Content Filtering: A Mutual Fund, ETF Website Differentiator

A few years ago, Search Engine Land published a column with the headline “How Does Your Web Site Make You Feel?” The premise of the article by usability expert Kim Krause Berg was that decisions made by Website designers and developers affect us “emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually.” (For more, see the post and see my 2009 comments on the subject.) 

I was captivated by the idea. Haven't we all had the experience of landing on a Website and seeing something so creative, so appealing, so smart or so efficient that it elicited a reaction? Ahhhhh. 

How can we produce Ahhhhhs on a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) Website? Here’s one suggestion: content filtering. 

Less Can Be More

Good for you that your firm has a lot to say, or that it offers a broad and deep product line (or multiple lines), and/or that you publish an extensive series of communications. Not so good for the Website visitor who has landed on your site with something they want to get done. He or she goes there for a reason. 

You can elicit that feel-good response if you optimize users’ visits—including those from on mobile devices where searching and scrolling can be excruciating. Enable users to filter the wealth of what you offer. By improving their experience, you indirectly enhance their feelings about your site and yes, firm, too. 

From my perspective, Search capabilities and content filtering are a key differentiator between asset manager sites. They can make the difference between a site that holds its own with some of the finest database-driven sites today like Amazon, LinkedIn, etc. and sites that betray themselves as having been built back in the days of browsing and not recently updated. (Shockingly, some sites have yet to offer an open text Search box. My advice is to make that a priority and then build from there.)

Respect The User's Effort

There is a line that governs usability work—“respect the user’s effort”—and that’s what underlies the filtering shown in some of the following examples.

We start with a few site-wide filter-capable Search examples that may represent the most ambitious undertakings.

Filtered site-wide Search may be out of the question in the world you that live in. Many firms publish to the Web from multiple closed systems that refuse to talk to one another, making integration of content impossible. Despair not, some firms are distinguishing themselves by offering the filtering of a specific content category (e.g., Literature and Forms or Insights and Research). Screenshots of a few of these follow.

What And When: J.P. Morgan

What does J.P. Morgan have to say about gold? The Search results themselves aren’t that descriptive, but see how site visitors are enabled to narrow down the options, thanks to content type and date filters.

Expanded Categories: Invesco

While keyword, ticker and symbol searches are common on sites, Invesco Search goes further by expanding on the content categories. Fund numbers, portfolio manager names and "literature part number" filtered searches are not commonly offered.

Results Relevance: PIMCO

Despite its appearance on many firms’ Search pages, relevance as a sort isn’t intuitive. See how PIMCO offers Relevance and Date sorts as well as category, date and file type.

When 2 Filters Won’t Do: Henderson Funds

The Henderson Funds Literature page enables users to narrow options by three possible filters: document group, fund and keyword.

"I'll Have What Everybody Else Is Having"

It's an extra step to produce and keep these current, but the inclusion of thumbnails of literature covers in Search is a user-friendly move. Also helpful are the Most Recent and Most Requested sorts offered on Vanguard's Financial Advisor Literature page.

Assuring They Will Be Back: TIAA-CREF

The TIAA-CREF Asset Management Investment Data Center introduces Morningstar ratings and risk as added dimensions with which to filter. The listing can be shortened by creating a log-in to save favorites, and the My Briefcase function further organizes the user’s use of the listing.

What I love the most: The ability to turn on alerts to be notified when favorited documents are updated. 

Making The Most Of The Visit: Russell Investments

See how Russell Investments respects the effort.

Multiple filters assure that visitors are not going to lose much time looking for an Insights & Research piece. Note the win/win in how Russell presents the default, featured content page—two options for subscriptions (RSS and email) make it convenient for the user while Russell makes the most of what might otherwise be a one-time only visit.

And, not shown in this screenshot, is the fact that an RSS feed can be created from the filtered Search. Ahhhhh...

How Are You Engaging Newbie Digital Investors?

Most of what we focus on is the incremental communication. We assume that our target “audience” of financial advisors, investors and the media has a basic foundation. Our work largely involves adding to a stream of communications that build on what’s already known and understood.

More often than not, communications energy goes into the market update, whitepaper or product communication. Social media posts also tend to be incremental, appropriate for their length and the medium.

Investment basics? We leave those to the junior staffers, giving them the responsibility to periodically update the evergreen pieces, which we make available online or via PDF or in print so advisors have something to distribute.

That approach may warrant some rethinking as mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies get increasingly serious about engaging investors online and specifically the digital natives (loosely defined as people born after 1980).

Nonlinear And Less Structured

First, there is the issue that all established (dare I say “old school”) brands have—the need to update their communications style to better resonate with these defining characteristics of digital natives:  

• Multimedia-oriented
• Nonlinear
• Multi-tasking
• Less textual
• Collaborative
• Very creative
• Less structured
• Extremely social and predisposed to sharing

And, the investment industry has a greater distance to travel, given its reputation for producing dry, predictable and uninviting communications. No offense.

Take a look at the following videos that reflect an updated approach to introducing some basic concepts. Three are by investment companies (T. Rowe Price, iShares and Franklin Templeton on a more advanced subject). One is published by the Guardian U.S., the other by a UK filmmaker discussing European ETFs. Even if none of them is your cup of tea, you can’t deny that these video producers are making an effort here to tell a story and to keep the viewer engaged.

T. Rowe Price's What's A Mutual Fund?

iShares' An ETF Is Like A Camera

Franklin Templeton's Availability Bias

The Guardian's Your Mutual Fund

Think Tall Films' ETFs: What Investors Should Know

Do You Really Have To?

Over the years, we’ve seen investor education Web content evolve from all text to text and graphs, glossaries, calculators and quizzes. How much has any of that really done for you?

In my experience, there’s no dustier place on an investment company Website than the Investor Education pages. Most of these communications harken back to a day when only the no-load fund companies invested much energy in investor education. That's because they had to. "Load" fund companies relied on advisors to introduce and explain concepts.

That was before. Before the power of content marketing in brand-building was proven. Before online content was actively shared and discussed online. Before digital immigrants became pretty darn proficient at using the Web to extract information previously available only through other channels. Before consumers (including investors) relied more on peer recommendations than professional (including advisor) recommendations. Before investors could be assumed to do extensive online research before presenting themselves to an advisor. And before digital natives accumulated assets sufficient to attract your and your competitors' interest.

Maybe all fund companies "have to" think about how they educate investors on their sites and elsewhere today.

How? Test this yourself: Watch a digital native visit a sampling of five Websites that are new to him or her. If there’s a colorful, engaging video on the home page—talking heads not included!—that’s where the digital natives goes first, nearly every time. Video is the obvious "new" medium to be considering for investor education.

Can You Afford Not To?

Introducing video to your mix is far from a slam dunk. Significant time, thought, creativity and budget needs to be invested to create something worthy—and then promoted. (All the while Sales can be counted on to be asking, “Why are you doing that? What about what we need?”) There’s also the undeniable fact that asset manager videos distributed via YouTube continue to suffer from low viewership. Video works for every other industry and not this one? The next videos need to be better. 

What are the chances that you could create such a likeable, helpful video (or series of videos) that could make a difference (prompt Website exploration, drive interest and inquiry, foster sharing, etc.) to your brand’s awareness?

Sorry, that’s the wrong question to ask. Here’s where I'd start: How important are newbie investors (and the advisors they’ll turn to) to your firm’s growth plan, including Sales' objectives? How appealing is the way you currently present yourself to this up-and-coming set of investors who learn differently?

What are you communicating by not freshening your approach? 

What Do Advisors Use Fund Company Websites For?

What are financial advisors using fund company Websites for? That's the question asked by an Advisor Perspectives survey, the results of which I've been anxious to see since January. The findings are elaborated on in a post published yesterday on the AP site. They reflect the responses of 282 investment advisers, registered representatives, financial planners and insurance agents who completed the survey online. 

While I urge you to check out the full report, below are a few of my notes. 

Websites are the #3 information resource after third-party sites and meetings/calls with wholesalers.

RTB’s take: Congratulations, digital marketers, you’ve reached the pinnacle of what you can hope to achieve. Can you envision Websites climbing any higher as an information source than third place, surpassing either third-party sites or meetings/calls with wholesalers and other real live people? I can't.

Note that print communications are nowhere to be found in the answers the Advisor Perspectives provided—I guess reliance on them is lumped into the Other category that 6% of advisors responded to.

Print’s fade is no less than stunning. Just six years ago a SwanDog/FRC study reported that firms with less than $50 billion in assets under management spent 40%-60% of their marketing budgets on sales literature fulfillment. And now...poof, at least in terms of what advisors rely on. Here's hoping a meaningful share of that spending on print has shifted to your digital budget.

What I wonder about is where asset manager apps would place on this list. It's a category worth breaking out next time. 

More than half of surveyed advisors get at least 25% of their due diligence information from fund sites. 

RTB’s take: Advisors who manage more money tend to rely more on wholesalers than on fund sites. But, the more money an advisor manages, the more they use the sites for research. Both of these would seem to make sense.

But if more than half of advisors get at least 25% of their due diligence done on fund sites, that means that a significant number of advisors are doing their due diligence on your firm and your products somewhere else. Are you plugged into those sources and how information feeds to them? Is someone checking on it regularly? These findings make it obvious that you can't afford to be disinterested about your firm's data and content syndication.

Advisors tend to use mutual fund Websites primarily to access core-level data on performance, holdings and risk metrics.

RTB’s take: No matter how imaginative you can get with enhancements to your site, here's a reminder of the highest value that a site can provide: As the product manufacturer, you’re recognized by advisors as having more product information than any other site is going to have. For many, it's the only reason to go to your site. Focus on improving the product information-gathering experience (e.g., how easy are your holdings to get to?) and all else will flow from there.

Asked to select up to five kinds of advisor-focused content that advisors found most valuable and relevant to their investment management and client service processes, 3% of advisors selected firm-created videos. (Detailed fund information, fact sheets, commentaries and fund research were what ranked highest.)

RTB's take: This has to smart, I'm sure. But, maybe it's time for you and your team to reset. Are the videos you’re producing truly advisor-worthy? Is it even realistic to be expecting advisors to regularly get their information from videos? Alternatively, what would you change in your approach if you instead optimized video on your site for the non-advisor visitors? 

55% of advisors access fund company sites on a mobile device.

RTB’s take: Advisor use of mobile devices has been studied by a few surveys but never have we seen numbers on mobile advisors' access of fund sites. More than half of the group surveyed (55%) say they've visited sites while mobile, and more than one-quarter (26%) say they do it daily. 

What are they looking at? "For everything except quick-hit tasks like getting price quotes, mobile users prefer tablets over smartphones," Advisor Perspectives reports. Below I've sorted the data to show the differences between advisor content consumption on smartphones versus tablets. 

These findings provide added incentive for firms to be form factor-aware when developing and executing their mobile strategies. Dig into your Web analytics and create at least two reports—one for smartphones and one for tablets. You need to understand the differences between these two very different types of visits. Pay special attention to visits that start from links in emails.  

"...Very few companies stand out as being the best. Of the top 20 largest mutual fund companies*, only nine were singled out by more than 10% of advisors as offering superior Website capabilities...This is an important wake-up call for fund companies." 

RTB’s take: Important wake-up call? I have to part ways with Advisor Perspectives on this conclusion. I just wouldn’t go that far with the data that’s being shared. For starters, perhaps “the best” aren’t all among the top 20 largest mutual fund company sites.

My hunch is that most advisors who regularly use firm sites are generally satisfied. Of course, every site can be improved upon. But there’s no indication that the industry suffers from poor quality sites across the board. Advisor Perspectives has a database of 300,000 financial advisors, and thousands of them will respond to a survey on a subject they feel passionate about. If advisors' needs weren't being met, I think there would have been a stronger response. 

But don't just take my word for all of this. If you're working on a fund company Website, the Advisor Perspectives research is a must-read point-in-time report on what's resonating and what isn't with a primary online audience. 

Content Marketing Begins At Home

Robust content production, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media participation. All of these reflect a commitment to content marketing.

And, lately, I’ve been seeing another sign of investment brands thinking like publishers: The appearance of “ads” on Website pages designed to drive traffic to other pages on the site.

I put quotation marks around “ads” because there’s no payment involved when it’s your own site, just the creation and placement of a graphic. (Unless some of you are managing to charge business units as a means of developing a digital marketing revenue source, to which I would tip my Chicago Blackhawks cap to you. Nice work if you can get it.)

For purposes of this post, an ad is a counter-message to what appears on the page. It’s not Related content or a Learn More element. Its purpose is to lead site visitors elsewhere. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Give That Twitter Account Some Support!

Look at how MainStay Investments calls attention to the firm’s relatively new (and second) Twitter account @MainStayMunis. A Twitter account promo appears in the right-hand column of many pages. But so there’s no chance of anyone overlooking it, the Products & Performance listing in the center of the page has been shoved down to accommodate the ad.

Oppenheimer Offers Options

It stands to reason that if someone is reading one commentary, he or she might very well be interested in other commentary. Below is a screenshot of a partial page of the Oppenheimer Weekly Market Review. Note the dueling promo on the left-hand side linking to a video on emerging markets.

T. Rowe Price Follows The Eyeballs

The most trafficked pages make the most sense for promotions. Example: This week T. Rowe Price’s Mutual Funds landing page was the home to not one but two graphics created to drive interest in fresh content.

John Hancock Doubles Up

Usually, product profile pages are sacrosanct. There’s more than enough to say about the product in question, let alone mention any other product. But in this example I’ve been saving for a while, check out how one John Hancock fund seeks to leverage attention paid to another fund.

This is a screenshot of an iPad ad landing page. While John Hancock paid to advertise the John Hancock Alternative Asset Allocation Fund, the intent of the leaderboard size ad at the bottom of the landing page was to drive traffic to another fund profile. Toward the end of last year I could have sworn I saw the same Big Box Opportunities ad on random (to me, not to John Hancock) fund profile pages on the site. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on the site to show you today.

Worth A Try?

One message per page. That's a direction from back in the day when we all believed that people would arrive at a Website's home page and leisurely browse the rest of the pages on the site. Oh the naiveté. Today we know 1)that interior pages can get 10 times the traffic of the home page and 2)the most effective way to get attention for something new online is to barge in on something that already has an established audience. 

The "violating" of tidy, single-purpose pages may require some explaining to business stakeholders. But experimentation with with a few spot ads shouldn't meet up with many technological hurdles, although some content management systems will support better than others. One way or the other, you should be able to add a counterprogramming graphic to a few well viewed pages. Be sure to include tracking code and then watch your analytics to see if you've successfully boosted the visibility of the new content. Worth a try?