Paid Channel Audience Focus — Individual Investors: In 2020, BlackRock directed 96% of its advertising dollars to the domain ishares.com, with the remaining 4% of ads linking to blackrock.com. ishares.com is geared towards both individual investors and financial professionals. Of the ad spend directed to ishares.com, 97% was focused on ads targeting individual investors. Thus, BlackRock only spent 7% ($260K) of its total ad spend in 2020 targeting Financial Professionals.
Content & Messaging: BlackRock split their Financial Professional-focused ad spend between ishares.com and blackrock.com, with different campaigns for each domain.
ishares.com Financial Professionals-Focused Campaigns:
blackrock.com Financial Professionals-Focused Campaigns:
BlackRock maintains several web properties that cater to different investor audiences:
In 2020, BlackRock significantly reduced its digital ad spend by 45% YoY. BlackRock’s ad spend from Jan. to Feb. of 2021 was significantly lower than previous years.
In 2020, BlackRock directed 96% of its advertising dollars to the domain ishares.com, with the remaining 4% of sponsored ads linking to blackrock.com
ishares.com is geared towards both individual investors and financial professionals. Yet, in 2020 Blackrock primarily targeted individual investors with digital ads linking to the iShares website.
Blackrock directed its $80K spend targeted towards financial professionals on four animated videos. The videos called on FPs to help clients manage their retirement, take advantage of growing industries, not make emotional decisions, and focus on long-term rewards.
BlackRock mainly distributed the animated videos through desktop video ads on yahoo.com (68%) and news.yahoo.com (19%).
The $181K in spend for ads linking to blackrock.com was spread across three campaigns.
The largest campaign (by spend) called on FPs to “invest in something bigger” and led to a landing page explaining factor investing.
Total campaign spend: $108K
The second largest campaign focused on BlackRock’s Tax Evaluator tool, which enables financial professionals to identify potential savings for their clients.
Total campaign spend: $29K
The third campaign leveraged three different messages to promote bond ETFs.
Ad placement was nearly equally split between desktop and mobile display.