We were recently proud to stage our Q3 2022 Beacon Connect Meeting for members of the Beacon benchmarking community. Beacon Connect Meetings serve as a great opportunity for members of our community to discuss recent industry marketing trends, divulge examples of best practices, build camaraderie over common struggles, and engage with the benchmarking data trends from the past quarter that we detail.
We highlighted the following digital marketing trends in our industry from Q3 2022:
- The fact that, from Q2 to Q3, we saw an increase in visitors to content pages (i.e. thought leadership pages, insights, blogs), yet bounce rate for these pages remained high. This illustrates that although users are being enticed to visit content pages, they typically only skim-read them before leaving. What can your team do to craft more engaging content and keep users on your site once they have reached your page?
- The fact that the average engagement rate has increased on LinkedIn from Q2 to Q3, while the number of average posts published per month has decreased. This begs the question of whether posting less actually drives user engagement. With LinkedIn feeds being continually flooded with content, audiences are left struggling to keep up – and have shorter attention spans than ever. Beacon data reveals that posting less (three times per week, on average) will help you improve your user engagement.
- The question ‘Is Twitter dead?’ was prominent this quarter. Beacon data indicates that the number of Twitter posts created per month, the rate of engagement with them, and the rate of growth in followers have all been on the decline throughout 2022. How is your own social media team keeping up with the ever-changing digital world?
Speaking of social media, White Marble’s own brilliant Ross and Sofia presented at our recent Connect Meeting on the topic of social media best practice. They led a discussion that explored the questions:
- What platforms are you using and what are you using them for?
- What are your audiences’ interests on each platform?
- How often are you posting and what is the most effective media type?
As social media continually grows as an impressive digital tool that asset managers can use to drive lead generation, Beacon members expressed a growing interest in learning about how they can best utilize each platform.
This quarter we also shared a new product feature that includes a CSV rollout of 13 months’ worth of aggregated data from Beacon, spanning website metrics, social media, content, website quality and email data. We concluded that firms are able to incorporate Beacon data into their own internal reporting through the CSV output. Monthly, quarterly and yearly benchmarks are available within this data set, so that members are able to measure how well they’re performing relative to the group.
As Beacon continues to evolve, we plan to expand our current list of benchmarks (web, social, search, site quality, content, email) to soon include media spend, events, brand, and marketing operations. Get in contact with our Beacon Team to be included in digital marketing benchmarking for Q1 2023.
We want to thank the firms that attended our recent Connect Meeting and hope you found it useful to connect with your industry peers. We welcomed attendees from Artemis, Natixis IM, EdenTree IM, Aviva Investors, Columbia Threadneedle, T.Rowe Price and Sarasin & Partners. As always, we appreciate the engagement and participation from all the firms that join us and help make this event a success.
The next meeting will be held on the 16th of February from 3-5pm GMT at our London office.
If you would like to attend our next Connect Meeting, please contact us to join the Beacon community. We look forward to hearing from you.