When a prospective client reaches out, there are a few things I’ll check before we even get on a call.

Regardless of whatever else they may be responsible for, every digital marketer has a corporate domain to call their own. And, a minimum goal of every corporate domain is to be seen.

So as part of my prep, I’ll complete a high-level diagnostic to check on how well the firm is managing its visibility.

Visibility is what drives most opportunities online. Effectiveness in digital marketing assumes visibility. (As does public relations, more about that later.) If I can get an idea of where a firm’s visibility is lagging, I’ll have some idea of what the prospect and I are going to talk about.

Except that the conversation almost never goes the way I expect it to.

I think I know why. Because—and this is true at all but the smallest of firms—no single person has a full view let alone hands-on responsibility for the communications to all stakeholders. Because of that, and because it’s easy to assume that things are working as you intend them, a considerable amount falls through the cracks.

The result: many firms lack awareness about what’s suboptimal about their own site.

Do you know who has an uncanny ability to spot your website’s vulnerabilities? Your clients. Your Sales team. The media. Google. What’s lamentable: you may never know where the breakdown is occurring. Because you don’t use the site like others do.

Categories

The PR/digital marketing co-dependency 

As suggested in our post on the recently updated PESO model, digital marketing and PR have a co-dependency that professionals in the individual disciplines may not even recognize.  

You all are running a relay race. Sometimes Marketing runs the first leg, producing content that PR can turn into a media opportunity. Other times, PR originates a media outcome, passing the baton on to Marketing to promote the media interview. In both of those scenarios, each owes something to the other to make the most of the opportunity.  

You can choose to think of these as one-offs or you can resolve to organize to support and fully leverage the fruits of your combined efforts  

When websites don’t work as intended

There’s one reason any PR or marketing activity happens and that’s to help drive business. Here are just a few business consequences to an asset manager website not working as intended: 

  • Abandonment or irritation from a task-motivated client or prospect tired of waiting for your site to load. (See our post on how financial advisors are losing patience with slow asset manager sites.) 
  • Sales preferring workarounds to having to deal with the site. For example, does your team insist on downloading and saving fact sheet PDFs rather than sharing links to the fund profile pages or online fact sheets? Understandable, they’re choosing the path of least resistance. But it’s a practice that impedes your ability to partner with Sales to collect and share the data that’s available when advisors visit and engage with web pages.  
  • A souring first impression from the media. As much as we’d like them to just take our word for it, reporters are going to do their own vetting when the Lowe Group proposes a portfolio manager as a subject matter expert. What if the PM isn’t immediately discoverable on your site? Worse, what if a Google search surfaces something unflattering? Could go either way. 
  • You lose when you should be winning the easy searches on Google. There is no explicit incentive to Google to rank your site first. Google’s motivation is to deliver the best experience to the searcher. If you’re not delivering it for your brand and your brand keywords, you don’t win. You lose. 

Forgive us for showing a little tough love here. It’s only because our wish for your firm is to be the very best version of yourself online—and the first step to getting there is to recognize what’s stopping you. 

Custom-designed for asset managers 

Today we’re announcing the Lowe Group Visibility Grader, which was built with you in mind.  

The Visibility Grader is: 

  • Custom-designed for asset managers. Take the grader if you’re a CEO, CMO, Head of PR or Head of Digital Marketing interested in focusing on measuring visibility-graderthe impact of your work. And/or take the grader if you’re interested in strengthening the connection between the impact of your work to business results. Take the grader if you’re a PR executive seeking to initiate a measurement discussion with your digital marketing counterpart or vice versa. The results of the grader can give you the common ground you need for greater alignment. 
  • Easy to do. It starts with you providing answers to five simple questions.    
  • Not automated. Unlike the array of fabulous tools available to digital marketers online today (I personally never met a tool I didn’t like!), you can’t get the results in 30 seconds. We’ll need some time to complete the diagnostic, which is based on decades of awareness-raising experience within the industry.  
  • Delivered in two parts: a quantitative assessment based on the results of the tool and a review of the results—and ideas on what to do about them—with Lowe Group Founder & President and PR focused pro Jody Lowe and me. 

Do you have a sneaking suspicion that things could be working better? Or, are you fairly confident and you just want to confirm your site’s awesomeness? Are you somewhere in between? Take the Visibility Grader and let’s see. 

To fire up the process or to learn more about it, send us an email.