable. If, on the other hand, all tweets by everybody needed to be approved prior to posting, social networking would be dead on arrival for FINRA-regulated entities in the investment industry.

Please read FINRA's press release and the regulatory notice for all of the details.

There will be much more to come on this, including at the February 3 FINRA Webinar. (FINRA announced its rescheduling from March 17 via email this afternoon.)

From our perspective, the topic of social media participation today moved from "FINRA won't let us" to "How long will it take for Compliance to prepare our policies and procedures?"

This announcement is great timing for tomorrow's Investment News Webinar on Advisors and LinkedIn. See you there?

And, of course, we're interested in what you think of the FINRA guidance--as always, we welcome your comments below.

Have you ever been part of a meeting when an idea is presented—maybe with some passion even—and the response is just a lot of shifting around in seats? Is it a good idea? Should we run with it? Or…? Nobody wants to say. With any luck, there’s an alpha in the room who is only too happy to step in and pronounce it.

When Fidelity announced its “Be the Green Line” Video contest on Tuesday, we decided to hang back a little and see how it played. It’s one of the first overt social media efforts by an investment company so naturally we’re happy to see something getting done. Go, Fidelity! We're rooting for you.

Week 1 of the contest, a YouTube promotion, has produced a few takeaways. First you'll need the contest's description. And you can watch its video, too.

Fidelity wants to extend its Turn Here advertising campaign with an online contest. The commercials feature a green line “that underscores the firm’s ability to help investors navigate all stages of life with financial guidance and appropriate investment options.” So, the contest invites entrants to create videos that give the impression “through creative interpretation” that “they are the Green Line.” And, the phrase “stay on the line” must be said in the video.

We're surprised that the commercials haven't been uploaded as standalone files to the channel. There's a really short clip in the contest video but Fidelity seems to be counting on consumers' recall and not expecting them to search YouTube for fuller versions. Because there are some non-authorized Fidelity green line videos, including some spoofs, out there. Permissions issue, maybe?

But we press on. The final prize winner wins $5,000 and the submissions of as many as 10 semi-finalists will be featured on the Be The Green Line YouTube page, according to the contest rules.

“Fidelity risks YouTube treatment with video contest” was the headline on Investment News’ coverage. We think it's a qualified risk. The submissions need to comply with YouTube's community guidelines and we bet that Fidelity staffers will be keeping an eagle eye on all uploads.

The public votes only on the semi-finalists.The selection round will be judged by Fidelity according to these criteria:
• Originality/creativity in presenting the entrant as the “Green Line” (50%)
• Overall technical quality of the video submission (25%)
• Appropriateness to the Fidelity brand (25%)

OK, YouTube is not really where you go for technical quality and brand appropriateness, but we can give them a pass on that because, well, we’re all just learning as we go, right?

Not so much. Sometimes we compare these early days of social media to the mid- to late 1990s when asset managers were launching primitive and wobbly Web sites. What’s comparable is that there are pockets of knowledge and experience amid confusion, uncertainty and a little intrigue.

It was all upside then. Nobody expected much from an asset manager’s Web site. Animated gifs? We all cheered at the animation of the growth of the $10,000 mountain chart line no matter how long it took to fully draw.

That was then, this is now. Forty-plus comments on the Boston.com (Boston Globe) article describing the Fidelity contest serve as a ready example of how social media can be a little trickier than launching a Web site was back in the day.

The crowd has expectations

Everybody—the general Internet population—has expectations now. Even newcomers are held to standards loosely defined by everybody, not professional reviewers. Investment companies’ social media doesn’t get a pass, it gets compared to Starbucks’.

Fidelity says they're bringing their campaign online because of its popularity. As often happens online, the detractors are better organized and post their snipes faster than the supporters—you will see some Fidelity defenders among the comments.

The brand is not in charge

In conversations, which is what social media is described as, both parties get to change the subject. When the Turn Here campaign was launched in March 2009, chief marketing officer James D. Speros explained that the intent was to position the brand as a guide and a navigator.

In other words, Fidelity didn’t want to talk about the markets, it wanted to talk about its value to investors. But when it’s their turn, people still want to talk about the market collapse and what it did to their investment portfolios. And there’s some of that in the comments.

We’ve observed this before and we encourage you to factor it in when you make your social media plans. 2008 has left some people distrustful and negative toward investment companies, and the people with computers are still working through it on the Internet. We believe that consumers will be light-hearted and carefree with other companies and other industries before they’ll relax with you. They want to see you working.

Sometimes the conversations will include the brand, sometimes not

By disabling comments on its YouTube page, Fidelity guaranteed that the commenting wouldn’t take place there. But people could be talking about the contest just about anywhere else—and to be the subject of conversations is the intent of viral.

The contest is getting coverage on video production blogs, broker blogs, investor blogs and even on EcoFriendlyGreenMattresses.com. Hooray! Here’s the impact of all that: It’s pushing down the official Fidelity announcement on the Google results pages.

On Sunday, Fidelity didn’t even shown up on page 1 of results for a “Fidelity green line” search and barely made it onto page 1 for “Fidelity you tube.” Contest coverage and more criticisms from social networks are ranking higher. Luckily, there were still some tweets circulating about the contest (another reason to make sure your news is covered on Twitter). A Google AdWords buy might have to assure Fidelity official’s presence on page 1 for contest-related keywords.

No matter what others’ agendas, it’s all worth paying attention to

Peanut gallery? No, brands really have to bury that dismissive phrase once and for all if they’re going to use social media to reach people. For marketing professionals who've knocked themselves out on a campaign now being reviewed as "lame-o," it can be demoralizing and the temptation may be to write the online critics off as just a few kooks. That’s risky, riskier even than social media.

We’re going to keep an eye on this contest and encourage you to, too. There's more to learn from Fidelity and the videographers it's inspiring (videos must be uploaded by February 19) about how social media and investment marketing mixes. 

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.