5 Early Wins For Mutual Fund, ETF Companies Using Social Media

I couldn’t get enough of the coverage this week of the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, celebrated yesterday.

Originally, this post was going to be about what the Web has done for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) communicating, with a few reminiscences.

For example, I smiled when I read this line from the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on a Google post Tuesday.

Thanks to the Web, Berners-Lee wrote, “You can link to any piece of information. You don’t need to ask for permission.”

Right, I’d forgotten! In the late 1990s, wirehouse account people actually asked for permission to link (their Intranets) to mutual fund company Websites. Ah, the innocence of those early days.

Instead for today, I’ve gravitated toward something fresher and, at this point, evolving more dramatically: The effect that participation in social media is having on how fund companies communicate with their many stakeholders. Let’s date the start of this to four years ago, right about when FINRA released its Regulatory Notice 10-06 in January 2010. I can think of five early wins.

1. Communicating at a higher level than product

As an example, access to Twitter came at just the right time for asset managers willing to provide a steady stream of information about municipal bond markets.

Starting in 2010 with Northern Trust’s @Fixedology account (since renamed @NTInvest) and followed by municipal-focused @RochesterFunds, @MainStayMunis and other broader asset manager accounts, 140 characters have proved sufficient space for pithy updates about markets, issue sizes, demand, etc. all clustered around the #muni hashtag or derivations.

In the last four years, what's going on with municipal bonds has been a topic that many others, and most notably the media, vitally cared about. Twitter provided asset managers an easy entrée into a conversation they could contribute to.

The notion that muni communicators could use a different communication channel to call attention to in-house insights or even just facts was new. Until 2008 or so, it was the equity funds, their stories and their management teams that typically dominated the marketing and public relations resources. And, regardless of the asset class or the timeliness of the comment, there would have been a limit imposed on the number of communications PR would have been willing to initiate—as in, "We can't reach out to a reporter on the same topic too often."

But, a Twitter account can. I’m convinced that steady, consistent communicating served the tweeting firms in good stead when, late in 2010, Meredith Whitney predicted a municipal bond "day of reckoning."

A crisis was avoided but the accounts tweet on, as shown in this random collection of information-packed Rochester Funds tweets. Note that many #muni tweets simply impart information, don't even require the reader to click a link.

Net revenue collections for FY ’14, July – Feb, in Puerto Rico are 10.2% higher than last year. Higher revenues = positive for bondholders.

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) March 5, 2014

Meeting today with some Puerto Rico creditors in NYC. We were not invited, nor will we attend. PR wasn’t invited either.

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) January 16, 2014

We agree with @Muni_Mkt_Advisor's Robert Donahue: "Puerto Rico's leaders are showing considerable courage” h/t @TheBondBuyer

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) December 26, 2013

Look for more of this social media-enabled content leadership, as the industry educates on alternative investing in particular.

2. Better customer intelligence

Some firms have a much better understanding of the financial advisors who use their mutual funds or ETFs than they did five years ago.

Because of the benefits to them of participating on social networks, advisors have been creating profiles and sharing information—all of which savvy asset managers recognize as valuable customer intelligence. (See this 2009 post for an early perspective on the opportunity.)

When third-party data providers (like Meridian-IQ to name a current-day example) first made advisors’ AUM and production data available, that was the first step in asset managers growing their customer databases with more than just the uneven data input by the wholesaling staff. APIs available from LinkedIn and other social platforms today and CRM integrations available provide real-time, qualitative information that salespeople know how to use to advance offline conversations.

At the 1:14 mark of the following Nimble video, you'll see an example of how social account information is being added to CRMs.  

Nimble Grid View and Smart Summary of Contacts from Nimble Marketing on Vimeo.

It is the rare investment company that is mining this data today. However, many firms are doing something, even if in a low-tech way, or by just adding social CRM to their roadmaps. This will provide a competitive advantage. 

3. Better visibility for initiatives

It can be a thrill to work for a firm with millions of shareholders or investors. However, communicating with them in print usually takes too much time and is cost-prohibitive, two challenges somewhat addressed by the advent of Websites and email. But there, too, there are reasons to take a measured approach. A firm can’t communicate “too often” for fear of fatiguing its lists, and no single initiative can consume too much of the enterprise's communication resources.

Enter Facebook, an extremely accommodating environment to discuss corporate responsibility and community initiatives and to foster engagement. Check out the John Hancock Boston Marathon posts for one timely example. 

Or, consider the single-focus opportunity that a blog affords, as Putnam demonstrates with its five blogs on five niche topics: perspectives, wealth management, advisor technology tips, retirement and absolute return.  

Putnam is also giving a master class on how to use social media to extend the value and life of research findings.

Do you remember the social media research Putnam released last October? Previously, a firm might have conducted research, prepared a whitepaper, launched a microsite, issued a press release and then its news would fade from the news cycle in about a week. Because the research was right on-point for its Advisor Tech Tips blog, Putnam continues to post additional survey-based insights, which in turn prompts sharing and new attention for the research.

4. More natural exchanges

When you talk to people only periodically, there’s a tendency to be more formal and need to say more. Four times a year-reporting means that there's always going to be a lot to have to catch people up on. Updating via social media, though, can be more conversational, even natural.

For its plain-spokenness and word economy, this @Vanguard_Group tweet (which was as a Rock The Boat Marketing 2012 content highlight) continues to be one of my all-time favorite asset manager communications.

Our Advisors app for iPad product comparison tool was too slow. We fixed it. Try it now. http://t.co/Ltoduy5r

— Vanguard | Advisors (@Vanguard_FA) November 17, 2012

We all know how this would have been approached in every other medium—a lot of background information, a mumbo-jumbo quote and a description of the app’s new capabilities. It’s hard to imagine a Web page with just these three sentences on it. The best fund companies on Twitter are keeping it real. (Also, see 2013: Time To Show Some Personality (And All That Implies).)

Theoretically, there’s no better way to project naturalness than to sit in front of a video camera and talk. Except that over the years, investment professionals and the perfectionist marketers who work with them have developed a lot of good habits that could use some relaxing to truly succeed on YouTube.

Here again, the Vanguard channel is blazing a trail toward less stilted presentations. Check out their first Google Hangout from December. There are a few rough spots but the fresh, uncanned approach has a contemporary appeal.

Vanguard, one of the first whose blogs allowed comments, is also one of the first money managers to allow Discussion on YouTube. It's inevitable: Through its interactions on Facebook, Twitter and in comments elsewhere, this business will get the knack of responding to investors and others in public.

5. Developing a fuller sense of the ecosystem

In pre-social media days, the enlightened asset managers acknowledged that their business was influenced by people not defined by AUM and sales. Hence, the gatekeeper-type field in a CRM.

But paying attention to social media conversations and interactions surfaces others—industry leaders, investment bloggers and service providers and vendors, also with no production data next to their names. These are influencers that those of us in marketing would have had no awareness of 10 years ago.

Let’s take the example of Cate Long on Twitter, writer of Reuters’ Muniland blog and very influential on the #munis subject with journalists among her top followers. She regularly tweets asset manager (and others') #munis tweets. Of course, she’s in PR’s Contact list, but marketers watching the #munis hashtag know about her, too.

This awareness should be institutionalized—if Long were to sign up for an email newsletter or call in on the 800-number, she should be recognized as someone other than a "non-advisor" in the enterprise CRM.

See where this is going? It’s silo-busting and calls for added collaboration across functions.

A systematic understanding of social networks, as some early adopting firms are starting to develop today, can lead to a fuller sense of the thinking influencing the users of investment products, and result in proactive communicating and marketing.

In what other ways do you see the business being changed by social media? Please add your thoughts below.

Wholesalers, CRM Enhancements And The Risk Of Being Invisible

Maybe you know the old movie scene I’m thinking of. Two men are talking to one another. There’s a woman in the scene but for some reason they can’t see her. She’s agitated. She's trying to get their attention, she has information she thinks the men can use. But she isn’t getting through to them. She’s either invisible or dead.

That’s what was I was flashing back to while listening to a recent Wholesaler Masterminds podcast. Rob Shore was interviewing Sam Richter, author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling. The focus was on the intelligence-gathering that Richter recommends wholesalers do prior to calling on an advisor for the first time.

As you’ll hear at the 4:20 mark, Richter makes the point that business-to-business sales have changed since the rise of the Internet. Buyers (advisors) have what Richter calls buyer intelligence—advisors already know about wholesalers’ products and their brands.

“Seventeen years ago, if information is power, who had the power? You the wholesaler had the power because you were the only one who knew about the product. Today, everybody knows about the product,” Richter says.

He goes on to explain how wholesalers can use Google and find other information available on “the impersonal Web” to personalize selling by learning what there is to know about the advisors they’re meeting with. 

"Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care," says Richter, quoting Theodore Roosevelt.

Wholesalers Never Google Advisors?

Who could disagree with Richter’s message? And evidently, it’s needed.

On the Wholesaler Masterminds show notes page, Shore says an advisor once emailed him:“Wholesalers never Google me. Just lazy.”

Wow! Really? I would have thought that the very least a salesperson would do is use Google to search for any mentions of a prospect. Certainly, that’s what advisors themselves are being coached to use social media to do. (For just one example, see this recent SEI post on how advisors should be taking advantage of what they can learn on LinkedIn.)

I tweeted the “Wholesalers never Google me” line and it struck a chord with a few advisors, including this exchange. Financial planning influencer Michael Kitces re-tweeted the tweet, which Jamie Cox commented on. Note that Cox is a Barron’s top advisor whose broker-dealer is LPL. Probably on your wholesalers' top 250 lists.

RT @RockTheBoatMKTG: “Wholesalers never Google me. Just lazy”--why advisor recon is important http://t.co/wp6mTAur8G via @shorespeak

— MichaelKitces (@MichaelKitces) January 15, 2014

@MichaelKitces@RockTheBoatMKTG@shorespeak they're so dialed into leading w/ product, they overlook the obvious-who we serve, who we are..

— Jamie Cox (@jamesacoxiii) January 15, 2014

Hey! What About The CRM? How About Checking The CRM?

But all of that is just prelude to what prompted this post. While listening to the podcast, I kept waiting for a mention of the mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) wholesaler’s CRM as a font of knowledge about advisors.

Most marketers I talk to are working studiously on building out the intelligence of the CRM. They're equipping wholesalers with information on advisors’ interaction with marketing communications, including email and Website pages, and they're at least piloting lead scoring based on digital language combined with AUM and sales data.

A growing number are integrating social profiles (e.g., LinkedIn and Twitter) for near real-time updates of what advisors are up to. (See this July 2013 post about Putnam's work.) After listening to Richter’s explanation of his YouGotTheNews.com, I’m thinking there should be an integration with Google News to bring in local news. Maybe some firms have that underway.

To listen to the podcast is to get the impression that wholesalers are on their own out there. That there's no awareness of what's being piped into customer databases. It could help. There's data that could warm up a cold call or an attempt to reconnect.

For Sales productivity, for the good of the enterprise and for Marketing (as in, “You spent all that time on that and to what end?”), these enhancements should not go unseen. 

           rob Shore

I reached out to Shore, whose Website claims an email list of 10,000 wholesaler names, as a proxy for wholesalers. What was his sense of the CRM as a go-to source for advisor reconnaissance?

Rob ShoreFirst, Shore expressed surprise that Marketing is contributing added insights to the CRMs (and obviously not all are yet, firms are at various stages of delivering various pieces of information).

"No wholesaler has described to me the breadth of capability you just described," he said.

We talked about the potential value of data being reported on individual advisors' interactions with marketing emails or the traffic to Website pages, and he pushed back some.

“I really don’t care, we don’t know what wild hair took somebody to the Website. I don’t think it’s fair to infer that an advisor is hotly interested just because he looked at a few pages on your Website,” he said.

Several product detail pages in a compressed period of time with accelerated frequency? That might be different, Shore allowed. He said that if the CRM aggregated the kind of information heard in the podcast about advisors’ interests and accomplishments (some of this being made available via the social integrations), then that would be compelling and useful information.

We wound our way around to talking about a higher level issue, though, and that’s wholesalers’ use of the CRM, in general. It continues to be what Shore called “spotty.”

“Wholesalers who use SalesForce, as an example, most effectively are committed to robust documentation of a sequence of sales events…My sense and my observation is that there’s not enough of that, there’s not enough of wholesalers committing to diligent CRM input,” he said.

Marketing Is Going To Have To Sell It

It was fun talking to Shore because it was theoretical. It wasn’t the loaded kind of interaction that can characterize Marketing/wholesaler exchanges, when Marketing wants to talk about partnering on a database roadmap and Sales wants to know where an approved presentation is. At the same time, he represented the wholesaler perspective—and the challenge for marketers if all this CRM integration work is going to become visible and yield results.

The work is far from done when a Marketing-led CRM enhancement is complete. It seems clear that Sales management and wholesalers are themselves going to need to be sold on the value of it.

Let’s give Shore the last word:

“How do you prove the value to a sales guy who ‘just wants to sell’? How are you going to show wholesalers how to use the data efficiently in the course of a day when they’re crushed with information, and without them needing to become a propeller head? The data may be there but in the swirl of everything else that the wholesaler is supposed to be proficient at, how can Marketing make them better at using the data?”

Reaching Advisors Via Gmail? Read This

The end may/may not be near.

Retailers and other heavy email users are reporting reduced engagement afterGoogle’s recent change to how it categorizes Gmail. Some are quite upset, going so far as to suggest that Gmail is "killing" email marketing.

In this industry, email is by far the most effective marketing communication, a point reinforced as recently as this table from the July 2013 Cogent Research*: Advisor Touchpoints™. Even so, my sense is that this industry is closer to the "The End Is Not Near" part of the spectrum. But, it is possible that your firm's email effectiveness will be diminished to some extent, thanks to the Gmail changes.

Are you using media lists to distribute marketing messages? This has bearing for them, too.

For Collecting 'Marketing' Emails

For background: Gmail is #8 among email clients. As part of the Google Apps suite, it has particular appeal to RIAs who have warmed to the idea of keeping their data in the cloud.

But, advisors of all stripes long ago decided that there are benefits to maintaining an email address for the purposes of collecting “marketing” (translation, sorry to say: non-essential) messages. Over the years, many gravitated from Yahoo! and Hotmail to Gmail as their preferred free email service. More often than not, it's a Gmail address that's used as a second address when advisors sign up today for asset management communications, among other online offers.

In other words, advisors have already siloed asset management communications from their primary email account's Inbox.

I was worried three years ago when Google introduced a Priority Inbox feature based on the Gmail user’s reading patterns. But now (starting in late May and continuing on a rolling basis that is believed to be complete now), Google is automatically categorizing email as it arrives.

Here’s the upbeat video that Google created when the tabs were announced.

This is a broadbrush treatment, and Google has yet to reveal the basis (algorithm) on which the emails are categorized. We're not likely to ever know.

It's A Tossup Where Mutual Fund/ETF Emails Go

Most asset management communications are sent on an opt-in basis. More to the point, few are promotional in nature. Global investment perspectives and half-price mani pedi offers don't have much in common. Unfortunately, Google is ruling otherwise.

Over the last few days, I’ve used a Gmail address to subscribe to many mutual fund, ETF and investment media newsletters and the early results are not encouraging. The screenshots below illustrate the problem with representative emails received yesterday. 

Most of your work is showing up in the Promotions tab versus the Primary stream. Google's algorithms notwithstanding, to the naked eye there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the categorization.

The most promotional email in the set is the first RIABiz email in the Primary tab, carrying a sponsored message from T. Rowe Price. The content and tone of the emails flagged as Promotions are different in no perceptible way from the emails that made it into the Primary stream. You can't tell from the return address ("economics"), but the last email in the Primary stream, by the way, is from First Trust. Personalized emails show up under both tabs.

By comparison, all of the emails shown above arrived directly in my Outlook account, none was stopped by its industrial strength SPAM filter.

Remain Vigilant

By definition, emails relegated to the Promotions tab will get less attention than email included in the Primary stream. What's an asset manager email team to do? Here are a few suggestions:

• Size the problem.Look into how many Gmail addresses you mail to. Maybe this is not your firm's problem. Another relevant consideration is where the Gmail is being read. The tabbed Inbox is available only in the Gmail webmail client and in official Gmail apps for iOS and Android. One recent study found that only 19% of Gmail opens actually occur in official Gmail.

• Monitor the effect. Create a report that segments only the Gmail recipients on your email list, and track the open and clickthrough rates over time. If you use MailChimp, by the way, you’ll want to read "Gmail’s New Inbox Is Affecting Open Rates." Also, ReturnPath offers a Gmail Tabs analysis for brands. Unfortunately, the benchmarking data provided is of limited value given that Banking is the closest it comes to investment companies.

• Be proactive. Prepare and send an email that shows Gmail-using advisors how to move your emails out of the Promotions tab and into the Primary tab. This MailChimp post includes the explanation you’ll need. There's nothing to it. But, be realistic about how many advisors will respond to such a plea. You might think about enlisting your internals in the crusade.

Let's keep an eye on this.