Content, Deep Linking And Marketing Tools—6 Recent SlideShare Faves

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Just because SlideShare isn't one of those needy (as in follow me, RT me) content sharing platforms, that doesn’t mean you should overlook it, either for research or for sharing your own firm’s work.

What follows is a random collection of six SlideShares (if that’s a thing) that I’ve been liking lately.

What Content Costs

Are you planning 2015 or a content strategy, in particular? This "2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends" report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs will save you time and enlighten. I sometimes find as much value in the questions being asked as I do in the data.

Don't miss the graph on page 15, which shows B2B metrics for content marketing success. Website traffic may still hold the top spot but note the prominence of three sales-related metrics. Increasingly, marketers are linking what they do in content marketing to sales results. 

2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends - North America by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs

from

Content Marketing Institute

How Your App Content Gets Discovered

Search engine search of app content has to be of interest to any mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketer—most fund company apps are loaded with rich keyword content that deserves to be found. Enter "Deep Linking—A Fundamental Change In The Mobile App Ecosystem."

This Growth Hackers deck is a solid presentation of the case for deep linking, how to implement it and best practices. It's a terrific guide, even if you take one look and pass it on to your development team.

Deep linking - a fundamental change in the mobile app ecosystem

from

TUNE User

Rebel At Work

Well, sure, I’ll admit that I came for the title of the presentation but I stayed for the content in this "Rocking The Boat Without Falling Out" deck from Rebels At Work.

If there’s anybody who’s perfectly positioned to be a rebel in an asset management firm, it’s the digital and social marketer. Your job is to be disruptive in the name of communications progress.

This isn’t as designed as some of the other decks but the message is spot-on.

Rocking the boat without falling out

from

Lois Kelly

For Your Toolbox

You may know 89 of these 127 marketing tools but there are quite a few gems in this deck. From TrackMaven, it's organized in 14 categories that include SEO, social, data and interactions and productivity.

This deck and a browser ready to open multiple tabs is all I need for my idea of the perfect Saturday night.

The Huge List of 127 Marketing Tools (+11 Bonus Sales Tools!)

from

TrackMaven

But Then Again, You Probably Knew That

From the Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves School of Humor comes "20 Signs You're Probably Not Working For a Social Business." To be precise, the deck was created by Paul Bromford, an innovation coach at Bromford Lab in the UK.

I suspect that you will join me in chuckling at a few of these. Or, to quote another poster, misery loves company. (Just kidding—see Rebel At Work above).

20 Signs You're Probably Not Working For a Social Business

from

Paul Taylor

How To Do This At Home/Work

Did you know that there’s a trick to creating presentations for uploading to SlideShare? If you’re thinking about the platform as a way to extend your firm’s reach, you’ll want to check out this post by Dave Paradi, presentation expert, author and consultant at ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com. Better yet, see the SlideShare.

Asset Managers Dominate #FixedIncome Tweeting Post-Gross

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After this post, I’m going on a PIMCO/Bill Gross/Twitter diet, I promise. But, I was looking at some data this week that was too rich not to share.

First, the September 26 announcement that Bill Gross was leaving PIMCO to go to Janus spiked interest in “Bill Gross” as a search term but not so much fixed income. This is according to the Google Trends U.S. data shown below (click on the image to see the data more clearly on the site).

Interest in Janus was far above average search interest while still lower than "Bill Gross."

On Twitter, where Gross' early use of the @PIMCO account influenced how other asset managers began to use Twitter to deliver timely, relevant micro-insights (see post), the news gave a healthy bump to the use of the #fixedincome hashtag.

In the period between September 29 and October 22, 189 users sent 310 tweets with the hashtag, according to Keyhole.co.

The RiteTag graph below of tweets and retweets shows a rush to #fixedincome, relative to its average volume, that has since petered out. 

Competing With Content

Here's what I was interested in. We saw some opportunistic fixed income advertising from fund companies in the days immediately following the news. And, of course, the email factories were working overtime. Did asset managers figure among those jockeying for what would be a burst of fixed income attention on Twitter?

Why yes, they did. The screenshot below from Keyhole.co shows the 32 accounts that used the #fixedincome hashtag most frequently. Twelve belong to asset managers, with @FidelityAdvisor, @NuveenInv, @WFAssetMgmt and @PutnamToday four of the top five accounts. Other firms participated at a lower level. 

In all @FidelityAdvisor sent 37 #fixedincome tweets, most in support of Fidelity Advisor Total Bond Fund. 

MostFrequentFixedIncomeTweeters.png

@BlackRock takes the honors as the account producing the top #fixedincome tweet (shown below), drawing 18 retweets and 38 favorites.@FTI_US, Putnam and @HartfordFunds were #2, #3 and #4 ahead of @SquawkBox. Sweet.

An investor's dilemma: Net worth and liquidity up, but #fixedincome market slowing down. What to do http://t.co/EnmfOdKmsk

— BlackRock® (@blackrock) September 30, 2014

Everybody Gains

What did the news do to @PIMCO’s enviable follower count? It's happy news all-around.

After a dip—there’s likely some correlation between fund flows and Twitter followers—@PIMCO is back on the rise again, according to TwitterCounter.com.

PIMCOTwitterAccount.png

Meanwhile, @JanusCapital experienced a growth spurt in followers, although still trails @PIMCO by about 174,000.

JanusTwitterAccount.png

You Got This

There are very few lightning-in-a-bottle moments for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies using social media. There’s been no equivalent of seizing the opportunity of a dark stadium to promote dunking an Oreo cookie and watching the Twitter account grow by thousands overnight, for example.

But communications windows open and close on Twitter, and there can be opportunities for alert and agile investment brands. 

On this single hashtag over the last four weeks, more than a dozen fund companies showed up and dominated in a way that rarely happens elsewhere online. (Unfortunately, paying for placement is the only way for many firms to get on page 1 of search rankings of key terms. Other brands got to most of the premium terms first and they’re not budging. See post.) 

For some perspective, fund companies use other hashtags and many to a greater extent. Event hashtags get lots of pick-up, as Morningstar's Leslie Marshall has documented. And, it’s not as if @BlackRock hasn’t been retweeted 18 times before—its maximum is 155 RTs. 

Still, this was a collective demonstration of the communications possibilities for asset managers:

1)using somebody else’s platform
2)and a lightweight, quick turnaround medium
3)to access an "audience" that others helped build and maintain
4)without being constrained by a frequency cap (i.e., Fidelity could have never sent 37 emails in the same time period)
5)to be relevant on a topic
6)that targeted others (financial advisors, media and other influencers) had hyper-interest in and were seeking commentary on.

For those of you in the mix, I hope something good came out of your participation. As for those of you still on the fence about Twitter, does this episode make you any more interested in chiming in?

What’s It Like To Work At….?

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Bill Gross can’t be the only asset management firm employee who’s wondered whether the grass is greener somewhere else. Fortunately for job-seekers inside and outside the investment industry, “careers” videos are becoming prevalent both on LinkedIn Career pages (a paid service) and domains.

(By the way, do you remember when LinkedIn used to publish key statistics about employers, based on roll-ups of individual profiles? At right is a screenshot example of the beta feature in 2009. As its database has grown, this would be even more reliable now. But I digress.)

Of all the storytelling that’s being attempted by digital marketers nowadays, the careers videos are among the best work. It helps to be working with people and emotions.

Which is not to say that these are easy to produce. There are too many stakeholders and too many balancing issues (which locations, which businesses represented, how much diversity is enough) to expect to get these done in short order. Once created, however, they seem to have a fairly long shelf life.

Do you work for a smaller firm? Don’t take a pass just because you don’t do a lot of hiring. These videos are as much about conveying the culture of a firm (important to clients and prospects, too) as they are about appealing to job-seekers. And, as we’ve seen with lots of other online videos, low budget and informal videos can be powerful and effective. Maybe you already have some video that can be repurposed.

Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows everywhere? Even if the videos do present an idealized view of a workplace, I’m a sucker for these.

Forward: No To The Status Quo

“We like people who are going to step back and question how things are done,” says Forward CEO Alan Reid. Enough said, although this 2:45 video elaborates.  

Fidelity: The Longest Personal Relationship

Fidelity is a bigger employer than most, which explains why it has a Jobs subdomain and a media library of no fewer than eight videos. My favorite features long-term, blissfully happy employees at a 2013 Employee Service Recognition ceremony. I love everything about this, including the snazzy jazzy music.

Putnam: Smiling And Dialing

Smile and dial, that’s the motto of the “people” people who are on the phones at Putnam. 

They Are Franklin Templeton

Did somebody say “integrity”? Yes, they did, over and over again in this Franklin Templeton video.

AQR: Stimulating Work

On its site, AQR features videos highlighting three employees. This "Why AQR?" video shows a vice president on the global alternative multi-strategy team discussing the stimulating environment, including working side by side with her Wharton undergrad accounting teacher. The videos aren't able to be embedded, just click on the image to go to the video-serving page.

Morningstar’s The Coolest Thing

The assumption of this Morningstar video is that job-seekers are hoping to find a “cool” employer—so Morningstar delivers, along with bagels apparently. 

Baird: Teaching Underwriting

Robert W. Baird makes quite a few culture and employee benefits points in this 2011 profile focused on a single investment banking associate. It’s one of 12 video stories in the Careers section of the Baird site. 

42 Mutual Fund And ETF Asset Manager Blog Feeds For Your Reading Pleasure

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Every time an asset manager launches a blog, a team of angels gets its wings. Or something like that.

There’s a lot of prep required to bring a blog to life, never more so than when you have to prove the business case, grease the Compliance wheels, collaborate with IT on a platform and corral highly compensated investment talent to commit/submit to a regular writing schedule.

Loomis Sayles Launches LandScape: A Blog Focused on Research http://t.co/Cq7G4pyqb5pic.twitter.com/1mHeiuCGdM

— Loomis Sayles (@LoomisSayles) September 23, 2014

On the occasion of both the Loomis Sayles’ blog launching this week and the one-year anniversary this month of Vanguard’s Institutional blog (yep, not only do institutional investors “use the Internet”—they read blogs, too), I thought I’d share my list of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) RSS feeds.

As I’ve noted previously and elsewhere, an RSS feed reader is an easy, efficient way to plow through the news. But, subscription numbers available from the leading RSS feed reader, Feedly, suggest that relatively few asset manager blogs are read this way. Not even the most popular Vanguard blog clears 1,000 Feedly subscribers, although that number has doubled in a year. Most investment company blogs have just double- and even single-digit Feedly subscribers. Apparently, the more common way to keep up is via email subscriptions from each firm.

Not all of the feeds are labeled "blogs." Some firms prefer to avoid the expectation that a blog should allow for user comments. This collection doesn’t stand on formality—if a site offers an RSS feed for its content updates, it’s included. (If your firm offers a blog or an RSS feed and needs to be added to the list, just shoot me an email.)

Lots For Marketers And Advisors To Learn From

For marketers, there are plenty of best practices to learn from:

  • Check out how often firms are communicating, mostly with substance.

  • Note what a difference a strong graphic can make when previewing a post through a feed reader. Below is a screenshot of the Guggenheim blog posts as viewed through Feedly on the desktop.

GuggenheimBlog.JPG

  • See that some firms enable the full text to be read within the reader while others offer just an abstract, in the hope that readers will follow the link to the site for the rest of the content. Sometimes they do.

  • Blogs aren’t forever. In reviewing the list prior to publishing it, I noticed a few blogs launched in the last few years have gone to Blog Heaven. They can be a lot of work. When the interest externally or internally isn't there, the smartest decision can be to pull the plug on a blog.

Of course, for financial advisors, investors and others, these updates are a font of relevant, timely information.

Accessing The Feeds

Without any further ado, here's how to access the list.

If you go to this page, you’ll find a list of 42 asset manager blog feeds, including those for the public, those specifically for financial advisors and specifically for institutional investors.

The screenshot below shows an excerpt of the page and where to copy the feed link address from to paste into your own feed reader. Note that the address is not a URL that will take you to the blog. If you prefer to follow the blog via email as opposed to an RSS feed, you’ll have to go to each site to subscribe.

Interested in following all 42? Just download the .OPML file (using the orange download box in the top right of the page) to your computer and then import the file into your feed reader. I like the way you think.

Included among the 42 feeds are:

For The Public

 For Advisors

For Institutional Investors 

Unfortunately, Feedshare.net, the tool I’m using to share these feeds, pulls them in with the file names used by whoever created the feed at your firm. Maddeningly, the list can't be alphabetized or ordered in any other way.

Haven't had enough of asset manager blogs yet? You might also check out Naissance Partners’ Best Blogs of the Week feature on their blog.

The Marketing Tech That’s Enabling Sales: Personalized Emails, Pitchbooks

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My first encounter years ago with John Toepfer of Chicago-based Synthesis Technology triggered some conflicting emotions.

Naturally, I welcomed him and his technology that promised to free marketing communications from the shackles of the mutual fund performance data quarterly updating process.

john toepfer

john toepfer

“With this, we’ll have time to do what marketers should be doing,” I remember saying and, as far as I remember, all nodded in agreement. Yep, none of us fully grasped what we were in for.

Things got uncomfortable when it became clear that Synthesis wasn’t just going to help Fund Accounting, Investment and Compliance get their acts together—Toepfer and team intended to impose standardization and processes on Marketing.

Well, it all turned out just fine in the end. A 45-day all-hands-on-deck updating process (!) was whittled down to 10-ish days. The work helped form my conviction that Marketing benefits from exposure to the structured thinking that technology requires.

My path has crossed with Toepfer’s a few times since that first gig. The automation of fund performance communications is standard practice at fund companies now. But Synthesis and other vendors continue to find new ways to improve upon the efficiency and accuracy (“wouldn’t it be nice to review that data just once?”) of what can be soul-crushing work for marketers.

Here’s a quick catch-up with Toepfer. It's difficult to ask any tech provider what's going on without getting the answer framed in the company's latest solutions. I expect that, I appreciate the free peek at what firms are doing, and hope you do, too. Know, though, that I have no business relationship with Synthesis.

For Synthesis’ ongoing views about investment management and technology, by the way, read the firm’s excellent blog.

Q. So, John, what’s new? What are the smartest mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers working on lately?

Marketing for investment management firms these days is all about two things: personalization—making sure that you’re communicating with the client in a highly personalized and relevant manner, and content—showing those clients that both the sales team and the firm are thought leaders in the industry. Any technologies that support these goals are hot. 

Q. Such as…?

For example, we are developing a solution for a client that enables sales teams to construct highly personalized emails to their clients. The benefit of this tool is that it blends the branding, promotion and compliance aspects of a marketing email program with the advanced personalization aspects of a sales email. 

Email marketing trends point to this idea of advanced personalization that goes beyond just first name merge tags and list segmentation. Marketing teams have the tools and expertise to create compelling email campaigns, run tests, analyze and optimize. What they’re lacking is the familiarity that comes with face-to-face exposure to the client. Wholesalers have more qualitative information about their clients’ unique interests, needs and goals.

This solution is a perfect opportunity to combine the qualitative and quantitative expertise of both the marketing and sales teams to deliver valuable content to the recipient. Advanced personalization that leverages the unique talents of the sales team will no doubt increase the effectiveness of these email campaigns.

Q. John, it sounds as if you’re branching out—from enabling Marketing to enabling Sales.

That’s right, and there is a lot of buzz about sales enablement right now.

As another example, smart firms are making room in their budgets for sales enablement technologies like pitchbook automation, if they haven’t already.

A centralized presentation management system that allows marketing teams to develop a library of presentation slides that automatically update and refresh with the receipt of new data or disclosures can take the chaos out of updating slides. Ideally, this system should be flexible enough to incorporate a firm’s unique business rules and processes for quality control.

Sales teams should be able to access this system from any geographic location and device to very quickly and easily build presentations that are highly targeted to their audience, while also compliant and on-brand. A system like this saves the marketing team a lot of time and empowers the sales organization to create highly personalized presentations that drive more sales.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a surge in pitchbook automation inquiries. I think there are a few reasons for this:

  • First, there is heightened awareness that this technology exists. More than a handful of technology companies are popping up that focus solely on sales enablement tools. This has brought a lot of healthy competition as well as validity to this business.   
  • Second, the industry expects a mobile aspect to the solution at this point. Although many salespeople (and clients for that matter) still prefer the tangibility of printed documents, the trend is clearly going paperless with the ability to push presentations to a wholesaler’s mobile device.
  • The third trend is that software providers are realizing the value of providing data management services in addition to the content management and publishing solution. Many clients still struggle with getting the data into one clean, consistent form and location. 

Q. Are there any other examples you can talk about?

One of our pitchbook clients is a private banking group of a major New York-based asset management firm. A three-person marketing team is efficiently managing a very large catalog of sales materials to meet the content needs of 900 users in 20 branch offices. 

With a few clicks of the mouse, financial advisors can access a constantly updated catalog of sales materials and any account-specific data, personalize their presentations, and be assured that the material is compliant from branding, disclosure and data perspectives.

One of the largest factors in the success of the system is its single sign-on connection with the firm's CRM. The two primary measures of success for systems like this are system adoption rate and efficacy of materials. Both of these are improved when the solution is well connected and aligned with the CRM.

These screenshots show the capability within SalesForce but similar integrations with other CRMs are possible as long as the platform has a good API and can support single sign-on.

CRMIntegration2.jpg
CRMIntegration1.jpg
CRMIntegration3.jpg

Once the presentation has been created and finalized, it is stored and recorded at the account record level. This is advantageous to the sales professional because it allows him or her to associate a specific presentation with a specific pitch to go back and refer to later without having to access two different systems. (For more on the pitchbook strategy, check out Synthesis' whitepaper.) 

Q. So, what would you identify as the obstacles for marketers eager to deliver both personalization and content?

No industry is immune to the challenge of aligning Sales and Marketing. In the investment management industry, you add in the compliance aspect, which makes it even more difficult for firms to align their strategies.

In our experience, the big issue for marketing teams is managing and producing all of their content in a way that satisfies the needs of both Sales and Compliance. Marketing communications need to be highly effective and accurate. Salespeople want the right materials right when they need it and they also want customization.

Typically, it is a major challenge for marketing teams to provide a high level of customization on sales materials due to time and resource constraints. Thus, we see companies either limiting customization by size of opportunity (only the big deals get custom slide decks) or turning a blind eye to how the sales force might be customizing things in the field.

The first solution is a bad idea from a sales efficacy standpoint. The second solution is a compliance nightmare. Compliance departments are very conservative, which makes it difficult for Marketing to even mutter the words, “customized” or “automated.”

The trick to getting these three groups into alignment is to find a way to effectively manage their content (and product data) in a centralized location that allows for controlled, shared, and reusable content.