Asset managers continue to blog with more frequency. This week, I counted 73 different posts from asset managers and I surely missed a few. One technique used sparingly but effectively is the question and answer. We think including a few Q&A posts each month improves a blog’s overall quality.
Asset managers typically have experienced writers on staff. Yet most of our clients struggle to consistently produce as much compelling content as they’d like.
In most cases the challenge is not a lack of ideas but difficulty in execution. We hear things like:
When I look at these issues, I think about newspapers, magazines, and blogs. These entities live (and die) by their ability to consistently create compelling content, and succeed only by overcoming the problems voiced above.
That leads me to ask: what if investment firms treated content-generation as journalism instead of marketing?
Consider that there are important differences in the ways journalists produce content when compared to marketers. There are editorial structures, processes, and a pacing associated with journalism that simply don’t exist within asset management marketing teams, even if some of the same skill sets do.
Why not incorporate these advantages? Have 1-2 people serve as “staff writers”, and make it their full-time jobs to create a constant stream of content. These writers could:
Then let the source material guide the output – in some cases short blog posts, in others long-form papers. A journalistic mentality means you let the idea and process dictate the nature of the output. Even with a dose of attrition (pieces that ultimately fail), I think content production would improve for most firms.
Each Monday, we’ll share the last week’s three best industry blogs. Hopefully, it’s something interesting to read as you get back into the flow.
Did you read anything within the industry as interesting? Let us know via e-mail.
Many of our asset management clients face a common issue – they don’t generate as much high-quality content as they’d like. It’s a frustrating issue for marketing teams and most often chalked up to a lack of resources.
As I read about some recent developments at Seeking Alpha, a thought came to mind – should asset managers invest more effort in content aggregation and less in content creation?
Seeking Alpha is among the better known and regarded financial blogs out there. The site publishes 250+ articles daily, drawn from a pool of 3,000 (non-proprietary) contributors. Some of the authors, who include financial advisors, and individual articles get quite a bit of attention (upwards of 50k followers and 30k page views, respectively).
What’s interesting is that Seeking Alpha has accomplished this having paid exactly $0 for content. $0. For 250+ articles per day. My takeaway is that being a content aggregator has advantages over being a content creator. Three broad reasons why:
Given the challenges in producing proprietary content, should asset managers consider content aggregation as a strategy? I think yes. Would researching, licensing, and packaging 30 top-notch articles from external sources be more fiscally efficient and valuable to clients than producing 30 internal pieces? I think maybe.
That’s enough for asset managers to at least investigate aggregation as a part of their content strategies.
For those of you unfamiliar, Gawker operates a network of (generally popular) blogs. You may not know the individual brands, but you probably know some of things they’ve written about, such as when Gizmodo found an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar earlier this year.
This week Gawker announced changes to the page layout of its blog network. This 1-minute video gives an overview:
Clearly Gawker’s business model does not match that of an asset manager. But I found the detailed reasoning behind the changes to have 4 good ideas for the Web sites of asset management firms.
The first two:
Two more thoughts to come on Monday…
