FUSE: Web, blogs, social continue to help distribution



Earlier this month, several SunStar Strategic employees attended a webinar on marketing trends that was sponsored by the FUSE Benchmark Series. The webinar covered recent industry trends in digital and social media marketing across companies dealing with advisor clients of various sizes. According to FUSE, 2013 hiring trends continue to focus on web-based marketing although more emphasis has been placed on the channel, communications, and CRM areas than in the past. Firm social media participation also continued to grow, with nearly 90% of survey participants engaging in social media as a company.

FUSE's Neil Bathon

The statistics that FUSE presented were interesting, but the most valuable information for advisors looking to strengthen their online presence came in the analysis of web content and traffic. Survey respondents overwhelmingly agreed that the most useful attributes of the websites they visited were timely updates and easy navigation, followed by robust research libraries, and detailed descriptions of the investment process. Having excellent data doesn’t draw traffic unless it is relevant and easily accessible. FUSE’s data on webpages with the highest traffic seems to reflect the popularity of easy to digest information. Of all pages on company websites, firm blogs get the most traffic, followed by product analytics, investment commentary, and white papers.

Of course, in order for a website to be successful it must be more than just a location on the web. Pushing content through social media has been on the rise in the fund industry for a while now, but 2013 saw some interesting growth and changes in the way funds and advisors are using it. Twitter remains the leading platform in the industry, with more than three-quarters of survey respondents using Twitter as a marketing tool. LinkedIn, perhaps the most business-oriented social media platform, saw strong growth among users while Facebook fell sharply in popularity, with only 36% of respondents using it regularly—down from 64% in 2012. To me, this means the industry is still experimenting and figuring out how best to use social media to its advantage. And Twitter may well be the place to do that—its conversational atmosphere and ability to link discussions certainly gives Twitter an edge for a group to explore en mass.

Based on FUSE’s data, the best course of action for industry web-development is to maintain exceptional content, update regularly, and be willing to take risks in content distribution. Who knows? You might be the one to hit on the right balance of social media and traditional content development to lead the pack in the next wave of successful distribution.