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Creative & Cool: Submitted For Your Consideration In 2010

Pat — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:03:35 -0600

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?

2010 Predictions For Mutual Fund/ETF Digital Marketing

Pat — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:31:29 -0600

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.

2010 Marketing Predictions Highlights

Pat — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:16:06 -0600

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."

Does Your Branding Let Digital Do Its Thing?

Pat — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:15:16 -0500

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.

Tracking the Great Financial Advisor Migration--And Implications for Your CRM

Pat — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:31:52 -0600

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.

Email Open and Click-through Rates? Benchmark Study Sheds Light on CRM/Database Development

Pat — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:52:30 -0600

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.