News For All Of Us: The Principal Shares Gadget, Text Messaging Adoption Data

The Principal Financial Group distributed a press release this week that was good and then better, from our perspective.

Good that the company announced that it was now making certain retirement plan account information available via iGoogle gadgets and text messaging. Few companies herald enhancements to their communications capabilities. We see that when those new capabilities are being sunsetted for lack of adoption, and the marketers responsible for pulling the plug confess, “Of course, we never really marketed it….”

Even better was the usage data that The Principal included in its announcement. Rarely if ever do we see that. Thank you. Now digital groups of other investment companies have some numbers to refer to in their planning and benchmarking.

Jaime Naig, media relations, told us that the initiatives were planned for “frequent visitors,” defined as those who log into the participant Web site more than three times in 10 days from 8 a.m. to 4.

The iGoogle gadget enables participants to view key account information directly from iGoogle without accessing www.principal.com. Here's a screenshot of a sample of the gadget as offered on Google; you'd have to be logged into an account to see an actual.

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Rock The Boat Marketing Moves To Chicago Financial District

Rock The Boat Marketing last week relocated from our suburban Chicago location to the Mercantile Exchange Center, 30 S. Wacker Drive, in the heart of Chicago's financial district. After having been toiling in the suburbs for the last few years, it feels great to be back in the swing of things.

If you want to talk digital strategy for financial services and you're heading to Chicago, let's meet!

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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.

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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.

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A Look At How Asset Managers See The Second-Half

The third week after the close of the quarter? Hey, that means there might be new commentary on mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) Web sites.

(In fact, not all sites have been updated yet, have they? But you know who you are and you know better than me what your "bottlenecks" are.)

As a speed-reading approach to reviewing what appears to be predominantly positive outlooks, I turned to Wordle.net for the visualizations below of what T. Rowe Price, First Trust Portfolios, OppenheimerFunds, BlackRock and Fidelity Investments expect in the second half of the year. Interested in others'? You can create your own in a snap.

T. Rowe Price U.S. Stock Market Quarterly Market Wrap-up

 

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