When it comes to fundsters' marketing and public relations tactics, a plurality of FAs like hearing speeches. Yet it looks like there is no one-size-fits-all approach for shaping FAs' opinions.

Patrick Newcomb FUSE Research Director of Benchmark Research

Those findings come from Fuse Research Network's new Marketing Support: the Advisor View report from its Advisor Trend Monitor series. Fuse teamed up with WealthManagement.com to conduct the online survey, which included responses from more than 700 FAs across the independent broker-dealer, independent RIA, wirehouse, insurance broker, regional B-D, bank B-D, and private bank and bank trust channels.

Pat Newcomb, director of benchmark research at Boston-based Fuse, confirms that 45.2 percent of FAs ranked "speakers at company events" as "very effective" at shaping advisor opinion. That's down slightly from 50 percent last year, Newcomb says, yet it's "still the highest-ranked PR tactic when looking at it from the advisor's perspective."

FAs rated 12 different marketing and PR tactics as either "very effective," "somewhat effective," or "not effective." Other tactics that are popular with FAs include: webinars (33.7 percent), "participation in investment firm training programs" (31.7 percent), "attendance (booth presence) at industry conference" (22.6 percent), and conference calls (21.8 percent).

"Advisors are really looking for active interaction from fund managers," Newcomb says.

On the flip side, tactics with low percentages of FAs calling them "very effective" were mostly less interactive and personal: radio ads (3.3 percent), generic mass emails (3.8 percent), digital ads (4.1 percent), voicemail messages (4.8 percent), and TV ads (6.7 percent). In the middle were customized emails (19.1 percent) and expert opinions in publications or on TV (16.5 percent).

Mass, non-customized outreach tends to be more scalable than outreach that includes active interactions. Yet the two most-favored approaches, speakers at events and webinars, offer fundsters some scale as they can reach many advisors at once with a small number of personnel. 

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