BOW + ARRO

Targeted Musings on Financial Marketing

If Content Is King, Video is Emperor

Utilizing videos in content marketing to gain investor mindshare

The secret is out: if ETF issuers want to get investors’ attention, dry materials and long-winded brochures no longer suffice on their own. In today’s hyper-competitive battle to grow AUM, issuers should seek to become trustworthy resources for investors—in other words, producing educational and engaging content. This can take many forms: blog articles, email blasts, whitepapers, fund-specific materials, brochures, handouts at conferences, and more. All of these content pieces have their respective roles to play within an issuer’s marketing strategy playbook, but there’s one medium in particular that can really break through the noise and capture prospective investors’ divided attention like nothing else: video.

After all, in an age of endlessly scrolling social media, microblogs, and constant distractions, who has time for a five hundred word blog article—much less a fifteen page whitepaper—anymore? That’s where video comes in. It’s already transforming marketing efforts throughout myriad industries, and its presence is increasingly being felt in the finance world as well. The numbers really speak for themselves. According to Insivia, including video in a landing page can increase conversion by 80%. This same report found that four times as many customers would rather watch a video than read about it, and website visitors spend about 2.6x more time on pages containing video than those without.

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This has momentous implications for ETF issuers. Imagine if, instead of a dry fund fact sheet, prospective investors first encounter a short, punchy, 2-minute animated video on the fund’s homepage that runs through the ETF’s main selling points in an engaging, entertaining way. A video like this one, for example, which we produced for an imaginary beer ETF:

All the website visitor needs to do is click “play.” If they’re interested in learning more, they simply scroll down and encounter the more detailed fund materials that tell the rest of the story.

The bottom line: Video presents an exciting opportunity for savvy ETF issuers to capture greater investor mindshare. It can play an important role in a new or existing content marketing strategy.