This past month, Kurtosys rolled out its annual survey to find out how marketers at asset management firms were reacting to changes in the digital landscape.
In 2016, we attempted to dig deep to find out exactly what content marketing strategies were popular amongst asset managers in order to display fund information to their investors. This year we were intrigued to see how these trends would be affected by the financial world’s increasing compliance issues, and gained results from almost 300 respondents.
Most interestingly, almost half of all our respondents believed that regulation would actually be the most disruptive force to the asset management industry, even more so than influential factors such as successful fintech startups and developments in blockchain technology. We can deduce from this data that the incoming MiFID II directive must have had an influence on those surveyed; its requirements for firms to increase the transparency of fund literature and investment research has caused many companies to adopt new strategies, and fast.
Additionally, when asked if regulatory technology had been adopted (such as recording software), there was a 50/50 split between respondents. Considering half have not invested in such technology, it will be interesting to see if increased regulation will make this number increase in future years.
In regards to which channels they find the most successful in marketing, the results this year are rather similar to last. Content marketing remains the most popular (63%), albeit down 8% from before, and social media was considered equal in importance with email campaigns, both at 42%. These results were almost identical in our 2016 study. Displaying asset managers’ further dedication to content marketing, around 65% expect to increase their investment in the space.
The most important factors for a website’s design are still considered to be ease of navigation (71%) and user experience (61%). Many asset managers still use in-house talent to build their websites rather than outsourcing (69%).
Similar to 2016’s results, an overwhelming 70% of marketers are planning to invest more into the website, displaying the growing interest in the need for asset managers to substantiate the quality of their digital output. Other focuses for investment included security issues (49%), which dwarfed the interest in paying for MarTech or cloud solutions (37%).
