It's Time To Start Leveraging Mutual Fund, ETF YouTube Channels

For a while now, I’ve felt that YouTube may be the most under-leveraged social media site for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) companies. This is a shame considering the opportunity—and the significant internal discussion and review that precedes an asset manager’s establishment of a YouTube channel and the effort invested in producing video content.

When was the last time you checked in on asset managers on YouTube?

Click to read more ...

Many Fund Companies Exhibited At Schwab's IMPACT2010— These 3 Had The Twitter Hashtag To Themselves

Asked to provide public examples of where social media participation has paid off for asset managers, we’ve got nothing…yet.

The best public argument we can offer in favor of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm participation in social media right now is this: Asset managers visible on social networks are most likely raising awareness. As cognizant as we are of the work that precedes a regulated firm’s debut on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, the first reason to do it is to see and be seen.

Click to read more ...

Asset Manager Site Traffic Also On The Decline—What's Your Content Syndication Plan?

It's natural to want and expect the traffic on your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web site to grow. But let's take a look at three data sets that suggest that you may need to reset what constitutes success for your Web strategy.

#1 Traffic is declining on the large well-trafficked brand sites.

A couple of blog posts have been documenting this lately. Go to a Digital Buzz blog post  to see declining traffic patterns since 2007 of ESPN.com, eBay.com and Dell.com among others.

In the asset management vertical, look at traffic to Morningstar.com.

Click to read more ...

Fidelity, iShares, T. Rowe Price Most Aggressive In Paid Search

Update: In my sugar haze, I inexplicably overlooked Fidelity, by far the largest paid search advertiser in our space, according to Spyfu.com! I corrected this post a few hours after publishing it.

I have a secret weapon that I use when I want to get something done. It’s called a generous bowl of Trix Swirls (whole grain, nr aturally). It’s not just for kids.

Having powered up on some Trix the other day, I set out to finally answer a question I always wondered about: Which mutual fund companies and exchange-traded fund (ETF) providers are the most aggressive in paid search?

Organic search success—how much traffic your site pulls in from search engines—is a function of many variables influenced by: the quality, quantity and uniqueness of your content, the size of your company, the extent of your online relationships, how your investment products are distributed, the number of your shareholders, etc.

If your site dominates search engine results on important keywords or if you're satisfied overall with the other marketing tactics you're using to support campaigns or raise general brand awareness, maybe you don’t need to compete using paid search.

What's important is that you understand the competition that's happening online. Trix isn’t just for kids and competing isn’t just for salespeople in physical settings. Mano a mano combat may not come naturally to mutual fund and ETF marketers. But, you've seen first-hand how the business environment has changed.

Click to read more ...

5 Random Highlights Of Mutual Fund, ETF Websites

Can we agree that mutual fund and ETF Web sites have more similarities than differences? For that, give the credit or blame to American Funds, the mutual fund company whose products are distributed by the highest percentage of financial advisors. If an advisor has already mastered American Funds’ site, so the reasoning goes, who are we to buck the tide and risk the advisor shunning our site because it dares to be different?

It’s a user-friendly call that we suspect has nonetheless had the effect of suppressing creativity or even brand differentiation. That's why when a Web site offers something special, the discovery is an unexpected pleasure. Here’s a random list of what we’ve tripped across in my recent travels on asset management sites. Well done!

A question to the managers of these sites: Are you leveraging them as the link bait you should in order to draw visitors to your site, first to that page and maybe to explore the rest of your value proposition?

1. Fidelity Investments’ Historical Yield Curve
Of all the gorgeous, exciting visualizations of data to be found on the Web today, this isn’t one of them. But it’s a true gem, very, very cool. A site visitor could spend minutes on this page learning. Marketing managers, when it’s time to hire again and you have a green marketing communications staffer, park them in front this.

Click to read more ...