22 Content Highlights To Remember From 2013

“And, the audience sprang to its feet and cheered…”

If you’re in the online content business, such physical signs of positive reinforcement are hard to come by. But, know that what you do is appreciated and often celebrated.

The following list contains 22 pieces of content. I cheered these gems when I learned about them at one point or another in 2013 and they've stood the test of as much as 12 months' time.

As in previous Rock The Boat Marketing annual content highlights (last year’s), this is an idiosyncratic compilation across multiple digital marketing subject domains. Most of these I like for their content, some for their design, their delivery or the evolution they represent. They're presented in no particular order.

Want to play along next year? Come join me on Twitter where the majority of these highlights were surfaced by the awesome information hounds I either follow or am led to. In 2013, I also explored more content on LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest—follow me on those networks or just check in once in a while on this site's Resources page.

1. How Google Reads Minds

The results that Google presents to you the searcher are based on how it “understands” the words you type into the search engine. You know what you want but your search query may have literal meanings that you don’t intend.

This excellent Vertical Measures graphic from April details what Google has in place to read your mind, and how that's evolving. The screenshot below is just a slice of the full infographic.

2. No Money Manager Is An Island

Part of being social is taking part in the broader community. Quite a few mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms seemed to acknowledge that this year with how they managed their social accounts. We saw more accounts following others, more sharing of others’ content and an occasional #FF (Follow Friday) recommendation.

No less than PIMCO’s Bill Gross acknowledged that investment and economic insight takes a village—and people showed a lot of interest in who influences this influential money manager. From August, this is one of PIMCO’s all-time most favorited tweets. It would have been too much to expect him to use the Twitter handles.

Gross: Strategists/writers I follow? Dalio, Durden, Bianco, Arnott, Aitken, Santelli, Grant, Grantham, Inker, Marks, Quaintenance & Brodsky

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) August 9, 2013

3. And We Are Doing This Why?

“…The silence around the economics of content is deafening,” says Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner in this July post 16 Ways to Turn Content Marketing into Business Value. Skinner then proceeds to break down what he names as catalysts of content marketing value: brand, next click, relationship, reach, data.

Many firms aspire to be content factories today, which is all well and good. Before you plow ahead into production, read the Skinner post to make sure you’re aligning what you’re doing with what drives value.

4. While You're At It, Throw In Some Sincerity, Too

It’s a good idea to present yourself as authentic and transparent. But, um, as this Tom Fishburne cartoon from June suggests, you may need to bring that in-house.

5. DIY Dashboard Help

Marketers need to be more analytical. That drumbeat got louder and louder as the year progressed. If you’ve ever found yourself looking for Excel training applied for marketers online, you may be happy to learn about this Excel dashboard series. Written by Annie Cushing and augmented by a video or two, it started in June on Search Engine Land and then continued on Marketing Land. 

6. Showing Signs Of Life On Google+

This November update isn’t on the list because the content is break-out. It’s a little more Facebook-y than I like for Google+.

But it’s an example of how the largest mutual fund company is not just experimenting but succeeding (relatively speaking) in engaging people on a social network that most investment companies have decided to ignore.

More than 700,000 people have circled the Vanguard account, 22 people +1ed this post, three shared it and 13 commented. And, what other social network (i.e., somebody else’s platform) provides such open real estate (no ads) for your message and yours alone?

7. A Map Can Show You Where You Need To Go

Infographics were so 2010. Still, I couldn’t resist spending several minutes of my life with this Gartner Digital Marketing Transit Map released in June.

Gartner says, "Organizations should use the map to identify the connection among business functions, applications tracks and providers. Map elements can be used to find additional research or structure questions about strategy and best practices as well as providers, products and selection criteria. It is also a useful device for mediating discussions between marketing and IT."

Show this to the people in your life who think all digital marketers do is email and the Website.

8. Right Time, Right Place

Advertising a financial advisor-only conference call? On Twitter? By Royce Funds? Yes, yes and yes. In October, Royce Funds showed its leading edge lead-generation chops by employing a Twitter card to drive sign-ups.

9. Lovely To Learn From

Design is rarely front and center for digital marketers, and yet it's especially important at a time when so many clients and prospects access information via mobile devices. You’ll take a lot from this Prophets Agency presentation published last January—and follow the account to learn when the 2014 outlook is available.

Trends in interactive design 2013

from

Prophets Agency

10. Where Do I Sign Up?

Few of us have high expectations when we go to a conference Website. Oh sure, the highest-profile events command the resources to deliver a functional, pleasant experience, but the majority of event sites lack luster.

That’s not the case with this vibrant LPL Connect 2013 site. I’d bookmarked it during the August event (which I attended by hashtag only) and hoped it would still be reachable when I returned to it for this list.

Outstanding—not only did it not go dark after the event, it’s been updated. Why would you go to a conference site afterward? Just one reason, probably. LPL lets the presentation archive dominate the home page, while most event sites require attendees to go looking. All that’s missing from my cursory review of the site is a Search capability. 

11. Sharing The Data

TD Ameritrade knew there was value in providing insights on what its investors were thinking. Previously, according to their Website, they'd satisfied media and others’ requests for information with opinion surveys.

That approach was upgraded considerably in January with the release of a quantitative, behavior-based index that reports on what retail investors are actually doing.

The Investor Movement Index, based on a sample of the firm’s 6 million accounts, is a tool that has ongoing marketing and communications utility. It raises the bar for other investment companies whose proprietary data contains insights when aggregated.

Wouldn’t it be cool (and ostensibly instructive) to someday get a full picture of what investors and 401(k) participants are doing, via a single site driven by the sampled and anonymized data from individual brokerage and investment firms?

12. Two Pictures = 1,000 Words

Nowadays, people are relying on mobile devices to share what they see around them and especially the news. We all need to plan accordingly.

Not that you needed the previous two sentences after looking at these photos comparing people anticipating a 2005 papal announcement in St. Peter's Square, Vatican City, and those in March 2013. 

If your client or boss isn't taking mobile strategy seriously, show them this picture of the Vatican crowd: pic.twitter.com/CPlrCbwrnp

— Fike (@MichaelFeldman) March 15, 2013

13. We Were Right There With You

From Google Earth to Reddit to Twitter, the Internet was focused on April’s Boston Marathon-related bombings.

From my perspective, this is the best content that came out of it. The rest of us were worried about Bostonians. In an inevitably schmaltzy way (is there any other when Neil Diamond is involved?), this video demonstrated their resilience. 

14. The Dope On SERPs

Google’s search engine results page (SERP) changed big-time in 2013. In October Moz provided a visual guide to all the variables that could possibly appear in (mostly organic) search results and why. Study the full guide (the screenshot below is just an excerpt) but don’t bother printing it—things may have changed since you started this post.  

15. Starting With Why

Water Investing, Calvert’s iPhone/iPad app launched in November, is different from other investment manager apps in at least four ways:

• It’s about something—the world's water crisis—as opposed to being a container of investment commentary and investment product information. The embedded video is effective at using the medium to communicate more than just words and images could.
• Its Daily Drip is an aggregation of others’ (non-Calvert) views and updates.
• It offers the tweets of not just the firm but three analysts using a #CalvertH20 hashtag.
• It includes a "Play" feature that uses the device's camera to simulate a water effect. Kinda corny but something to build on.

16. A Framework For Your Work

You could land on any blog post on Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor site and find Web analytics gold. But, make a special effort to read See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework. Your entire day every day can be filled in the pursuit of digital marketing tactics. This post is a nudge to be more strategic in how you think about your work and its effectiveness.

BREAKING: Sorry, I can’t let this post fly without also mentioning a December post in which Kaushik lays out a digital marketing “ladder of awesomeness.” Another must-read. You might just want to subscribe to this site.

17. Endorse Me As Father of The Bride

A chuckle is the last thing I expect when I log into LinkedIn but, no kidding, some of the photos being used for profiles are funny. This MarketingProfs 19 More Reasons Your LinkedIn Headshot May Be an Epic Fail presentation is not exaggerating. Too bad it doesn't touch on one of the types of photos I commonly see. Men in tuxedos, really?

19 Reasons Your LinkedIn Photo Is an Epic Fail

from

MarketingProfs

18. Looking Under The Hood

Last week was all about learning an hour of code. I’m guessing most of you sat that one out. But this week, how about learning to just read the source code on your Website?

If your work has anything to do with optimizing your site for search engines, this KISSmetrics post from August provides an excellent foundation for how to confirm what's happening on your site. Bonus: Check other sites' source code to learn what they're up to. This screenshot is just the first example the post provides.

19. Out Of The Ashes

First there was the dramatic reading by James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell of Jenna’s Facebook for a Sprint commercial. I loved that. Moving onto the digital realm, on YouTube two actors re-enacted a YouTube comment war between two One Direction fans.

But the investment industry has nothing to do with most memes. We wouldn’t do the Blurred Lines knock-off videos, twerking is out of the question, and the President of the United States took part in a selfie before an asset manager CEO has. 

So, while I suffered along with other financial services marketers when the #AskJPM Twitterchat imploded, I have to say that a subsequent CNBC video published the next day thrilled me. Stacey Keach provides the dramatic reading. 

It didn’t go anywhere (just one tweet!) but let history show that this may have been the first stab at a meme. Thanks to my buddy Todd Donat for first sending me the link to this.

Too soon? I hope not.

20. In Another's Eyes

When one Website sneezes, do the other Websites catch a cold? Nah, the failings of healthcare.gov just inspired Slate in October to show how iconic sites Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon and Windows would have made the site over in their own image and likeness. Pretty genius. 

21. Borrowing From The Journalists

The introduction of data, including visualization, can add to the usefulness of content you’re creating.

But this is yet another competency that people in marketing positions today will have to learn on the job. Most likely, you will not be crunching the numbers, you’ll be managing the data-driven work. To be an effective partner and contributor you may have to dig in.

It was prepared for journalists and not marketers, but the Data Journalism handbook may be just the resource you need. The handbook, a version of which is also available in print, is a project of the European Journalism Centre’s Data Driven Journalism initiative.  

22. Tech To Watch Out For

The Marketing Arm’s Tom Edwards, the author of this contribution to iMedia Connection, sounds like he has one cool job as an evaluator of interactive/new media and emerging tech.

We’re the beneficiaries as he outlines—and provides plenty of examples of—six marketing technology trends. Included: collaborative commerce, curation, second screen and social TV, rich social media, crowdsourcing and social and CRM. The screenshot below shows the user interface of a social TV app.

This post will do it for me for 2013. Happy Holidays to all and see you back here in the first week of 2014! 

Fund Fact Sheets: The State of the Art

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (EF) digital marketers can and should make big plans. But everyone knows that the accurate, on-time publishing of quarterly fund fact sheets is Marketing Job #1 at asset management firms. Nothing gets done until the fact sheets are updated. It can be a life-sucking experience.

Because it’s been a while since I’ve been in the line of fire for this work, I asked Kurtosys to answer a few questions on the state of the art.

I became acquainted with Kurtosys, “a global provider of digital marketing and client reporting tools that help asset managers attract and retain investor assets,” via Twitter and I like their blog, too. Kurtosys is in the business of selling solutions and in the process of preparing this post it was sometimes impossible to de-couple their response from their philosophy and their underlying product. Still, I think their market perspective is worthwhile.

Beyond the relationship we established in our back and forth for this post, Rock The Boat Marketing has no business tie to Kurtosys. If another provider of fund fact sheet automation solutions wants to submit a guest post with answers to these same questions, I’d be happy to publish it, too. The more we can all share about who's doing what to get the fact sheet monkey off our backs, the more time we'll have to do value-added work.

The answers below were provided by Gerritt Graham (Commercial Director-Americas).

Q. What’s the standard today for how quickly and efficiently the majority of asset managers are producing fact sheets?

Gerritt Graham, Kurtosys

Graham: These days, we’re hearing that fact sheet production takes from one to three weeks or longer. Depending on the size of the asset management company, there’s a tipping point where automation becomes a necessity, and that usually happens when a firm manages 10 funds or more. Larger organizations that produce hundreds or thousands of fact sheets already have automation in place. In these cases, any edit to the system becomes a “Change Management” issue, and they typically work to continuously improve this process.

Q. Are firms waiting for the data for all funds to be available? Or, are they publishing on a staggered basis reflecting the fact that data for some funds can be available earlier than other types of funds?

Graham: Generally, all fund documents are produced simultaneously at month or quarter-end. More often, it’s staggered by delivery channel, which is a big problem. The asset manager’s Marketing team says, “OK, we have our fact sheets done and posted on the Web, now we have to key them into all of the Website’s charts and presentations!” 

Different organizations prioritize this differently. Some don’t even post data on the Website, but those that do are scrambling to do it in synchronicity with their PDF reports to clients, PowerPoint decks and other sales and marketing materials. And that’s no small trick, as this fund performance info can have multiple versions, domiciles, languages and document types for different devices.

We talk to our clients about keeping all data and documents in a unified data model (UDM) that enables the same fund performance info to flow through all distribution types. This takes a combination of two processes: 1) understanding and classifying all this financial data in a unified way and 2) mastering all of these output types: Websites, monthly or quarterly fact sheets, longer fund/strategy reviews, pitchbooks or sales aids, and increasingly, mobile applications. It’s essentially implementing one solution and delivering five kinds of output.

Q. The industry has had automated solutions for publishing fact sheets to print, PDF and Web for years now. What's the status of publishing to presentation decks?

Graham: Creating data-driven pitchbooks is a massive problem across the board. Asset management firms build automation to output PDFs and they don’t want to break it by moving to other output types like pitchbooks or presentations.

As a standard document, fact sheets usually come first—most firms have established calendar deadlines to publish these, so that’s the priority. Too often, any subsequent works based on those fact sheets are error-prone as the derived content is entered by hand and these manual processes introduce errors. We believe that the goal should be to automate the creation of pitchbooks or presentations, enabling dynamic updating as the underlying data changes.

Q. Are there other state-of-the-art applications? Are there any advances in Web delivery of fund marketing data? 

Graham: The truly disruptive game-changer is harnessing the analytics behind newer, interactive fund tools. Most fund marketers already understand how tracking the investor’s online journey can help you test and tune your Website to get significantly better marketing results.

But financial service marketers need to get beyond the basics of just knowing which pages are attracting the most visits. That won’t cut it when it’s time to justify exactly which fund marketing efforts make a difference. Tracking ROI with real marketing revenue means getting smarter about this. Meta tags on drill-down data like fund type, domicile and other identifiers can help asset managers turn Web traffic into actionable intelligence. That’s what’s happening now.

Q. Back in the day, the most difficult data requests tended to come from national account relationships. There was the case of a valued distribution partner that used a different categorization of our funds than we did. And, most firms used just a handful of funds versus the full range. The request was that we provide monthly and even daily updated data on just those select funds, using the partner’s asset class designations, to the firm’s Intranet or Extranet.

What’s happening today? Has anything changed in terms of how those one-off requests get handled?

Graham: The industry is so behind in using technology that issues like these are maddening for most asset managers. Firms can’t assume the position that “We deliver data just this way.” They should be looking at what their target investors and partners really want. That’s what stirs real innovation.

This market is report-centric. The first thing everyone asks about is output: “What do I need to show and how should it look?” The second step is to build a pipe to get the data.

As a result, everything is fit for one purpose. Every new classification, mapping or output type needs a new purpose-built solution (or it becomes a stapled, duct-taped mess). This approach isn’t scalable. We believe in unifying the data so changes like this simply become “Let’s turn on this switch,” and out comes another type of reporting. 

Q. The industry has extensive experience in feeding data to outside services (e.g., Morningstar and Lipper), but what can you tell us about distributing selected data (not every fund, not all data, etc.) to other applications—for example, a display ad with a data reference that must be updated?

Graham: We don’t hear a lot of questions about that currently. But there is a huge opportunity to inform the asset manager about all the places where their data appears—and where it’s wrong. Because of manual processes or unchecked data feeds, outside data services can end up showing incorrect data.

This happens today—from the fact sheet to the presentation to the asset manager’s own Website—with data that’s not just out of sync, but completely wrong! And you can imagine how your typical Chief Compliance Officer feels about this. An “entitled distribution” process can enable a firm to choose which information—at both the document and meta-data level—is permissioned to be sent to each recipient before it leaves the system.

Q. Finally, what are your smartest clients talking to you about?

Graham: Our most cutting-edge clients are thinking creatively with us about improving workflow, analytics and display technologies. But in the end they want to use technology to attract and retain assets. That means understanding the different needs of their audience, whether they are deep-pocketed and conservative institutional investors or their influential consultants or even individual investors who have increasingly high expectations for sexy, impressive presentations.

Check out [above] what JP Morgan UK is doing—beautiful layout and groundbreaking use of embedded data and performance charting. They’re doing the work of getting to know the audience, A/B testing interactive pages, and delivering the message in the appropriate way and channel.

Gerritt Graham is responsible for managing all sales, account management and long-term revenue strategy at Kurtosys in the Americas. His nearly 20-year financial services and technology career includes a variety of senior, global business development roles at The Oracle Corporation, Thomson Reuters and the Gerson Lehrman Group.

Some Level-Setting About The Sharing Of Mutual Fund And ETF Content

Investment firm marketers need to take what’s known and reported about the social networks overall and then do their own thinking about the opportunities for the business they’re in and for their firms.

That second step is important, given the hoopla surrounding social media activity and results. Some of what builds expectations about the benefits of social media doesn’t apply to the largely business-to-business wholesale distribution context that most mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms operate in.

Interest in social interaction is keen for several reasons. There’s the opportunity to build awareness by being social and there’s the potential to demonstrate relevance as a member of an online community. Near the top of the list of reasons, in part because it’s eminently measureable, is the promise that social networks will help spread asset manager-authored content. It’s a wish, a hope and a prayer of firms that have social accounts and also those that don’t.

How much sharing of homegrown investment company content is there, really? 

Based On A Sampling Of September Posts

You and your firm have access to the best, most complete data on usage of your own content, including Web analytics. But to get a sense of what’s happening across the board, I’ve reviewed some sharing data across a sampling of continuously content-producing asset manager sites.

My objective wasn’t to identify what firm's content is being shared the most. Sharing is a function of the size of the audience initially reached, which in turn is a function of brand, promotion, firm size, energy the firm devotes to social networks, timing of the content posting, etcetera etcetera.

For this exercise, the focus was on the extent to which content published on mutual fund and ETF domains gets a lift from those who share links to their social networks. Based on the social sharing counters on some sites and on some other signs, I had a hunch.

Please note that what follows is a look at asset manager content sharing that’s limited in scope and time. The review was contained to investment commentary-type content published, mostly on blogs, by 10 firms. Included were all posts published by these firms in September, a total of 111 posts. The mix included 22 updates in the month from BlackRock on the high end and 4 from MFS on the low end. An additional 22 financial advisor-directed September posts also were reviewed, you'll read more below about those. 

The sites whose content was included:

• Context, the AllianceBernstein Blog on Investing
• The BlackRock Blog
• The First Trust Economics Blog
• Beyond Bulls & Bears, Franklin Templeton 
• Guggenheim Partners' Macro Views
• On the Lookout, MFS 
• OppenheimerFunds' Blog
• PIMCO Insights
• Vanguard Blog
• The WisdomTree Blog

The tool I used was the SharedCount multi-URL dashboard, which I believe to be reliable based on checks against my own site and other sites’ analytics. A few counts disagree with the counts published in the social sharing icons on a few asset manager sites.

SharedCount reports on multiple sites, but sharing of investment company content appears to be contained to four sites: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. 

I looked at the September URLs from the sites and then exported and combined the sharing data as of October 15 to produce scatter charts. You could do the same with your competitive set.

A Few General Insights

This data suggests:

• If you're serious about supporting the sharing of your content, you might take a look at how you present your social sharing icons. Move them up top and make them so big that they're impossible to miss.
• Firms large and small are reporting more success with their content syndication efforts. Making content available on other, better trafficked sites with better reader engagement is a critical piece to making sure your content gets the attention it deserves.

LinkedIn

Public sharing from asset manager domains to social networks is at its highest on LinkedIn, based on how LinkedIn sharing (1,533 total shares) trounced all other sharing to other networks in September. Here's a look at the distribution of the LinkedIn sharing data from each September post.

Even so, few asset manager posts attracted more than 50 shares in September. See the Track Social site for an idea of how leading brands are doing. The top 10 brands on LinkedIn attracted more than 3,700 Likes last week—with LinkedIn itself topping the leaderboard with almost 15,000 Likes. 

Facebook

A total 722 Facebook Likes and Shares ranked Facebook second on the list of shared mutual fund and ETF domain content published in September. Facebook users' support of Franklin Templeton content had a lot to do with it.

For reference, according to Track Social, the top 10 brands got at least 45,000 Likes on their posts per day, as of data reported last week. Fox News tops the list with 117,000 Likes per day. 

Twitter

Most September asset manager posts prompted fewer than 20 tweets, for a total of 601 shares.

The Track Social data is not relevant here because the closest measure would be to look at brand retweets. However, not everything that a brand tweets is about content it’s posted on its domain. The top 10 brands got more than 4,000 retweets of their tweets per day last week, with ESPN getting more than 15,000 retweets. Yes, not much of a benchmark for this space.

A low level of content shares will limit a firm’s prospects for awareness-raising and relevance. But remember that this kind of content-sharing analysis goes only so far. The next step is to understand the amplification effect of the content shares.

Amplification is something that Twitter is particularly good at, and fortunately for us, several tools are available to analyze what’s happening for an account on Twitter, including its reach and even effectiveness.

Below is a screenshot from Topsy showing the total number of tweets and the total number of “highly influential tweets” to a PIMCO post. Topsy tags the top 0.2% most influential of all Twitter users as “highly influential," and “influential” tags are used for the top 0.5% most influential Twitter users. 

Fewer Twitter shares by influential accounts capable of amplification have the potential to get you just as much or more reach than LinkedIn shares by accounts with limited connections and reach. Unfortunately, in a spotcheck of Topsy of the September posts in our sample, very few were tweeted by highly influential accounts. And, that’s something to work on. I would do that before I gave up on Twitter.

Google+

Google+ brings up the rear, with asset manager September content appearing only rarely (20 shares in total) on public posts. It’s possible that more sharing is happening in private posts, not trackable by SharedCount.

Content shares on top-performing brand Google+ pages are much lower, too. The top 10 brands got about 117 shares, with YouTube topping the Track Social list with 313 shares, last week.

Financial Advisor Content Sharing

We’ve taken a look previously at where financial advisors are sharing content, thanks to the data that RegEd Arkovi regularly publishes. It’s a safe guess that those shares include asset manager-created content.

But, an analysis of the content published on blogs that are specifically published for advisors shows even lower level sharing. Included in the analysis were September posts from:

• Putnam Investments' Advisor Tech Tips blog
• Russell Investments' Helping Advisors blog
• SEI's Practically Speaking blog
• Vanguard Blog for Advisors

LinkedIn is again the network the advisor-directed content is most shared to, followed by Twitter.

Let's start with the fact that the universe of potential sharers is small. And, a fraction of the approximately 300,000 U.S. financial advisors have social accounts and are likely to be sharing content on any given day. Also, surfacing content that other advisors will find valuable is not an advisor’s first priority in establishing a social presence.

A cursory review of other advisor-directed Websites (media sites and prominent bloggers) suggests more sharing than asset managers are experiencing. Unknown, though, is how many of the sharers are advisors versus others in the financial advisor ecosystem. On those sites, sharing via Twitter rivals the level of LinkedIn sharing.

Thoughts? Your comments are welcome below.

2 Customer Acquisition Graphs For Your Digital Dashboard

Survey data released in the last week points to a recent rise in the importance of email as a customer acquisition channel for the retail industry.

It’s a provocative finding given that email tends to be the Rodney Dangerfield of digital marketing work, with marketers over the last few years giving much more attention to flashy social media tactics. And yet, see how organic search (whose value is off the chart created by the Custora E-commerce Customer Acquisition Snapshot) and email lead as acquisition sources for retailers.

Email's Impact Doubled

At a time when few of us were giving any respect to email, its impact more than doubled, providing almost 7% of customers in 2013 compared to less than 3% in 2011. By contrast, banner ads, Facebook and Twitter crawl along the bottom of the chart. 

The breakdown of lead sources may be different from how asset managers have acquired customers over the last few years—you may want to include Online Event Marketing and would probably drop Affiliates, for example—although I suspect they’re directionally consistent. I also agree with the commenters to the post who point out that social activities may not be getting credit for creating awareness that eventually leads prospects to subscribe to emails.

Whether in the retail or the asset management industry, once a subscriber is on board, email can be a powerful brand-builder and prospect nurturer.

2 Questions

But the purpose of this post is less about the data and more about the exercise. I’ll use the survey as the occasion to pose two questions to you:

1. Are you tracking and comparing the sources of names that you acquire that eventually turn into customers? Your dashboard should include a graph of customer acquisition by channel over time, too.                 

2. Are you also tracking the value of the names acquired by channel and comparing them to a computed average customer lifetime value a la this Custora graph?

Of course, attribution (i.e., in most cases, the source of the last click is the channel credited for sourcing the prospect) is a consideration to work through. But for starters, make sure that you’re collecting and organizing channel and customer value data in a way that lends itself to further analysis.

Speaking of flash, here’s to a fireworks-filled but safe Independence Day! See you back here or on Twitter next week.

Investors’ Go-To Site: Finra's BrokerCheck

I liken browsing on the Internet to going to the stacks in a university library. You pull one book down, it leads you to another and then to another. Before you know it, there’s been a lot of input but (in my case) zero output.

As much as I try not to surrender to Web-based moseying, I will indulge from time to time. Something did give me pause this week and I thought I’d share the results of my digression here.

There was a quote on the New York Times DealBook blog Monday. “People are starting to use BrokerCheck the way they use TripAdvisor,” DealBook quoted Seth E. Lipner. Lipner is a professor of law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College and he also represents investors in cases.

The post itself was about the heightened interest on the part of those regulated by Finra to pursue every possible means to remove negative information from their records. As investors increasingly rely on Finra’s BrokerCheck to vet advisors, the registered people hope to clean their files up before anybody sees anything.

While I have an interest in that, my real curiosity was in the characterization of BrokerCheck as a go-to site. How do investors even find BrokerCheck online? 

Who's Looking For A Broker Today?

Including “Broker” in the name of the database probably made sense when it was established in 1988. And, obviously, there are still brokerage businesses. But, do people really refer to individual financial advisors as “brokers” anymore, I wondered.

No, they don’t, as confirmed by this Google Trends chart, which plots the plummeting use of “stockbrokers” and derivative terms in the last 10 years. (As an aside, the search volume of financial advisor-related terms has remained relatively stable.)

Hmm, in addition to the traffic that heads directly there, BrokerCheck must get its traffic from links on other sites. I immediately hopped on over to the Majestic Site Explorer, a tool that has just been made free, and confirmed that, in fact, more than 9,000 mostly trustworthy sites (including plenty of .govs and .orgs) link to it. That’s a reflection of the benefits of being a 25-year-old entity sponsored by the well connected (online and offline) Finra. 

I then realized that I’d neglected to check Google Trends to see whether “Finra broker check” as a term had any search volume. Wow, as you can see, it does. Having peaked at 100 on Google’s scale in June 2011, search volume on the term in June 2013 was still a healthy 86 on Google’s scale. Drop Finra from the term and “broker check” searches are at about the same level.

At a time when the advisory business has evolved beyond the business practices of brokers, BrokerCheck as a term enjoys healthy brand awareness. It’s interesting to me that investors know to type in “broker check” when they’re researching someone who in all likelihood has branded himself or herself as something far different from a broker. And, a broker is probably not what they're looking for.

I’d make the argument that “broker check” and other search derivations are branded searches—this isn’t a generic search, investors have likely heard about BrokerCheck.

Since July 2010, search volume also has been up for “financial advisor check,” although interest has been spikier. But that’s not likely how an investor with no awareness of BrokerCheck would word the search, it would probably be a much longer search phrase. 

Google Trends also provides a geographic breakdown of where the BrokerCheck searches are originating from. I’m not sure what the insight is here. Are the searches in line with where the financial assets are concentrated? Are these searches an indicator of intent to initiate advisor relationships or to move money?

New York, Of Course, But In Nebraska Too

Most interesting on Google Trends is to view the change in regional search interest in the term over time. Specifically, you can see the map start to light up in 2008 in New York, California, Texas and Florida. Even though the 2013 search volume is off its 2011 peak, the searches are more widespread this year.

Ultimately, the primary takeaway here is that the name of Finra’s database search does not seem to penalize it in terms of traffic, thanks to high awareness which leads to successful searches, and also to its solid online support. A better name, social media presence and securing the BrokerCheck.com domain would help even more investors directly find it.

Financial services continues to be the least trusted industry globally, according to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer. And, financial advisory is the least trusted among financial services sub-categories. Heightened use of the Web to research advisors is another indicator of post-2008 investor determination to take responsibility for who they entrust with decisions regarding their financial assets.

While there isn't a site comparable to BrokerCheck for checking on asset managers, we can assume that an equal amount of scrutiny is being applied to the product manufacturers whose mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) advisors are recommending.