T. Rowe Price has topped a recent ranking of asset managers’ digital maturity, driven by its content and search marketing prowess.
The report by Ultimedia, available for download here, examined the top 50 asset managers globally by AUM across 10 core areas to form an overall metric for digital maturity.
It found that US-headquartered T. Rowe Price was the overall best scorer, driven by its high scores for traffic levels, website effectiveness, search marketing and content marketing.
Capital Group, Vanguard, BlackRock and Blackstone rounded out the top five of the research.
Asset Management Digital Maturity: The Top 10
T. Rowe Price
Capital Group
Vanguard
BlackRock
Blackstone
Invesco
AllianceBernstein
Fidelity International
Franklin Templeton
PIMCO
(Source: Ultimedia 2023/24 Digital Maturity Report, Asset Management)
The report showed that asset management as an industry was significantly behind some other sectors. The average maturity score across the asset managers was 36.7%, compared to 66% for the legal industry, 70.95% for automotive and 80.43% for insurance.
The industry performed relatively well on some areas, such as content marketing. However, there were several key areas where they fell short.
One was personalisation – strikingly, none of the firms looked at offered personalised digital experiences for their audiences on their main homepages.
Email marketing was also found to be a weak area. 48% of firms failed to offer website visitors the option to subscribe to a newsletter, while of those who did, only five sent a follow-up newsletter within a week, while just 10 sent a confirmation email.
Website performance was also poor in the sector. While Google recommends a load speed under three seconds, this standard was only met by AMG and Schroders. The report said that some sites in the list took seven times longer than Google’s recommendation. This was because many of the websites were bloated with unnecessary imagery and videos.
The research also examined the most common tech platforms being used to support online offerings. Adobe Experience Manager was by far the most commonly used, with Drupal and WordPress in second and third place respectively.
“The digital revolution shows no signs of slowing, demanding that asset management firms urgently accelerate their efforts to evolve in sync with the broader industry and the wider business landscape,” the report concluded.
The research was conducted between 31 July and 29 August 2023, using 2000 data points. The core areas examined were audience size, website effectiveness, organic search marketing, paid search marketing, content marketing, personalisation, remarketing, email marketing, social media and mobile applications.
