A good website with a clear message is perhaps a marketer’s most powerful tool in today’s tech age.
In order to facilitate lead generation, promote products, raise brand awareness and offer an all-round, high-quality experience for your clients – a website that portrays and adequately attests to your message is a must.
And despite the notoriously slow digital uptake that the investment industry is famous for, asset managers have started to recognise the power of a well-designed site.
And it’s about time.
According to a report by Kasina, the financial services research and consultancy firm, two out of three advisers are influenced by an asset manager’s online capabilities.
Further, the millennial generation of investors are well-known by now for their brand devotion and online consumer behavior so unless your website is up to scratch, you risk falling behind.
With this in mind we run though the areas of a website that asset managers see as the most important in achieving their marketing goals- factsheets, price and performance pages, and research and corporate blog pages.
Fund factsheets
Fund factsheets have been a long standing marketing must-have for many fund groups. But what makes a good factsheet today?
Let’s start by thinking of your factsheets as a digital communication.
One challenge asset managers face is ensuring that the product information they provide is accessible for both investors and advisers, and that it fits with the ways that they enagage with investment information.
Having your factsheets in a HTML format means that your website users can also access critical fund information from their mobile and tablets – without having to download anything or leave your site like they do with PDF factsheets.
Secondly, as a key part of fund marketing, factsheets should get serious consideration when it comes to their design.
Having a factsheet production system where the design is flexible enough for you to incorporate your firm’s branding, charts and tables, but not so bespoke that they are time consuming and expensive to create is vital.
Having a consistent supply of fund data to populate your factsheets is also key – pretty factsheets are great but are useless unless they display accurate and timely information on the fund.
Fund price and performance pages
Perhaps even more than factsheets, as the main product promotion pages, these pages are usually the most visited pages of any asset manager’s site.
But making price and performance data something clients and investors will enjoy reading is a challenge that the industry is constantly trying to overcome. However, there are a few steps you can take to help the data on its way.
Incorporating clear, dynamic and interactive performance charts will improve the visual appeal of the page and create a better, more engaging user experience.
The Financial Conduct Authority has published a report that touches on this. Charts allow you to showcase your funds’ performance in a really effective way that is simple for investors to grasp.
Again, you need to make sure you have a reliable source of data so that this section will never leave a visitor confused over the figures, or get you in trouble with the regulator.
The data also needs to be consistent with the data on your fund factsheets, so it’s a good idea to use one source of data to populate both to avoid inconsistencies.
Research and insights
Moving away from the data heavy side of your site and on to the content side, another way to improve your brand perception - besides having accurate, well presented data and factsheets - is by establishing yourselves as thought leaders.
You become a thought leader by establishing authority in the industry, and content is a good way of demonstrating that. Having a good blog on which to host your thought leadership and marketing content helps drive traffic to your website, establishes your firms as an authority and drives long-term results in the form of your website’s search engine rankings.
But this only happens when you commit the time and energy needed to keep it updated and insightful.
Make sure you regularly update your company blog with research and insights. If someone reads a fantastic post and comes back the next week to find nothing new, you will lose their interest.
Most well-read blogs update more than three times a week, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
One way that this can be managed more easily is to have an editorial plan so you don’t get stuck for ideas. You should also look at working out a plan which includes the analysts at your firm as their insights will be the golden ticket to establishing authority with your content.
Next steps…
What should you take away from this post?
If nothing but that you need to create your site with the consumer in mind. The bigger picture is that digital, whether in the form of a website or an online investment tool, empowers consumers to make better investment decisions in their own time. But only when well executed.
The asset management industry would readily rank factsheets, price and performance pages, research and insights as the most important areas to concentrate on when maintaining a corporate website - due to how these parts of their website directly effect a client’s perception on brand and the products on offer. So these areas deserve special attention.
However, the core of your digital priorities should be in ensuring that your data is accurate – so that all your other digital marketing material is populated with information that is correct.
After all, who’s going to want to invest with an asset manager that cannot even get their data right?
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