7 Examples Of How Context Matters For Mutual Fund, ETF Marketers

/

You can’t control the U.S. mail. If your large cap growth promotion happens to arrive at a financial advisor’s office on a day when the stock market is tanking, well, that’s how it is. Shake it off—you didn’t know, how could you? Looks like that piece is not going to work as well as you’d hoped.

And, that pretty much sums up the powerlessness of a direct mail marketer. Moving on…

Context.jpg

Communicating online is less forgiving. Digital marketers are assumed to have control of their online communications including not just the What but the When and even the Where and the How.

Add to this mix the fact that financial advisors are not just reachable online but also more knowable online. This heightens expectations that communications are relevant and appropriate.

The context of what's being communicated is an increasingly important factor to consider in the planning and execution of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing. 

“Context” is a concept that’s open for interpretation, and I’ll admit to taking some liberties below. But let’s start out right, with a definition, courtesy of an ebook from StrongView, Context Changes Everything.

StrongView explains context “as a combination of the consumer’s [client’s] disposition and situation, coupled with the business’s disposition and situation.”

Disposition refers to the essence of who a consumer is and includes demographic and behavioral data. Situation refers to dimensions that are constantly changing—location, social setting, sentiment and needs, for example.

“The relevance of a firm’s interactions is related directly to its understanding of customer context,” StrongView writes.

One of my favorite non-asset management examples: Do you remember when NetFlix accidentally released Season 3 of House of Cards in mid-February? Boston residents thought that was by design, as a consolation as Boston braced for another blizzard. Think of the goodwill engendered if that had been the intention. 

If you don't already, I’d encourage you and your team to begin to pay attention to context. Who knows how the Apple Watch is going to rock content marketers’ world, starting with tomorrow's pre-orders. But it seems a safe guess that “wearable” content delivery will make context-awareness even more important.

To urge you along, I offer the following list of how context can make a difference. It’s in no particular order and in a slightly different tone. I’ve let myself go snarkier than usual to make obvious to you the need for alertness on the part of marketers, supported by enabling technology including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation and Web, email and social analytics. Opportunities abound for relevant communicators. This is a partial, random list—surely, you can think of more?

What Not To Do

1. Overestimate The Compelling Value Of That PDF

Send a blast email with a link to a PDF at a time of day when you'd reasonably expect most recipients to be checking their email on smartphones. Do you communicate across multiple time zones? Right, well, you could stagger the email sends by location, drawing on regional information no doubt extractable from your CRM. It is more work. How important are those PDF opens to you?

1A. Burn Through Your New List

TrashCan2.png

Use your hard-fought-for list of conference emails to email attendees while the conference is underway. Please don't. They won’t read your introductory message then, and all you've done is waste an opportunity. Conference attendees are battling to stay on top of their business emails, yours will be one they’ll be happy to quickly dispose of. Choose your time and message wisely.

2. Play Hide-And-Seek With People Who Are Already Stressed

Move your tax-related content from one place on the Website to another in the months between January and April. Oh, and don’t sweat the details about trying to map redirects to every single (likely Google-indexed) page. Are you trying to incur the wrath of your clients and the people who answer the phone lines at your firm?

The graphic below is excerpted from a Google Finance Trends infographic (link opens a PDF) that reports that tax-related searches are starting earlier in the year, and that more are happening on mobile devices. Plan your enhancements for during the off-season.

3. Dawdle With The News

Twitter is all about what’s happening now or maybe in the last 24 hours. A February tweet announcing the availability of your 12/31 communications is going to impress no one. That’s not what Twitter is for, I wouldn’t bother.

Did you see the number of firms that jumped on the Lipper award announcements last week? InvestmentNews published this list immediately after the evening ceremony March 31 and quite a few firms took to Twitter the very next day. Looks like Thornburg needed a full day but imagine how that ginormous image looked in a tweet stream.

That’s the way to do it. If your announcement is still working its way through your process, I’d say that ship has sailed on Twitter—the news was so last week. (Your timely addressing of bad news would be expected, too, but let's save that for another list, another day.)

Off-topic but I also really like TIAA-CREF’s use of its Twitter header image to promote its Lipper dominance. Where is it written that asset managers need to use a moody photograph of their headquarters as their Twitter image and never ever change it?  

4. Advertise 24/7 If You Can Help It

Pay for broad match AdWords searches all day and all night. Unless you are convinced that financial advisors are looking for solutions in the wee hours, I have one word for you: dayparting. Let the non-advisor (most likely) night owls amuse themselves with organic search results or run up some other firm's pay-per-click budget.

5. Get Caught Sleeping At The Wheel

Release a blog post on your firm’s philanthropy (or whatever) on the day the Fed raises interest rates for the first time in seven years. Throw your body in front of this if you have to.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a blog contributor offering a reaction post that day, don’t publish anything. It’s better to say nothing than to reach your blog subscribers—on a day when they’ll be paying extra attention to what you contact them about—with something that suggests that your team is either on autopilot or blissfully unaware.  

6. Just Stroll In There Like It's 1999

Fail to train your wholesalers how to check for LinkedIn profiles and updates (including links to blog posts), tweets and Facebook updates prior to calling on advisors. Advisors research their clients (and vendors) and you can be certain that they expect others to be doing the same due diligence on them. I may have mentioned this before.

SegmentByDevice.JPG.png

7. Lump Everybody Together

Track and report on your Web visitors as one homogenous group, as if desktop, table and mobile sessions all yield the same experience. As if all visitors regardless of device have the same motivations or needs. 

If you were to segment the traffic, you would see some eye-opening differences.

Note: Blane Warrene, co-founder of Arkovi Social Media Archiving, now financial technology speaker and advisor and editor at large of TheDigitalFA, and I discussed the state of asset manager marketing on Blane’s Digital Well podcast last week. Blane is fun to talk to and it’s a freewheeling discussion (what was supposed to be 30 minutes turned into 40). If you check it out, here’s hoping there will be something in it for you.

Why Your Site May Be On The Verge Of Losing Lots Of Traffic

/

Here’s a quick test for you: Search for the ticker symbol of one of your firm’s funds, a big one, a small one, it doesn’t matter.

What’s the top search result? A big ole chart, right? The screenshot below shows the results of a Google search on a desktop and on a smartphone. (Incidentally, note how simple and clean the data display can be when not weighed down by the pesky disclosure that’s required on your site.)

How many searches do you suppose your site loses to Google Finance, Morningstar and Yahoo Finance, the sites linked to at the bottom of the ticker symbol graphs?

There’s no need to guess—just check your Webmaster Tools account (Search Traffic/Search Queries). You’ll likely see that your site is being displayed in search results for ticker symbol searches (Impressions) but that you’re not getting the majority of the clicks.

In all likelihood, the information that Google is providing to ticker symbol searchers right there on the search results page is either 1)satisfying the searcher or 2)driving the searchers to Google, Morningstar, Yahoo fund or (for ETF ticker searches) even MSN Money profile pages.

Ouch. This especially hurts because ticker symbol searchers are the most qualified site visitors you could ask for—no doubt you’d prefer them to come to your site, sign up for an email newsletter, ask for more information, check out other funds… Opportunity is being lost because Google (and Bing, too, by the way) siphons interest in the ticker symbols of your products and reroutes traffic.

Now, competition for organic search rankings is one thing. If the authority of your domain is lacking or if you haven’t taken the appropriate SEO steps to lift the visibility of your fund pages, well, then, you’ve had your fair chance and didn’t step up.

But this extraction of structured fund data from a third-party database is different because it’s completely beyond your ability to appeal.

The publishing of fund prices on the search results page has been going on for years. My sense is that asset management digital marketers are desensitized to the traffic/attention that’s being lost. Do you remember that parable about the frog in the water? As long as the water boils slowly, the frog won't jump out because he doesn’t perceive danger. 

The Knowledge Graph And Its Impact

As it turns out, asset managers have had an early taste of what many site publishers are now experiencing due to Google’s implementation of what it calls the Knowledge Graph.

The Knowledge Graph, according to Google’s 2012 introduction of it, enhances search by narrowing search results, summarizing relevant content around a search query, and facilitating deeper and broader searches. "It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the Web," Google wrote three years ago.

Knowledge Graph-driven search results have become more prevalent in the last year. The goal of Knowledge Graph information, whether displayed in answer boxes immediately below the search box or in a panel to the right of the search results, is to instantly provide an answer that’s relevant to a search query. Relevant answers delivered on the spot are increasingly important as more searches take place on mobile devices. The fewer clicks required on a smartphone, the better.

This is an expanded role for Google. As opposed to just directing search traffic to the most relevant Websites, it’s now taking it upon itself to try to answer search queries. For a current overview of the various search-related initiatives underway at Google (i.e., Voice Search, Knowledge Graph, Google Now), see this Medium post, part one of a series. About 25% of search queries today produce Knowledge Graph answers, according to author Steven Levy.  

While fund sponsors never made a peep about Google effectively hijacking searches for ticker symbols, many Website publishers who explicitly monetize their sites are upset and confused about the rise of Knowledge Graph.

Some object to Google’s “scraping” their sites to extract a result to show in a Knowledge Graph answer box. It’s a backhanded compliment—Google thinks enough of the site to extract answers from it, but that results in a loss of visitors to revenue-producing pages.

It’s easy to see the value that’s being provided to the searcher. If all a searcher wants is a basic definition of ETF, this Knowledge Graph extract from Nasdaq.com might be enough. If the searcher wants to dig further, Nasdaq is in an advantaged position to get the click from the added prominence on the search results page.

Consequently, some search engine optimization experts are pivoting into Knowledge Graph Optimization. Sources of the Knowledge Graph include Google+, Wikipedia, Freebase and Schema, which is structured markup added to Websites to clearly identify standard elements that Google may want to lift. Following the markup standard for Customer Service phone number, for example, can result in Google extracting the number and publishing it with the search results.

Knowledge Graph Optimization prepares Website content for what is effectively syndication of granular content.

But not all SEO experts or Website publishers approve of this appropriation of content. Many are product manufacturers, like fund companies, and they’re insisting that they should be able to be both the authoritative source of information and a search destination. For two perspectives, see Knowledge Graph 2.0: Now Featuring Your Knowledge and Knowledge Graph: Does it Make Sense to Optimize for the Google Scraper?

We live in interesting times.

So, where does this leave the asset management Website and Web strategy?

Next: Converting Searches For Fund Names

I remember how shocked my team and I were back in the day when we saw the first analytics that revealed that our site’s Daily NAV pages were the most popular pages. That made sense then for two reasons: 1)This predated the fund data aggregators and 2)advisors habitually used multiple funds from the same fund family—a late afternoon or evening visit to the fund sponsor’s Daily Prices page was all they needed.

The bleak future of sites that relied on single-page visits to pages whose data could be found elsewhere didn’t dawn on us until later.

Let’s turn now to your Web analytics. How much of your traffic goes to your product pages? Today, you may be missing out on ticker symbol searches, but my guess is that you’re still getting the traffic from people who are searching for your products by their names. This includes a long tail of searchers using a creative mix of how they spell, remember or type fund names. 

Such keyword searches are increasingly giving way to semantic searches, in which Google considers user search history as well as other contextual signals. It’s just a matter of time before Google looks at those incomplete, hastily entered fund names, automatically does the translation and understands that the searcher is looking for a fund. The fund data graph will be what's displayed as the top search result for all those searches, too.

The goal is to provide information fast, remember, and displaying the graph with the table of basic return, expense and asset size data is faster/more useful than just offering links to an asset manager fund page or, God forbid, PDF of a fact sheet. The implication for your site: More traffic (opportunity) lost.

This is your risk today. I make the assumption that traffic to your domain is something you want to protect, if not build, for a multitude of reasons that start with brand awareness and lead right up to lead scoring and predictive analytics initiatives.

A Few Recommendations

Here’s what the proactive asset management digital marketing team should be doing, at a minimum: 

  • Use the data available from Webmaster Tools and your Web analytics to get a handle on what’s what. Make sure you understand the sources of traffic to your fund pages and their value to you. How many anonymous visitors convert to newsletter subscribers or registered advisor site users, for example? How much of the traffic that Google sends to Google Finance, Morningstar, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money finds its way back to your site—how much as a result of the editorial versus advertising? 

Track all changes in your volume of search traffic and sources over time.

  • Confront the obvious: Why would a fund searcher be better off coming to your site as opposed to another site?

If you’ve researched a car in the last few years, you know that there are some automobile manufacturers that deliver superior, differentiated experiences on their Websites. Car buyers who rely exclusively on an Edmunds.com or other car review site are missing something if they don’t check out the configuration capabilities and other bells and whistles offered by the manufacturers.

What information can you uniquely offer and attractively/interactively present for product tire-kickers?

By the way, I had the “So, what’s so special about the fund information that appears on your site?” conversation with someone recently, and she answered, “We’re the only source of our capital gains distributions.” Well, OK, that’s a start. Those pages command a lot of eyeballs at this time of year. And yet, very few firms use the margins of those pages to cross-market or otherwise communicate.

There’s no stopping Google so control what you can control—give the site visitors you attract better information and a better experience, and that includes when on a mobile device. 

  • If you think your site offers worthwhile, appealing features and data that deserve the attention of fund data searchers, promote it. Don’t sit back and expect site visitors to find it. 

Make sure your wholesalers are versed on the depth of the fund data available on the site. Promote it on the home page, throughout the site and consider targeted pay-per-click ads. As of now, you can still buy your way to the top of the ticker symbol search. 

As Google gets more grabby to protect its own value proposition, you need to be more aggressive, too.  

  • Finally, if you can’t fight them and win, join them. Google’s evolution of the Knowledge Graph (whose answers are extracted from only the first page of search results) gives you just one more reason to commit to publishing authoritative mobile-friendly content that’s optimized for search.   

Your thoughts?

Time’s Up: Mobile-Friendly Websites To Be Rewarded, Others To Be Penalized

/

Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

For the last several years, Website publishers including mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms have been encouraged to focus on the mobile user’s experience. This includes reducing the time a Website takes to load on a mobile device and enabling the taking of action via call-to-click functionality. While Google has been leading the charge, Bing also is checking sites for “mobile compatibility.”

But yesterday Google made it all real with the announcement that it will be adding a mobile-friendly label to mobile search results. At the same time, it acknowledged that it’s experimenting using mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.

Awesome And Not Awesome

If your firm has made your site’s mobile friendliness a priority, it's all good. As Google rolls out the mobile-friendly label in the next few weeks, you could conceivably benefit from the designation and possibly a boost in Google search engine rankings.

But a spot-check yesterday of the largest asset management Websites, using Google’s mobile-friendly test, suggests that many firms have work to do. Note that root domains were tested, I noticed that some firms with mobile-unfriendly sites have mobile-friendly blogs.

In addition to returning either an "Awesome" or "Not mobile-friendly" result, the tool's analysis provides specific reasons and information on how Googlebot sees the page. The tool is part of a developer's guide to mobile-friendly Websites. 

The Consequences

The desktop computer is no longer the leading way people access the Web. As reported by comScore, by July, 60% of U.S. digital media time was being spent on mobile devices. Financial advisors, in particular, use smartphones and tablets.

If there was any doubt before, it is now crystal clear that Google is serious about eliminating frustration for mobile searchers. When text is too small, links tiny and sideways scrolling is the only way to see all the content on a mobile device, a site will be penalized.

At the minimum, a ranking boost for sites that are mobile-friendly disadvantages the unfriendly. But also last month Search Engine Watch reported that Google was testing a mobile-unfriendly icon in search results. It’s unknown if a decision was made to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive but OMG. No brand or Web team wants that badge of shame.

Here’s hoping you do whatever you can—as soon as you can—to avoid the unfriendly label and the resultant loss in ranking, traffic and relevance. I'm working on the same with this site.

Voice Search And Why It's Time To Show Bing A Little Love

/

Just because you ignore something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Take Bing, for example. If it’s been a while since you reviewed how your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) Website ranked in the #2 search engine, you might want to get to that sooner rather than later.

While Bing is unlikely to ever topple Google on the desktop (and Google continues to enhance its own Google Now voice search capability), Bing is the search engine that Apple’s Siri sources for voice search results.

BingSearchesByFinancialAdvisors.png

Of course, you care how your site performs for all searchers. But a quick look at your Web analytics will likely show that most of your financial advisor mobile (smartphone and tablet) traffic comes from Apple products. Heightened advisor adoption of voice search—including on the Apple watch coming next year—may mean that Bing could lead advisors to more search results.

I’ve had reason to research the topic lately and thought you might be interested in a few questions I’ve had and the answers that I found.

Q. Are people really searching with their voices?

A. More than half (56%) of adults now use a personal assistant, up from 30% over the prior 12 months. This is according to a Thrive Analytics report, “Is the Personal Assistant the Successor to Search?”, published in October. Usage of personal assistants such as Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana, have increased by 87% over the past 12 months, the report says.

Google’s own Mobile Voice Study, released last month, reported that 41% of adults and 55% of teens use voice search more than once a day.

TeensAdultsMobileVoiceSearchStudy.png

Market or investment-related topics failed to rate among the more common searches reported. A likely scenario that I could imagine would be advisor voice searches when they're leaning back, during after-hours iPad use, for example.

Q. Are voice searches relevant to non-local businesses?

A. According to this SearchEngineWatch.com article by David Cato of Covario, mobile voice-related searches are three times more likely to be local-based than text. That makes sense.

But non-local searches—such as those that would conceivably lead to asset manager sites—using voice do take place and they’re different from text searches.

“Voice search users typically search in more complete sentences or questions. Additionally, the user tends to complete more searches on a faster basis, adding more words around their main query,” Cato wrote in September of last year.

“Brands can optimize for conversational or long tail queries by deploying an FAQ or Q&A content strategy. A Q&A strategy would not only improve customer service by answering common questions, but it may increase search presence by ranking for more long tail keywords,” Cato concludes.

Helpful but, again, think of the context of the device. FAQs may be overkill on a watch.

Q. How different are the Bing and Google search results?

A. The prevailing opinion has been that if you optimize your site for Google, you should rank similarly—without any additional specific work—in Bing. But there is plenty of commentary online about the differences between the algorithms used by the two.

At the highest level, Google’s indexing is more mature, typically more thorough, more text-based and relies more on linking authority. Bing does better with images, flash and social. You may find this Ultimate Guide To Optimizing Your SEO for Bing from July helpful.

And, you’ll definitely want to check out Bing’s SEO analysis tool and get going with Bing Webmaster Tools. 

Your firm and Rock The Boat Marketing have very little in common. But I can tell you that when I forced myself out of my own all-Google world to confirm that all was showing as expected on Bing, I was shocked to see that Bing located my business at an address from six years ago. A trip to Bing Places remedied that.

More helpful for you, probably: See the difference between the results of a Siri search on the iPad for “retirement planning” and a Google voice search on an (Android) Samsung Galaxy S5.

RetirementPlanningVoiceSearchResults.png

In this search you can see one possible byproduct of searches shifting to Bing: If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser hoping to snag some searching advisors, you may be headed for a decline in volumes. Then again, you might consider the Yahoo Bing Network. An AdGooroo study (here’s a link to the PDF) conducted a year ago reported that Yahoo Bing led in ad impressions in the financial services category, probably due to the popularity of financial news on the Yahoo! and MSN portals.

For a more exhaustive analysis, see the results of a comparison by Stone Temple Consulting of the search results returned by Google Now, Siri and Cortana. As of October 2014, the firm concluded, "Google Now has a clear lead in terms of the sheer volume of queries addressed, and more complete accuracy with its queries than either Siri or Cortana."

The video below illustrates some of the points made. Note that a few searches are answered on the spot, without leading to an additional Web page. That's a discussion for another day.

Q. How can we spot voice searches in Web analytics?

A. Don’t expect to see a pronounced rise in traffic sourced by Bing. Voice requests are encrypted so they can’t be intercepted and no one can listen to them, according to this LocalVox post.

That being the case, voice searches aren’t distinguishable in Google Analytics, for example. Sessions that initiate via voice search are lumped in the “direct traffic” bucket. To see this for yourself, use voice search to go to your site and check out your real-time traffic sources. The source for your session will be listed as Direct.

Your thoughts, or experiences, on any of the above? They're always welcome below. 

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

/

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.