Mutual Fund, ETF 'Marketer Of The Year' Nominees Link 2010 Strategies To Results

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You work all day every day and many days into the evening. Once in a while you’re asked to summarize what you do, your accomplishments, the ways in which you’ve contributed to the success of your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm. What do you point to?

Five marketers were considered for Fund Action and Fund Directions’ Marketer of the Year, with the award last night going to Marty Willis, chief marketing officer of OppenheimerFunds (who I happened to mention in Monday’s post). Congratulations to Marty and her team.

Congratulations also to the other marketers nominated: Colin Kelton, principal in the retail investor group, Vanguard Group; Wendy Harrington, executive vice president of global marketing services, Franklin Templeton; and Gary MacDonald, managing director, global head of ETF marketing, State Street Global Advisors, and to their teams.

The nomination process provides the rest of us with a peek at how leading asset management marketers link their work and metrics to their firms’ success. The following list of the marketers’ accomplishments is extracted from a January 28 Fund Action page profiling the nominees. I’ve stripped some of the detail and sorted the activity by type. Be sure to visit Fund Action for the complete stories.

Advertising

  • Digital advertising drove above industry-average sales growth (Oppenheimer)
  • An integrated (online, print and social) advertising campaign that grew ETF assets more than 50%, producing a better than 2% gain in market share in one year (Vanguard)
  • Print, digital and broadcast TV ads driving 10%-plus asset growth and, with one ETF, triple the inflows of the previous two years (State Street)
  • A robust campaign that resulted in three focus funds more than tripling net inflows from 2009 (Franklin Templeton)
  • QR codes added to print ads, an industry first (Oppenheimer)

Positioning

  • Overcoming the 2009 leader (Fidelity) to become the largest asset manager in the world (Vanguard)
  • Turning Vanguard into a verb (Vanguard)
  • Arranging for portfolio managers to be regulars onCNBC's Closing Bell and Squawk Box(Oppenheimer)

Broadening distribution

  • More than 9,000 advisors selling an equity fund, a first in the firm's history (Franklin Templeton)

Website

  • 42% increase in downloads from the firm’s Website (Oppenheimer)
  • Making the Website accessible via mobile phones (Oppenheimer)

Social media

  • The launch of the industry’s leading (in term of followers totaling 17,000) Facebook and Twitter accounts (Vanguard)
  • Partnering with The Wall Street Journal to launch a video series that attracted 96,000 views (State Street)
  • Launch of a YouTube channel, with one video drawing 20,000 views (Oppenheimer)

Literature

  • 500,000 pieces of campaign literature ordered (Franklin Templeton)

What story do you tell and what metrics do you use to support it?