Jemma Gosling, senior marketing manager for BNY Mellon Investment Management, explains how a unique content partnership with Trustnet is helping her to increase levels of engagement with IFAs and wealth managers and promote understanding of the firm’s multi-boutique model.
BNY Mellon Investment Management consists of 13 sub-boutiques, each one with its own unique investment philosophy and process - “the world’s specialists under one roof.”
The solution
The marketing team recognised that content was going to be very important moving forwards. Traditionally asset managers have perhaps not produced content as well as they could. To remedy this, BNY Mellon IM set up a ‘news desk’ to bring in content from all of the boutiques.
Collaboration with FE fundinfo
Aware that their websites were not getting a lot of traffic whereas sites like Trustnet were, the decision was made to take the content to sites where their target audience was already consuming information.
Jemma approached Trustnet with the idea of a content partnership, whereby her news desk would publish their content on the Trustnet website. The idea was well-received by the Trustnet team; and the collaboration is now well into its second year.
How it works
The collaboration began in January 2014.
Jemma worked very closely with the Trustnet editorial team to identify which headlines worked well and what kind of content was being consumed by wealth managers and IFAs.
“We have a good partnership. We meet once a month to see what’s working well from the FE fundinfo side and see how we can leverage that. We also evaluate how well their content has been doing: which stories are working best. The aim is to try to optimise what we’re doing,” says Jemma.
BNY Mellon IM was using Trustnet previously - but just for advertising.
What they have now is a real collaboration between BNY Mellon’s publishing team and the Trustnet publishing team, with insight into what’s working and what’s not and brainstorming sessions as to how the content can be improved.
The goal is to add value to IFAs with market commentary pieces; these are not promotional items. Some will be related to portfolios but from the perspective of movements in the market. Jemma wants to keep existing investors informed of what is going on as well as trying to engage new clients.
Results
In terms of promoting an understanding of the boutique model, the feeling is that they are “well on the way”, as each week content pieces are published from different boutiques. In terms of engagement, it has been shown to be 16 times more effective than advertising, based on click-through rates. So, a lot more effective in terms of engagement - both in terms of the total number of engagements achieved as well as ‘cost per click’.
“We have the same budget – we’re just using a portion of it in a different way,” adds Jemma.
The regular production of articles each week is more resource-heavy for BNY Mellon than simply running ads, but these pieces are also used internally and in Europe for other marketing purposes - on the website, for example.
“We went to FE fundinfo with the proposal and it has worked really well; the Trustnet team has been really helpful,” says Jemma. “This year the results are even better than last year and we are continually monitoring what we can do better.”
BNY Mellon’s marketing team receives statistics that show how many people have read each article, length of engagement times and so on. So they can see if someone is skimming through or reading thoroughly. This helps to identify topics of most interest.
What they have now is a real collaboration between BNY Mellon’s publishing team and the Trustnet publishing team, with insight into what’s working and what’s not and brainstorming sessions as to how the content can be improved.
The goal is to add value to IFAs with market commentary pieces; these are not promotional items. Some will be related to portfolios but from the perspective of movements in the market. Jemma wants to keep existing investors informed of what is going on as well as trying to engage new clients.
“About 50 % of our budget goes on content marketing now because we see that as more valuable moving forward. This was quite a big shift for us. We trialled it first and saw that engagement statistics were really good so rolled it our fully.”
The success is due in no small part to Trustnet’s appeal and existing draw for IFAs and wealth managers.