When it comes to stock selection, investment managers understand the application of top-down and bottom-up analytics. One focuses on the big picture of how the overall economy and macroeconomic factors drive the markets and stock prices, while the other one takes a deep dive into the fundamentals of a company literally from the bottom on up – two very different perspectives using two different sets of analytics for the same purpose of identifying the best investment opportunities. For a broader perspective, the greatest amount of insight, and actionable intelligence, some managers combine the two.

The same general approaches to analytics are applied for the purpose of identifying ways to maximize the ROI on a firm’s website. As more asset management firms realize the importance of investing in a digital marketing strategy, they need a clear view into their websites to see how they are performing.

Visits and Page Views

The typical approach is top-down, using Google Analytics or an equivalent service to view the activities of website visitors and identify trends and patterns of usage. Having this view into website usage is critical to identifying its strengths and weaknesses and determining how to generate more traffic and more effectively engage visitors. Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking the number of unique and returning visitors, where they come from, which pages they viewed most, average time viewing each page, and bounce rate. In short, the top-down approach using Google Analytics provides great insight into visitor behavior, which can tell you how well your website is performing and how effective your content is in engaging visitors. It’s also helpful when testing different items, such as does a different font size cause more engagement in general.

Actionable Names and Contact Information

The problem with Google Analytics and the top-down approach it offers is, while it provides good information, it’s just numbers. While it is important to track website activity and visitor behavior to improve website performance, the information is not actionable in terms of identifying who is visiting and why. That is information that can turn visitors into leads and make salespeople more productive. That is information a bottom-up approach can provide.

With a bottom-up approach that combines an email marketing system with advanced marketing analytics, marketing folks have a real value-add to offer the sales team.  Once an email subscriber clicks on a link from the email campaign and visits your website, you can track his every move. Not only can it identify who is visiting the website, it can track how often they are engaging with the site or connected social media channels. Even if the visitor doesn’t download a report of register for a webinar, the salespeople still get an actual name and email address they can follow up with. Once visitors are identified, there is no limit as to how marketing and sales can utilize the information to move them through the sales funnel.

• Leads can be graded, pushing those scoring highest in terms of engagement to the top of the sales queue. Wholesalers can spend a portion of their time contacting these warm leads.
• Leads can be segmented by their interests and their level of interest to enable marketing and sales teams to customize their direct sales approach in cultivating them further. Consider a $500 million advisor wo has been highly engaged with your content for only the past few months. You may want to call him. He may be interested in what you have to offer.
• More personalized content can be emailed to highly engaged leads or for behaving a specific way. For example, an advisor who just visited your website and downloaded your three month old white paper on fixed-income can be automatically emailed your new Insight article on fixed-income.
• The same scoring system can be applied to existing clients to track who may be disengaging, which is sign they may be selling your fund soon. You may want to follow up with a phone call.
• Integrate your CRM data with your digital marketing data. Sure your wholesaler entered notes in his CRM from an advisor call six months ago. Wouldn’t it also be nice to know he opened three of your six emails and four articles, visited specific pages on your website five times and shared one LinkedIn post? The next semi-annual call will probably go very different when armed with this knowledge.

At a minimum, firms should be using top-down data gathered through Google Analytics to improve website performance. By adding relatively inexpensive marketing automation software, firms already using email marketing can create a digital, bottom-up process to uncover the actionable data that can boost their sales team’s productivity.

Dan Sondhelm is CEO of Sondhelm Partners, a firm that helps asset managers, mutual funds, ETF’s, wealth managers and fintech companies. Click here to read Dan’s latest Insight articles and here to schedule a complimentary consultation.