Understanding the competitor landscape and current market demand with AI

Technology can help ensure your message lands in a more receptive environment

Key points:

• Technology can help asset management marketers understand current demand and interest in the market as well as the competitor landscape.
• By comparing volume of content on certain topics, the volume of visits to the pages by the target audience, and the average session time, it is possible to provide more valuable insights into how your content performs compared to your competitor set.
• Alphix Trends provides marketers with insights into which topics are currently being consumed most by investment audiences on asset managers' websites and financial news websites.

As today’s market environment is constantly in flux, it is vital for asset management marketers to be able to quickly adapt their advertising campaigns to match the current market conditions. However, the differences between each country’s media landscape, audience preferences and levels of brand awareness pose significant challenges to nimbleness. Artificial intelligence can provide a solution.

At a recent Fundamental Media breakfast roundtable event attended by a small group of asset management marketers, we discussed how marketers can utilise technology to shorten the cycle.

One of the issues technology can address is understanding current demand and interest in the market as well as the competitor landscape. Fundamental Group has developed Alphix Trends to enable asset management marketers to benchmark their site’s content and traffic volume against that of their competitors, and to see which investment topics are most popular in the financial media.

Comparative analysis through Alphix Trends

Alphix Trends helps marketers understand how the amount of content on a certain topic on their website and the site traffic to these pages compares to that of their competitors. Analysing your site’s page traffic provides some insights into the topics of interest to your target audience.

But comparative analysis needs to measure more than just traffic volumes to your site. It needs to take into account the audience type, the content topic that’s being consumed, and the volume of content available to that audience.

If, for example, you have noticed an increased interest in fixed income from visitors to your site, an important question to ask is how this compares to the traffic your competitors are getting to their fixed income pages.

In the example below we can see that Fund Manager A has seen an increase in traffic to its fixed income pages by financial intermediaries, but unfortunately other fund managers are seeing a much higher volume of traffic to these pages.

Similarly, Fund Manager A may have increased the number of pages focused on fixed income on its website from ten in January to 15 in December, but other fund managers may have much more fixed income content on their site.

By comparing volume of content on certain topics, the volume of visits to the pages by the target audience, and the average session time, it is possible to provide more valuable insights from which to benchmark. Each asset manager is then indexed between 1 to 100, providing you with a better understanding of how your content performs compared to your competitor set.

Understanding your relative position for content consumption on your site vs your competitors is an invaluable data point. When the data point is measured over time, it can be converted into a core metric to measure marketing influence: the Cost per Index Point (CpIP). For example, if the index moved 12 points and the campaign budget was £240,000 then the CpIP (fixed income) was £20,000.

Insights into financial media consumption

Apart from understanding the competitor landscape, marketers would also benefit from understanding current demand and interest in the market. This improves the chances of a positive audience response to their campaigns and thus a higher likelihood of new inflows.  

Alphix Trends provides marketers with insights into which topics are currently being consumed most by investment audiences on asset managers' websites and financial news websites. Fundamental Group spends in excess of $140,000,000 with financial publishers around the world. We are increasingly partnering with these publishers to allow traffic and sentiment data to be aggregated, modelled and converted into metrics from which signals can be extracted.

When volume and sentiment are both above the ‘mean line’, then the data is converted to a signal and triggers an advertising ‘event’. This could then be used to promote a philosophy, asset class, strategy or a product.

For example, if financial publications are writing more about fixed income compared to the average of the past 60 days and if the sentiment is more positive than the average of the past 60 days, then a signal would be triggered. This indicates a more receptive environment to promote fixed income strategies.

Marketers still in the driving seat

At the breakfast event, the roundtable participants expressed concerns about the AI taking away the marketer’s decision power and providing all asset managers with the same insights to act upon. However, even if all asset managers would be using Alphix’s capabilities, not every manager is claiming exactly the same position.

More importantly, the human element remains. Marketers will continue to be in the driving seat, interpreting the data and deciding how to act upon it. The technology is a tool to use specific to the marketer, where the AI does the heavy lifting, but it is still the marketer making the decisions.

One of the main challenges the participants face is that “everyone thinks they can do marketing,” as one of them put it. “It is hard to challenge some of the senior people at the company without the data. We talk about being a data-driven company, but they see our insights as just marketing data – they do not see it as business data. They still think of marketing as easy, like it used to be. But with all the data it is a lot more complicated now and it allows us to demonstrate the benefits of our work.”

Incorporating AI into Marketing Strategies: LinkedIn Poll Insights

To gauge the adoption of AI in asset management marketing, we recently ran a poll on LinkedIn. The poll asked:

"Are you using artificial intelligence to deliver timely relevant messages aligned to market sentiment?"

The results were telling: 80% of respondents indicated that they are leveraging AI for this purpose, while 20% are not yet utilising AI in their marketing efforts.

As demonstrated by the poll results, a significant majority of industry professionals recognise the value of AI in delivering relevant and timely marketing messages that resonate with the current market sentiment.

Alphix Trends uses AI to help asset management marketers understand the competitor landscape, assess current market demand, and customise marketing messages to the topics that investors care about most.

Technology can help marketers better understand the competitive landscape and current market demand, but it can also provide insights into which of your products are a good fit for the current market conditions, ad creation and automated reporting. Other articles in this series focus on these specific topics.