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Research & Insights

Thought leadership content is a critical way for asset managers to promote their investment philosophy, display how their products respond to market conditions, and win over advisors.

New Research Highlights the Crucial Role that Digital Content Plays in Financial Advisor Decision Making

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Connecting investor dollars with asset manager strategies

Financial advisors play a crucial role in connecting investor dollars with asset manager strategies. With that crucial role come extensive demands on their time, as they juggle tasks including administration, investment research, and prospecting for new clients. Asset managers must work around those demands on advisors’ time to successfully place their products at the top of advisor’s minds, and into client portfolios.

ISS MI’s latest report, the ISS MI Advisor Pulse Series – Digital Content study, captures the importance of digital content in influencing advisors’ investment decisions. The report is the result of interviews with over 600 advisors performed in September 2024. The results show that thought leadership content is a critical way for asset managers to promote their investment philosophy, display how their products respond to market conditions, and win over advisors.

Digital Content is directly influencing product choices

Large numbers of advisors surveyed acknowledged that digital content directly influenced their choice to recommend or invest in a product from an asset manager. Thought leadership and educational content worked through a variety of ways. Some advisors mentioned the benefits of focused product education, with one stating, “It gives me the intellectual ammunition to feel confident recommending certain funds and/or strategies.” Another discussed how this content can be the first step in a beneficial partnership, saying “One company provides ample market and economic research, so I’ve used their products over others due to the level of help I receive from the client conversion element.” Even those who were hesitant to directly tie their investment decisions to content acknowledged its useful potential. One mentioned, “It helps to build a case to use their portfolio if they can show how it makes sense via content.”

Advisors consume content through a wide range of different mediums and touchpoints. They were most likely to rate in-person events as the most useful method of receiving insights from asset managers, with 30% rating them “extremely useful.” Customized and personalized emails ranked second as 19% of advisors said they were extremely useful. While in-person events are much appreciated by advisors, it will be difficult for them to act as the primary touchpoint for disseminating asset manager content. Not only will they be more expensive for asset managers to host and more difficult to scale, but advisors will have limited bandwidth to attend all of the sessions which pique their interest..

Asset managers will need to employ a variety of touchpoints to reach advisors.

When asked their preferred medium for consuming pre-prepared content from asset managers, advisors were most open to digital copies of written reports. 38% chose that compared to 28% for in-person presentations. This preference differed vastly by advisor channel. RIAs overwhelmingly preferred digital copies to in-person presentations, breaking for the former by 49% compared to 9% for the latter. Broker/dealer and wirehouse advisors meanwhile exhibited a much higher preference for in-person presentations. The ability to consume content at their convenience remains paramount for RIA advisors, likely due to the lower levels of centralized support they receive compared to other channels.

Figure 1: RIAs prefer content they can consume at their convenience.

What is your preferred medium for consuming pre-prepared content from asset managers?

Source: ISS MI Advisor Pulse Series – Digital Content, October 2024

Six times each year, ISS Market Intelligence (ISS MI) surveys Advisors across the country to understand the advisor decision making process and their perceptions of firms across the asset management industry. Download a Summary of the latest issue of the Advisor Pulse research series.


Alan Hess, Vice President, ISS Market Intelligence

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