Leveraging RSS to Master the Content Challenge It is widely understood by money managers and advisors that there are two primary purposes of an effective website. The first is telling your story to prospective clients, while the second is to reinforce that story with existing clients. The first is about the design and execution of your marketing message. The second is about the timeliness and quality of your client reporting. Depending on a firm’s age and plans for growth, either one of these may take priority, but both are critical in order to be competitive. We have written at length about the importance of having an attractive, aesthetically engaging site to attract new business. It is essential to move away from long textual product descriptions and processes and place preference on rich images, professional photography and video in order to hold attention. Likewise, fully consolidated, firm branded, information driven daily reporting has become the best practice standard for client reporting. Both of these are fundamental capabilities of InvestCloud, which we have delivered to hundreds of managers and advisors. Our cReporting suite of applets is the only comprehensive, platform agnostic, fully custom client reporting available in the industry. With the foundation of these critical elements of your site in place, what should the next priority be? From our experience of building and managing hundreds of sites, the clear next step is creating dynamic content. Dynamic content is the ongoing messaging and commentary that give people a reason to return to your site. It gives prospective clients a reason to keep you in mind, and current clients a better understanding of your strategy and responses to moves in the markets. The most basic form of dynamic content is a core news and market data feed. This is also the easiest to employ, as it requires no maintenance once it is set up. It is not relevant to some firms, but for those to whom it applies, it is a very low-cost way to say, “Our firm is connected to what is going on.” The legacy of dynamic content consists of firm newsletters, quarterly commentary, and white papers. Doing these things well has never been easy, and with the more frequent weekly and monthly cycles that clients are coming to expect, it has become even more challenging. In fact, one of the reasons for the rising popularity of blogs is that their shorter and more informal nature makes them easier to produce more frequently and consistently. At InvestCloud, one of our core strategies for creating dynamic site content is to leverage RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to create mash-ups of blogs and articles relevant to your firm’s investment orientation or to the personal interests of your firm’s clients. Although RSS has been around for more than a decade it has only really taken off in the last few years. What it provides is a standard, easy to use format for aggregating and organizing content from other websites. When used effectively, it allows you to leverage the editorial efforts of others to improve the quality and quantity of visits to your site. RSS uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information like blog posts, news articles, audio, and video. Given that the RSS feed includes both text, and key metadata, in a standard XML file, we are able to configure the content to fit within the design format of your firm’s site. They way that the feeds are setup as subscriptions (even-though most do not require registration) allows us to have new posts or articles downloaded automatically.
By using our curated collection of RSS feeds, we can include everything from insights on retirement and estate planning, to world news from the BBC, to business building strategies from Harvard or MIT in your client portal. We maintain over a dozen categories covering investment news and market strategy, private equity, hedge and alternative strategies, ETFs, etc., compiling more than 100 source feeds for articles and blog posts, which enables us to create tailored content for most firm types. We begin by identifying a list of sources that correspond to a firm’s investment approach and client types or concentrations. From these sources we create a firm specific content stream that populates the firm’s site with dozens of new articles and posts every week. With this service we allow you to offer your clients a custom financial portal to offset the noise of CNBC and strengthen your firm’s long term messaging. The foundation of a competitive website is that it must be aesthetically attractive and offer client reporting. After that, the most important element is current and relevant (dynamic) content. The most simple, sustainable, and powerful way to get that content is by effectively using RSS to leverage the editorial work of others. For asset managers and advisors no one has more experience doing this than InvestCloud. If you would like to learn more, visit us at www.investcloud.com or click here to request a demo.