"Astonishing" Advisor Research Suggests Necessary Changes To Mutual Fund/ETF Communications

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I was so eager to get at the recent Advisor Perspectives/Inside Information research that I read the complete 65-page report on my 4-inch phone while sitting out in a cold car waiting for a Realtor to show my house over the weekend.

The conditions notwithstanding, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. “Investment Trends in the Financial Advisory Profession: Key Implications for the Investment Management Industry” lives up to its promotional email.

Authors Bob Veres (Inside Information) and Robert Huebscher (CEO of Advisor Perspectives) wrote a page-turner filled with some provocative ideas for mutual fund and ETF marketers focusing on the elusive RIA channel.
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Taking A Closer Look At How Your Content Is Being Discovered, Consumed

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I escorted a loved one onto the World Wide Web over the holidays. It truly was my pleasure and honor, after years of his enduring my stories about Websites, RSS feed-reading, analytics, apps and podcasts. He—a brilliant guy and voracious newsreader who haunts the libraries but was able to spend only limited time on their desktops—finally could be online at home via his own 3G iPad and I was eager to help him.

Well, I had romanticized the Training Day. When the time for instruction came, followed by telephone calls and follow-up tutorials, I realized how much I’ve taken for granted about how different online content consumption is and how customization transforms the experience. Not to mention how frustrating the information exchange can be, for both parties involved.

It’s taken me a while to recover (yes, I think I’ll blame the trauma for the delay in publishing a Rock The Boat Marketing blog post in 2012) but I want to share with you some thinking that emerged from it.

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Some Encouragement To Keep Working On The New Stuff

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Inside your company, I know there’s lots of discussion about the rationale for the new social stuff. That’s good because outside, the drumbeat continues—for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers and for all marketers. The old stuff isn’t as impressive as it used to be.

I submit two pieces of content for your consideration today.

First, specific to the investment industry, is I’m Not A Financial Professional, But I Play One On TV, an I Heart Wall Street blog post published yesterday. The blogger is Scott Bell, a financial advisor who runs a California-based RIA but keeps his blogging and wealth managing separate. In aggregating six YouTube videos of celebrity commercials over time, the point of the post is to challenge the SEC’s position prohibiting the use of clients in testimonials.
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Ameriprise Taps LinkedIn Connections To Make Advisor Referrals

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Six months ago, I wrote a post about companies that are sharing their business data via APIs, and the insights that result when others work with those APIs. In the last few weeks, Ameriprise Financial has unveiled a reverse of that—their financial advisor search engine now uses the LinkedIn API to enable prospective clients to tap their social networks as a means of surfacing an Ameriprise financial advisor.

Ah, here’s where this social data stuff gets interesting.

How do investors typically look for financial advisors? Offline, they ask their family and friends for referrals. Online, they have probably used search engines or advisor-finder services. By introducing a search via LinkedIn, Ameriprise is acknowledging what lots of consumer research is pointing to—the increasing influence of and trust in social networks and recommendations. This may be a next-gen way of vetting an advisor.
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Thought Leadership Marketing And SEO’s Role In It

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What role does SEO play in your firm’s Marketing? Many companies we work with don’t invest a lot in search engine optimization. But the companies that do tend to swing over to the other extreme—they tend to have a deeper appreciation for how search drives website traffic and, because of this, they invest many of their hopes and dreams into their SEO efforts.

In many cases, that’s not practical. SEO can’t on its own rescue an online presence, and particularly not if an SEO team is siloed. What an organization knows and understands about SEO can be leveraged many times over once the search professionals are mainstreamed with the rest of Marketing, including writers and producers involved in creating content to be marketed and syndicated.
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