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AIM High: Content to build audiences · Two in Twenty

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome to another episode of Aim High.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Twink Field.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: I am the host of these podcasts, which are specifically for marketers in investment management.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: And today we're talking about content that builds audiences, that builds traction and trust.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: And unsurprisingly, we're talking quite a bit about social media and LinkedIn specifically.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: And joining me is Vered Zimmerman, who's the MD of FinTech, and Kennedy Lynn, who is the marketing analyst at White Marble.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so over to them.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Kennedy and Vered, for joining me today.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's great, great to talk to you both about how we build audiences with our content.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: So why don't I come to you, Vered, to introduce yourself and then to you, Kennedy, and then we can get into some questions.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Sounds good.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for having me here.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: This is a great podcast.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: I'm delighted to be here.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Vered Zimmerman.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm the managing director of FinTechs.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: We are a marketing research firm that uses machine learning to analyze content and understand what works.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, we've been doing a lot of work on what content seems to be working in the financial services industry.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: Kennedy, over to you.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for having me, Twink.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Also Vered, good to see you again.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Kennedy.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: I work at White Marble Marketing.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a marketing analyst.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: I spend all of my time building up and maintaining White Marble and a digital benchmarking service called Metrologist.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there I primarily spend a lot of my time looking at asset management firms, marketing KPI data, benchmark data.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: We track engagement rate and follower growth rate month to month.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really happy to be here.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really happy to share what I've learned, what I've seen, and then just the different trends at this time in our crazy world.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe just starting with you then, Kennedy, what do you think uh are the key considerations then to have in mind when kind of building audiences and trying to build audiences?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as we know, I mean 2020 was one of the hardest years I think any of us have experienced lately.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So with that, I will say that 2020 firms naturally began to oversaturate their social media pages.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we were in full fight or flight mode.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: People wanted their voice to still be heard, although there were no client-facing meetings.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I definitely saw a huge spike in social media posts in 2020.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And now that it's kind of been to the point where, dare I say, we're used to the pandemic, we're used to what's going on and we've become almost comfortable with it.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: But however, we do hopefully see a light at the end of the tunnel.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: People have begun to relax a bit with how often they're posting, but now it's become quality over quantity.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I've really seen that when people are trying to build audiences and just maintain their follower growth rate, that they really have to focus on humanizing their brand.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've had a lot of social issues happen in 2020.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of ways that people are a lot of ways that audiences are actively engaging with content is content being posted about social issues and how companies are um becoming an advocate for change.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's the hashtag choose to challenge.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a gender equality time for people to post, hashtag choose to challenge, and then just really advocate for gender equality.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Also, mental health awareness, diversity and inclusion.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: These are all posts that are just gaining so much engagement.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: People want to feel heard, they want to feel seen.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a great way right now to especially build your audience and maintain that audience.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Brilliant.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I completely agree with humanizing brands and people feeling much more accessible.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I guess kind of the corporate corporations are much more accessible and relatable and sort of share values and a value system that's really sort of emerged.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Burard, anything um from you in terms of those key considerations, sort of either growing on that theme or taking another one?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: So absolutely, I think humanizing the brand is a challenge.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, we need to remember that these are commercial entities and what they're hoping to achieve with their marketing is overall greater commercial success.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you look at the question of how to do that, so on top of talking about your uh corporate social responsibility and employees, how do you communicate and build an audience around your uh commercial proposition?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: The key here is uh to be very specific about who you're trying to reach.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: We've all been supposedly taught that going viral is the way forward.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's not.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's about knowing your audience and knowing what they care about and signaling that in your messaging.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's harder than it looks, even for professional investment managers who you think know their audiences well.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: When it comes to actually wondering what is it that they want to read about, they don't always know.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: But if you do, you're able to tailor your communications to a niche.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so that way you start to build an audience of engaged professionals who say they know what they're talking about, they speak to me.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting, and and taking your point about keeping that commercial lens in in mind, you know, Veron, maybe staying with you.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think then is the you know, that brings to my mind how you measure something and bringing metrics back into the business?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: So, what would be the best way do you think of then measuring the success of your content approach, you know, and building trust and sort of bringing these two things together, really, the kind of commercial side as well as the sort of valuable relationship you you build hopefully over the long term with those target audiences?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: So there are a couple of ways to answer this question, and I'll attempt them both.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, you have to ask yourself if I'm gonna measure something, what am I trying to achieve by that?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because really, what you want your measurements to do is to guide you to be more successful in what you're doing.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the challenge is that when you're measuring uh stuff like uh likes or social signals, it's uh backward looking and it doesn't tell you much because these are social signals, especially on LinkedIn.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: When someone likes a post on LinkedIn, it's really more about them telling their social network, I am happy to identify myself with this message.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a bit of peacocking associated with social signaling, and so as a metric, it can be skewed.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: So if we're looking to measure things that will give us valuable insights on the audience behavior side, you want to look at behaviors that are time-based.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: Essentially, the more time a client spends with you is an indicator of how engaged they are.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a good signal.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: If they're leaving a comment, they took the time to write that comment and so forth.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: But on your content side, in terms of what you can do to improve, the measurement comes down to looking at the stuff that you put out, put it out there, and quantifying basically the answer to two questions.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_02: One, is it presented in a style that my audience likes to read?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: And two, is it about a topic that my audience cares about and hasn't heard of enough?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And you can measure all these things.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: You can measure style, you can measure topics using natural language processing.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that's essentially one, time-based measurements, and two, looking at your own content and making sure it's hitting those benchmarks in terms of style and content topics.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: Perfect.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it brings to mind something that we were talking about, Kennedy, around sort of relevance and and sort of how you engage your in knowing your target audience and engaging them by being really relevant to their needs.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I that takes me to thinking more generally, and your earlier comments, Kennedy, around you know, just the volumes of of content going down social channels.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you know, it seems busier than ever.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, you've done the analysis, it is busier than ever, or kind of was last year and then sort of kind of got back to sort of bit more even queue.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: But how do you really, amongst all of that, how do you compete and get cut through?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, especially now, I'd say less is more.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a lot of the data we've seen, firms have found comfortability posting a bit less now that we're in 2021, just really honing on the quality over quantity.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we've seen that majority of firms are typically posting around 18 posts a month.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: So break that down, it's about one to two posts every other day.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And with that, I really do think um it's possible for these firms to get their content out there, but not oversaturate, but also not become irrelevant by posting too little.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's also just about, like to mention what Veard said is keeping people interested.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we've found posting a revolving amount of content.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: However skilled your content team may be at posting articles, that's fantastic.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: But our audiences don't want to see just articles.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: They want to see exciting news that's happening in your firm.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, an example of this is ESG milestones.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: People are very interested in how you're giving back and how your company is becoming sustainable and just community involvement.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then also quarterly reports are really popular.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Different engaging interviews, like short clips of maybe 30 seconds to a minute and a half of just someone in your firm speaking about their experience lately.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: It could be an insights piece or it could be a more personal piece of just how they're handling day-to-day life.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Those are really popular.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Podcast recaps.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of options for articles that are more PDF formatted.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not everyone wants to click a link and go back to your website.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people just want to see the content right there and read it and then continue back on LinkedIn.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And also just keep a strong visual and brand presence, I'd say, throughout everything you're posting.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Just make sure the colors are um in line with what your theme is and what you're trying to advocate.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And same with the imagery you're posting with the articles or um with the video, just as a highlight reel.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Just make sure that the visuals are appealing and that they're making people want to engage with you.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But um I would just reiterate that revolving content, all of those pieces, but on a revolving basis, instead of just one piece over and over and over or one style of piece, I will say, is the best way to get the most engagement for me.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it sounds like a good variety of content, um, but good consistency in terms of the look and the feel, so we all know what house it belongs to.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: How does that play out there in terms of the tone for a company?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, when I think of the number of different authors internally that a company might have right across their business, is that a consideration as well to drive consistency in terms of you know the tone of the company and how they express themselves, or do you think that's not such an issue in terms of that variety of authorship?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the the main consideration to take into account when suggesting best practices is to understand that investment managers are large companies.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so the content they produce is process driven.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: You have your head of marketing who's getting information from your portfolio managers.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes they write a lot of the content, you have your digital, you have your investment writers, you have your all these components are strung together into a process.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: And at the end of it, you're seeing your articles, your LinkedIn posts.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so uh traditional advice would be do this, do that.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't work because that doesn't address the fact that this is a process-driven way.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so what we can do is ask how can this process yield uh better content?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: How can we tweak the process so it yields uh better outcomes?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um topics is a great consideration.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of investment managers like to talk about themselves.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um and you see that in the and this is more than just a stylistic choice because if I'll tell you that posts are more successful if you use you rather than we, then you can go around and say, Why don't you listen to our portfolio manager talking about that's cheating?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um really what you want to do in terms of the focus is shift it to the you, and that's in terms of style and also in terms of thinking about what you're writing.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: What's the benefit to your reader?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um in terms of topics as well, uh, because this is a process-driven content, um a process that delivers content in investment houses the marketers and the people who create the content are usually not in direct relationship with clients.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so what we've just talked about about knowing your audience and knowing what they care about right now, the people who are creating the content don't have access to that information.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_02: So you want to figure out a way for you to uh tap into what's relevant to your audience and bring that into your content creation process.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: From there on issues like consistency and varying style, I think that comes later on.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: But first, it's about getting the topics right and making sure it's about the reader.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, getting the immediacy kind of through through the process almost so that you can be really topical and you can be immediate to sort of what's relevant, what people are talking about.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, Kennedy, when we kind of think about the digital marketers and you know, how uh can they help manage the content or uh the content of the business to get best engagement?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how how are they best kind of folded into this process?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I think there are a couple of ways that digital marketers can go about getting the best engagement, but a lot of it also goes back to what Veard said is a lot of people managing these teams don't always write the content.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it really has to do with also having a strong plan in place before you even go to the drawing board to think, okay, well, what kind of content do we need to produce?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's, I would say, engaging in the community on LinkedIn before you even sit down and say, okay, well, what else do we need to produce?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like what have your competitors been producing?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And since I think we do have, well, it's a little bit harder to get that data without sitting down and doing it manually at the moment.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there are a lot of ways just to quickly go through and see, okay, well, this firm posted about one example I've seen is Fidelity actually does a really good job at posting advice pieces.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: And although that may sound weird to some firms, it's mostly about posting um like three best ways to budget your money or five best tips for investing in 2021.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just little snippets of PDF formatted articles like that really grab the user's attention.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're able to recognize, well, that's really successful for Fidelity, maybe we should try something along those lines, maybe not copy their exact format, but also just, I would say, get out there and see, get a feel.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: You don't always have to stick to your ways, stick to what you've been doing for the past 10 years, um, really just branch out because I don't think the excitement and opportunity on LinkedIn is just a fad or just something that happened in 2020.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's going to be something that continues over the past, over the next two to five, 10, however many years.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: We can't really plan for anything at this time.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: If I'd say the pandemic taught us anything, we really can't plan.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the best bet is just to think that we're going to be at home for at least the next six months to a year.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's best to really put your foot forward on LinkedIn and just sit down with your team, have a brainstorming session, and really think about what's been doing well in the industry, what can we produce with the type of skill set we have on our team and how are we going to get there?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm taking that sort of test-and-learn approach that you mentioned as well, just trying something different, trying to.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_02: If I could add to what Kennedy was saying, that the challenge obviously that investment management firms have is the challenge of compliance.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: They have to track every bit of information they put out there, including social media posts.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: And getting back to your question, Twink, about the challenge that digital marketers in particular face, their challenge is that they're not the ones creating the content.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes they don't have control over the content, and then and yet they're expected to deliver greater engagement.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so the question is, what can they do?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: And the good news is that uh data, both data that FinText has proprietary collected, but also one from other research firms, shows that people consume uh information, especially around financial content, but not just in predictable behavioral ways.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so the great contribution that digital marketers can add to the mix is in okay, so the process means that they get the content from someone else who's written it, but they have quite a lot of control over presentation.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: And presentation plays a huge part in the not just the readability of the content, but the trust level that it breeds in you being able to give the reader something of value.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so bringing the value to the top using bullet points on the top, adding a meaningful set of headings throughout to help skim through the articles, always assuming that most of the content is not gonna get read.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is a terrible assumption, but it is true.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: So if you take that on board, there is so much you can do with layout and structuring how you present the message, and then this carries through to LinkedIn because if what you're going to do is take the first couple of sentences and sentences in your content and paste them in the post and drop a link, that's probably not gonna work.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: But there are measurable tactics that you can deploy to make your LinkedIn posts better, essentially just and more engaging, and then you see that you see the outcome in in the metrics, but first comes the changes, and then you see the outcomes.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would completely reiterate that as well.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've definitely seen easy digestible content has had the most success.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people on these platforms, however, they come to these platforms for a sense of community and education, they don't always have the most time.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're all so busy.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: So anything with bullet points at the top in a body, a paragraph, or just segmented um titles and then a little paragraph underneath, have really been performing really well.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was going to ask a pessimist question about what are the biggest mistakes that you know you you see being made, you know, when trying to build trust with your audiences.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um very happy to hear what those mistakes might be.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, very maybe you could expand further.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe on the flip side, also expanding further on what other is, you know, what else is best practice?
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: What else, how else can we kind of really help engage and build those audiences?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, very happy to.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: So if we go back to what we said earlier, the recipe for trust, if you'd like, is to present something to your target audience that is one, in the style they like to read, and two, about topics that they care about, but that they haven't gotten information about elsewhere.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: And the unfortunate reality is that most investment managers fall into the trap of doing the exact opposite.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so they deliver to their audiences essentially last week's news.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I say last week because it has to take the time, remember the process, it has to go through compliance.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's last week's news, which you would have already read in the FT or the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist, well, not the economist because it takes a little bit of time, but you you will have read that in The Guardian or whatever it is that you're reading.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: And they tend to present this information about last week's news in language that is measurably more complicated.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm talking 60%, sometimes twice as complicated as you'd find in the news.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's all you can measure all this stuff.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so you don't want that.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: The way to overcome this trap, right, is to think in the concept of niches, because niches allow you to get more specific.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that we're saturated with too much information is both true and false, true for surface level information.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: But anytime you want to go deep on uh any specific issues, you tend to converge on a few sources of authority.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: And this is something that absolutely investment managers can take uh advantage of by becoming that source of authority, but it does take confidence, it does take an understanding of where your skill set lies.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's it's a process to get there, but it is completely doable.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in terms of best practices, so how about I just talk for a minute about someone who's doing a good job, right?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Because it just be now the entire industry.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe it would be fair to give an example of someone who's doing a good job.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: So we are fintext is about to release a research note, I'm hoping in the next week or two, comparing um the social media performance of Vanguard and BlackRock.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: Now, these are two companies, oftentimes they say, Oh, how can we differentiate ourselves on commoditized products?
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of investment managers' products are quite similar.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so this is a classic example where the product itself is as near commoditized as can be.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, these are both very large companies, sometimes one leads, sometimes the other.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and crucially, they have a fairly similar number of employees on LinkedIn, and BlackRock has about four times as many followers as Vanguard.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so now I ask you given all this data, who would you think performs better on LinkedIn?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And the answer is Vanguard.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Vanguard outperforms BlackRock even though it has far fewer followers and just as many employees.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you were gonna say, oh, it's mostly the employees who like the content, um and you can see through their content that they're doing some stuff.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: Some of it is not intuitive, they use a lot of links, a lot of links.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: I would not have thought that this would perform as well because LinkedIn tends to kind of uh promote less posts with links, but you can see their consistent focus on clients.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: They use a lot of less we and a lot more you.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: They choose their topics with care.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_02: You can see that as Kennedy has suggested, they diversify the content, but they achieve greater results.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: And these results aren't explained by shallow metrics like followers or whatever.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: So they're a good example to look at of what they're doing right.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, in particular, one thing that's they've done interesting is separate their investment commentary into a separate page.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: Their main page is not about hear our fund manager talk about this.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: They have a separate page for that.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that separate page gets fantastic traction because the people who follow it know what to expect.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: Do you see what I mean?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really managing client expectations.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_02: Target audience right there.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really good point.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I was also going to say that um one of the best practice tips I would give at the moment is to post like you're speaking to a client, not speaking at a client.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to sit down and just be spoken to.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: They want to feel like you actually care to educate them, whatever the post may be, or just help them in any way.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's um, they want to feel like they're also getting something out of the post that you're delivering to them.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's a two-way street.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: So any way you can benefit your client through a post or you're just your audience in general, I would say is key to posting at the moment.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then Ken take you through the research that you've been doing.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, is there anyone in the industry that you think is doing a good job?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I was um going to say that I really don't think size matters.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Just like Beard was saying, follower count is almost irrelevant when it comes to engagement.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's really about quality of what you're posting.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going back to the humanize your brand aspect.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: I've definitely seen companies who have a strong campaign about whatever is going on in society at the moment.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen Columbia Thread Needle really recently posting a lot about mental health awareness, a good campaign they're doing called What's Behind the Mask, all the masks we're wearing every day.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: But all of our audience, they're real people with real personal lives going on.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so just adding to that human element and letting people know that they're being heard is really successful right now as well.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I've got your um your comments a little bit around sort of shallow metrics sort of has just sort of stuck with me.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I was just wondering is there any other data to review or have front of mind uh to in order to sort of optimize digital content?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is there anything else that we should be kind of really considering in the whole?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm thinking about how to best answer this because obviously the answer is yes, there's a lot of data.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, people are busy, they have jobs, no shortage of that.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: So my pause is to consider not whether there is data, but which data to take into account.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, we talked a little bit about topics.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna do the shameless plug, but one of the things that we figured out that makes a lot of sense is listen to online conversations to hear what people talk about as a way to get direct access to uh topics that have been, you know, maybe neglected.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so one way to say, is there more data to keep in mind?
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: Then absolutely getting tangible data on audience insights is gonna help you produce better content and possibly even build a niche.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's one.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and then the other thing is style.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: We've we've mentioned this, but haven't touched upon what you can actually do.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: So we say cater to the style that your audience already likes.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: Investment marketers will know this anyhow because each and every one of them wants to sound like the economist, right?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: Why do they want to sound like the economist?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's, you know, it has gravitas and yet it's light.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_02: So it's this tricky balance that they want to reach.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so if someone would tell you this is how you this is the recipe for how you sound like the economist, then people will say, get me some of that.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: To get your tone of voice sound, well, it's not even tone of voice, it's just the language that you use.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: A good first step is to lower the complexity level.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: And the immediate suspects that you want to look for are long words, words with three syllables or more, words with four syllables or more, they are heading straight to the bin.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, cut that out and and just get look for big words that you can do without, even if it means just a couple more shorter words.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, to sum up, it's the topics through social listening and it's the style.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_02: You don't necessarily need fancy metrics, just make your words shorter and punchier.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I feel much more well dangerously armed to go and start writing some content for LinkedIn.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, any other final tips or things that you would uh assert and sort of underline for our listeners?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: Anything just to leave them with, you know, when they're thinking about you know their sources of information and and sort of building um trust with their target markets.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um Kennedy, should I come to you first and then and then to you, Verit, to finish up?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: I would just reiterate um a bit what I've said earlier, but at the end of the day, 2020 was not easy for anybody.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: So at this time, I would say post as if you're seeing your client or your audience face to face for the first time after the really hard year we've had.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: People don't want to be sat down and just spoken to.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: They want to feel like you really actually care about what they've gone through and how hard this year has been, business-wise and in our personal lives.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just say reach that human element.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, try your best to post revolving content, a bunch of different pieces, and also know that size doesn't matter whether you're a firm with a thousand followers or 500,000 followers.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: You can still reach high levels of engagement.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just being aware of what you're posting.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Don't post too much, also don't post too little.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the gold, goldilocks of uh kind of position on uh on posting.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Kennedy.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it we've covered quite a lot.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if you say readers, know and trust, who are your readers?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: What do they want?
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there is it's a lot of investment managers talk about wanting to be different, and so they should be.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: The industry is overwhelmed by two struct, not not one structural challenge, but two.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: One was the rise of passives, and then the second was the rise of platforms, and so customers today are better informed, they're spoiled for choice, mutual funds are no longer their only choice.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so building trust is is is a business imperative.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just you know, fluff poor market, and therefore, if you have an emerging markets fund, if you have um a UK equities portfolio, right?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: You can talk about what UK equities did, but uh you know, when you can spruce it up a little bit, but really it's about finding out how you can consistently generate, the consistency part matters so much, consistently generate insights that your clients can't get elsewhere for many of the other investment managers posting on UK equities.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's think of it as a puzzle, really like a Rubik's Q puzzle.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: But if you genuinely try to attempt an attempt to solve this puzzle, how can I consistently generate insights around my field of expertise that my clients can't find elsewhere?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, you will become a trusted source of information.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: How brilliant.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: What a great place to sort of draw up stumps as we say over here in the UK.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so thank you both, Kennedy Vered, for such uh an interesting conversation for taking the time with me this afternoon.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate it.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you,