Marketing At The Morningstar Conference: Finserv Goes Funserv

Instead of publishing a blog post related to asset management marketing last Thursday, I headed over to the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago (my hometown) to see what I could see in action. I didn’t expect to meet up with many marketers onsite, and didn’t, but I certainly saw a lot of your work.

What follows are a few random, ragged observations. The overall event itself was packed with information and opportunity. Congratulations to Morningstar's Leslie Marshall, Director – Events, Magazine and Social Media, and the entire conference team, and my thanks for having me as a guest.

MainStay: In It To Win It

MainStay Investments was at the conference to win it. The firm has had a great couple of years, and it’s a reasonable assumption that advisors would have more than a little interest in the MainStay booth. Why not test some cool tech to drive engagement?

In this video, Frank Ranu, Senior Associate, Social Media Digital and Creative Services, explains an innovative Morningstar-focused campaign that involves a box of Cracker Jack, a smartphone app (Taggar) and a woman who walks out from around the box of Cracker Jack to greet Morningstar attendees and encourage them to enter a contest.

This was a campaign with more than a few pieces, and Frank’s analytics suggest it was positively received.

A Slice Of Life

Over at the William Blair booth, my friend, former colleague and, I should say, current client John Jackson, Intermediary Marketing Manager, was leading with content—two-minute-ish video clips that are at the core of the firm’s Watch and learn alternatives campaign.

A single image doesn’t quite capture the effect of dynamic portfolio manager Brian Singer mid-delivery so I took a few rapid shots on my Android phone and let the Google+ Auto Awesome feature do the rest.

The result shows a slice of life in a fund company booth—Marketing does its job while the Sales guy does his.

Natty Marketer

After having been named the #1 fund family for 2013 performance in the annual Barron’s/Lipper Fund Family Ranking, Natixis took a victory lap by serving as principal sponsor of the conference. Natixis was everywhere, sponsoring the mobile app, the complimentary charging station, the beverage cups and the chewing gum.

We might have talked about all of that but when John Refford, Natixis Vice President, Strategic Marketing Technology, and I met up for the first time, I was drawn to his Pebble. The Pebble is a watch he helped fund on its first day on Kickstarter in 2012. John received it about a year later.

If wearable tech truly takes off in 2014, John has a headstart in familiarizing himself and thinking about its value for this space. Way to stay sharp, John.

Our Very Own Meme!

In opening the conference, Morningstar’s Kunal Kapoor, Head of Information Products and Client Solutions, promised an upbeat get-together. And, with the exception of some comments from selected portfolio managers, the conference delivered. At one point, Refford even invoked the term “funserv” in the #MICUS tweet stream.

Ironically (given the recent $50 billion outflows from PIMCO Total Return Fund), from the general session dais it was PIMCO’s Bill Gross who introduced levity. As Carlos Santana-esque music played, Gross took the stage wearing sunglasses and he even paused to check his cool factor out on the big screens.

It prompted some entertaining tweets, and finserv social media hit a new high when Michael Kitces posted this meme-worthy image. Animated gifs and selfies (see more below) followed. 

Bill Gross opened #MICUS general session showing off his optimistic outlook on @PIMCO - Cc @ReformedBroker pic.twitter.com/gAY8APeewk

— MichaelKitces (@MichaelKitces) June 19, 2014

Asset Managers And Social Media?

When meeting up with like-minded people in the Social Media Lounge in the middle of the Exhibit Hall, the conversation naturally turned to the state of social media in the asset management industry. These are my latest thoughts, colored by what I saw at the conference.

Kudos To Morningstar For Leading The Way

I sincerely believe that Morningstar itself, led by Leslie Marshall, is to be credited with helping accelerate the awareness of and adoption of social media in the investment industry.

The origin of Morningstar’s business was in the compilation, standardization and distribution of fund data and analysis—basically making it easier for investors to understand and follow funds. Then Morningstar was easily the first investment industry publisher to seize on using social platforms to advance the exchange of insights using the new content formats.

Onsite during the event, it’s not just Leslie who works the #MICUS hashtag. It’s also the business leaders whose full-on participation gives the social channel added editorial cachet. This assures that the stream isn’t overrun by tweets promoting booth numbers and giveaways, and that’s important.

The level of engagement this year rounded out the content planners’ on-stage personas while also demonstrating their interest in how the audience is reacting to the content, accessible via the Twitter backchannel.  

Scott Burns, director of manager research and apparent master of ceremonies, had sent more than 30 tweets—some his own thoughts but many retweets of others’—in the first hour of the event. Then he sent this tweet, which made me smile. It's pretty obvious he's taken on tweeting as part of his job, too.

Need to check out from tweeting for a bit. Need to get ready for my panel! I've got a job people! #MICUS

— Scott Burns (@MStarScottBurns) June 18, 2014

Just Half Of Presenting Asset Managers Have A Twitter Account…

By now, most of the largest asset management firms do something in social, even if it’s just a LinkedIn company page or YouTube channel with a video or two. But across-the-board adoption, best practices and accompanying gains in relevance and engagement? No, we’re not close yet.

Most of the presenters at the conference work for asset managers, and yet asset managers had little to say about their participation or their commentary on Twitter.

By my count, only half of the 27 presenters from asset management firms—and these firms were those selected by Morningstar analysts as being the most program-worthy in 2014, remember—hail from firms with Twitter accounts.

…And Most Of Those That Did Used Them For #MICUS Promotions

A few of the firms that have Twitter accounts used them and the #MICUS hashtag, but not always to the best effect.

If you’ve ever watched the tweet stream closely during an event, particularly during a general session event where most are focused on this one piece of content, it’s a bit jarring to see a promotional message (i.e., a notice about the swag available at a booth). Too many of those off-topic tweets were from firms that have much more to say but didn't.

Why were asset managers’ contributions to the conversation so marginalized?

For starters, let's consider why asset managers with Twitter accounts were mostly silent about what their presenters were sharing in Chicago.

Compliance issues would be my first guess. It does take some doing, including some of it in real-time, to use Twitter to share event content in addition to marketing updates. The possibility of being on the receiving end of tweets responding to the content has to be anticipated and planned for, too (even if the decision is to not respond). 

Below is a tweet that J.P. Morgan Funds had queued up and ready to go in support of its presenter. Note how the use of an image enables more to be said than can fit in 140 characters. There are ways to participate, as this example shows.

3 principles to guide absolute return #fixedincome strategy http://t.co/fXeiv2PPfa #MICUS @MorningstarInc pic.twitter.com/5pBPH91q5l

— J.P. Morgan Funds (@jpmorganfunds) June 19, 2014

A second factor might be the siloed manner in which event participation is divvied up as opposed to coordinated. Marketing’s role is usually limited to the booth, any related social (in the physical world) events, maybe pre-event emails. The content to be presented is the province of the Investments professionals, who may be oblivious to Marketing's interest in it.

A third consideration may have to do with “ownership," internal governance of the account and how narrow and/or deep the owners feel is appropriate to go with tweets emanating from a single, mostly B-to-B conference.  

At the same time, there are also opportunities for non-presenters to take part in content conversations. By tracking the #MICUS hashtag, firms both in the Exhibit Hall and outside it could have weighed in with their own content contributions.

This business may be too genteel to expect any bond managers to have had Twitter fun with Bill Gross' sunglasses-wearing but maybe there was an exhibitor that could have offered him branded croakies, if that's still a thing. The dreamer in me wishes that Gross, no stranger to Twitter, would have commented on some of the post-keynote tweets. But none of that happened this year.

Morningstar delivered a vibrant, highly tracked backchannel. We'll have to wait for next year (that's just something we do in Chicago) to see whether more asset managers will find a way to capitalize on the natural opportunities that accrue from taking part in relevant conversations.

I’m not saying anything that most marketers don’t understand and agree with. It’s just another measure of where we are, and the extent to which the benefits of being social have yet to be inculcated within the industry.

Meet Some Of The Tribe

Finally, much of the energy at any conference has to do with people coming together, to learn and exchange ideas but also to see one another, for the first time or again.

So, let me go personal here and say how much fun it was to meet up with people who are active in finserv topics online. Since I’ve mentioned everyone in this photo on the blog at one point or another, I thought you might want to see an update to their avatars. More? Blane's animated gif is here.

Shown in the snapshot with me are:

• Cathy Curtis, financial advisor—follow @cathycurtis, last mentioned on this RTB blog post
• Michael Kitces, financial planning thought leader—follow @MichaelKitces, last mentioned on this post
• Leslie Marshall, Morningstar—follow @LeslieAMarshall, see above and here
• John Refford, Natixis—follow @iamreff and see above
• Steph Sammons, WiredAdvisor—follow @WiredAdvisor and see this post
• Blane Warrene, QuonWarrene co-founder and TheDigitalFA editor at large—follow @blano and see this post. You might also be interested in Blane's coverage of the Morningstar Social Media Lounge
• Roger Wohlner, financial advisor—follow @rwohlner and see this post 

There's More To A Social Media Landing Page Than Disclosure

Firms whose every public communication needs to be evaluated in terms of its compliance with regulations can sometimes inadvertently mistake who the customer is. The customer isn’t the regulator. There’s more to do, more to be communicated once the regulations have been satisfied.

A case in point: What’s being linked to from many investment firms’ social profiles.

Let's review: 

• Establishing a presence on social networks is no cakewalk for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers. It’s a cross-functional tightrope, and the operating guidelines can take months to pull together. Even after all that, Legal and Compliance may have reservations, and there can be the veiled threat that it could all be undone at any time.

To prevail and move forward, marketers pledge to be on their very best behavior. There's no appetite for revisiting what's already been approved, and working well enough. 

• And yet, there's an opportunity to consider: The establishment of an account on a social network gives that account the potential for visibility that far exceeds any other unpaid opportunity on an Internet presence with highly engaged traffic. 

Specifically, the ability to link from the home state of the social account—the bio of the Twitter profile or the About pages on Facebook or YouTube (where more space is available)—provides a near priceless chance to move people interested in what you say on a social platform to your own domain. 

The opportunity here is different from online advertising in at least three ways: It has no expiration date, your potential reach is limitless and yet no minimum number of impressions is assured, and there's no charge. 

As with advertising, the page you link to needs to be well considered. The best practice for online ads is to direct traffic to a landing page customized to anticipate just that traffic.

However, many firms don't offer a link to a social-audience landing page to visitors to their social profile pages. There are plenty of instances where social profiles link to landing pages that are no more than the firm’s home page—you know, those kitchen sinks dressed up as extravaganzas in sight, animation and hyperlinks. Where's a newcomer supposed to go?

Worse, some bios link to a fund company’s prospectus page or Legal disclosure or documents. And that sound you hear is the sound of someone back-back-backing up and out. Too serious too soon.

While links to those pages may satisfy Compliance, they fall short of what your bio-clickers might be looking for. They need additional attention if you have any expectations to convert that traffic.

A Few Deviations On The Landing Page Theme

What are your options, while still meeting all of Compliance's requirements? A spot-check of the pages that FINRA-regulated firms link to from their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages show more variety than you might expect. While none of these pages is visually arresting in the way that advertising landing pages strive to be, you’ll see an effort to 1)communicate more than what’s required 2)be visitor-centric and even 3)seek to convert. 

Excerpts are shown below, which means that you may not see the required disclosures in the screenshot. Follow the links or click on the images to see the full pages.

BlackRock and Franklin Templeton (shown below) use their pages to pass on some participation guidelines.

As one of the few firms that allows commenting, U.S. Global Investors explains its YouTube guidelines. This is the rare investment firm landing page that's unique to just one social network.

It’s conceivable that that some client/prospect visitors will discover the existence of social accounts not from participating on the networks themselves but while on your site. The UBS (by including a Twitter feed in addition to lots of other options in the left- and right-hand columns) and Vanguard (by including the tweeters’ bios) pages make room for that possibility. These pages could convert Website visitors to Twitter account followers.

Yay—MainStay’s “legal notice page” includes an attempt to convert visitors to email subscribers. A sample of what to expect might also help drive signups.

This T. Rowe Price page can be arrived at from the firm’s Twitter or YouTube channel account. "Conversion" from this page would involve a gain in followers for other social accounts.

Finally, Natixis and Well Fargo Asset Management (shown below) include their own blogs in their landing pages’ social account listings. 

   

When thinking about re-opening your own kettle of worms, review your Web analytics to see how your current “landing page” performs. That should tell you all you need to know about traffic sourced from social sites.

For additional perspectives on social media landing pages, also check out these posts from other sources: 

• Why You Need Social Media Landing Pages (Not Just a Homepage!) (2014)
• The Social Media Landing Page – The Underutilized Page You’ll Kick Yourself For Not Having (2013)
• The Anatomy Of A Great Social Media Landing Page (2010) 

5 Early Wins For Mutual Fund, ETF Companies Using Social Media

I couldn’t get enough of the coverage this week of the 25^th birthday of the World Wide Web, celebrated yesterday.

Originally, this post was going to be about what the Web has done for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) communicating, with a few reminiscences.

For example, I smiled when I read this line from the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on a Google post Tuesday.

Thanks to the Web, Berners-Lee wrote, “You can link to any piece of information. You don’t need to ask for permission.”

Right, I’d forgotten! In the late 1990s, wirehouse account people actually asked for permission to link (their Intranets) to mutual fund company Websites. Ah, the innocence of those early days.

Instead for today, I’ve gravitated toward something fresher and, at this point, evolving more dramatically: The effect that participation in social media is having on how fund companies communicate with their many stakeholders. Let’s date the start of this to four years ago, right about when FINRA released its Regulatory Notice 10-06 in January 2010. I can think of five early wins.

1. Communicating at a higher level than product

As an example, access to Twitter came at just the right time for asset managers willing to provide a steady stream of information about municipal bond markets.

Starting in 2010 with Northern Trust’s @Fixedology account (since renamed @NTInvest) and followed by municipal-focused @RochesterFunds, @MainStayMunis and other broader asset manager accounts, 140 characters have proved sufficient space for pithy updates about markets, issue sizes, demand, etc. all clustered around the #muni hashtag or derivations.

In the last four years, what's going on with municipal bonds has been a topic that many others, and most notably the media, vitally cared about. Twitter provided asset managers an easy entrée into a conversation they could contribute to.

The notion that muni communicators could use a different communication channel to call attention to in-house insights or even just facts was new. Until 2008 or so, it was the equity funds, their stories and their management teams that typically dominated the marketing and public relations resources. And, regardless of the asset class or the timeliness of the comment, there would have been a limit imposed on the number of communications PR would have been willing to initiate—as in, "We can't reach out to a reporter on the same topic too often."

But, a Twitter account can. I’m convinced that steady, consistent communicating served the tweeting firms in good stead when, late in 2010, Meredith Whitney predicted a municipal bond "day of reckoning."

A crisis was avoided but the accounts tweet on, as shown in this random collection of information-packed Rochester Funds tweets. Note that many #muni tweets simply impart information, don't even require the reader to click a link.

Net revenue collections for FY ’14, July – Feb, in Puerto Rico are 10.2% higher than last year. Higher revenues = positive for bondholders.

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) March 5, 2014

Meeting today with some Puerto Rico creditors in NYC. We were not invited, nor will we attend. PR wasn’t invited either.

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) January 16, 2014

We agree with @Muni_Mkt_Advisor's Robert Donahue: "Puerto Rico's leaders are showing considerable courage” h/t @TheBondBuyer

— Rochester Funds (@RochesterFunds) December 26, 2013

Look for more of this social media-enabled content leadership, as the industry educates on alternative investing in particular.

2. Better customer intelligence

Some firms have a much better understanding of the financial advisors who use their mutual funds or ETFs than they did five years ago.

Because of the benefits to them of participating on social networks, advisors have been creating profiles and sharing information—all of which savvy asset managers recognize as valuable customer intelligence. (See this 2009 post for an early perspective on the opportunity.)

When third-party data providers (like Meridian-IQ to name a current-day example) first made advisors’ AUM and production data available, that was the first step in asset managers growing their customer databases with more than just the uneven data input by the wholesaling staff. APIs available from LinkedIn and other social platforms today and CRM integrations available provide real-time, qualitative information that salespeople know how to use to advance offline conversations.

At the 1:14 mark of the following Nimble video, you'll see an example of how social account information is being added to CRMs.  

Nimble Grid View and Smart Summary of Contacts from Nimble Marketing on Vimeo.

It is the rare investment company that is mining this data today. However, many firms are doing something, even if in a low-tech way, or by just adding social CRM to their roadmaps. This will provide a competitive advantage. 

3. Better visibility for initiatives

It can be a thrill to work for a firm with millions of shareholders or investors. However, communicating with them in print usually takes too much time and is cost-prohibitive, two challenges somewhat addressed by the advent of Websites and email. But there, too, there are reasons to take a measured approach. A firm can’t communicate “too often” for fear of fatiguing its lists, and no single initiative can consume too much of the enterprise's communication resources.

Enter Facebook, an extremely accommodating environment to discuss corporate responsibility and community initiatives and to foster engagement. Check out the John Hancock Boston Marathon posts for one timely example. 

Or, consider the single-focus opportunity that a blog affords, as Putnam demonstrates with its five blogs on five niche topics: perspectives, wealth management, advisor technology tips, retirement and absolute return.  

Putnam is also giving a master class on how to use social media to extend the value and life of research findings.

Do you remember the social media research Putnam released last October? Previously, a firm might have conducted research, prepared a whitepaper, launched a microsite, issued a press release and then its news would fade from the news cycle in about a week. Because the research was right on-point for its Advisor Tech Tips blog, Putnam continues to post additional survey-based insights, which in turn prompts sharing and new attention for the research.

4. More natural exchanges

When you talk to people only periodically, there’s a tendency to be more formal and need to say more. Four times a year-reporting means that there's always going to be a lot to have to catch people up on. Updating via social media, though, can be more conversational, even natural.

For its plain-spokenness and word economy, this @Vanguard_Group tweet (which was as a Rock The Boat Marketing 2012 content highlight) continues to be one of my all-time favorite asset manager communications.

Our Advisors app for iPad product comparison tool was too slow. We fixed it. Try it now. http://t.co/Ltoduy5r

— Vanguard | Advisors (@Vanguard_FA) November 17, 2012

We all know how this would have been approached in every other medium—a lot of background information, a mumbo-jumbo quote and a description of the app’s new capabilities. It’s hard to imagine a Web page with just these three sentences on it. The best fund companies on Twitter are keeping it real. (Also, see 2013: Time To Show Some Personality (And All That Implies).)

Theoretically, there’s no better way to project naturalness than to sit in front of a video camera and talk. Except that over the years, investment professionals and the perfectionist marketers who work with them have developed a lot of good habits that could use some relaxing to truly succeed on YouTube.

Here again, the Vanguard channel is blazing a trail toward less stilted presentations. Check out their first Google Hangout from December. There are a few rough spots but the fresh, uncanned approach has a contemporary appeal.

Vanguard, one of the first whose blogs allowed comments, is also one of the first money managers to allow Discussion on YouTube. It's inevitable: Through its interactions on Facebook, Twitter and in comments elsewhere, this business will get the knack of responding to investors and others in public.

5. Developing a fuller sense of the ecosystem

In pre-social media days, the enlightened asset managers acknowledged that their business was influenced by people not defined by AUM and sales. Hence, the gatekeeper-type field in a CRM.

But paying attention to social media conversations and interactions surfaces others—industry leaders, investment bloggers and service providers and vendors, also with no production data next to their names. These are influencers that those of us in marketing would have had no awareness of 10 years ago.

Let’s take the example of Cate Long on Twitter, writer of Reuters’ Muniland blog and very influential on the #munis subject with journalists among her top followers. She regularly tweets asset manager (and others') #munis tweets. Of course, she’s in PR’s Contact list, but marketers watching the #munis hashtag know about her, too.

This awareness should be institutionalized—if Long were to sign up for an email newsletter or call in on the 800-number, she should be recognized as someone other than a "non-advisor" in the enterprise CRM.

See where this is going? It’s silo-busting and calls for added collaboration across functions.

A systematic understanding of social networks, as some early adopting firms are starting to develop today, can lead to a fuller sense of the thinking influencing the users of investment products, and result in proactive communicating and marketing.

In what other ways do you see the business being changed by social media? Please add your thoughts below.

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?

Blue, Blue, Our World Is (Mostly) Blue: Recent Asset Manager Website Redesigns

  July brought new looks (and some information re-design) to several asset management Web sites, including:

• Alger
• Calamos Investments
• Eaton Vance
• Mainstay Investments
• RidgeWorth Funds

Besides a fondness for blue (good for you, RidgeWorth, for daring to use a red!), the publicly accessible areas of the new sites have some features in common—multiple searches/sorts, quick links, RSS subscriptions. With their Most Popular capabilities, MainStay and RidgeWorth take navigation a bit further by offering visitors the benefit of what previous visitors valued. You’ll want to check each site out yourself.

Just for fun, below we show screenshots of relatively recent previous versions of the sites, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. The screenshots we show of the new sites are of the individual investor pages. Click on the images of the new sites to go to them.

Click to read more ...