B2B Financial Advertising Strategy

Key Takeaways

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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:

• Retirement Management: “Help your client manage retirement and beyond.”
• Emotional Decisions: “Help to keep clients away from making emotional financial decisions.”
• Growing Industries: “Help clients take advantage of growing industries.”
• Long-Term Rewards: “Help clients remain focused on long-term rewards.”

blackrock.com Financial Professionals-Focused Campaigns:

• Invest in Something Bigger: “Active managers have targeted factors to drive returns for decades, who says you can’t do the same with an ETF?”
• iShares ETFs: “Find tax-efficient alternatives.”
• Bond ETFs: “Open up new paths to pursue income for your clients.”

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BlackRock maintains several web properties that cater to different investor audiences: 

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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.

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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

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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. 

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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.

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BlackRock mainly distributed the animated videos through desktop video ads on yahoo.com (68%) and news.yahoo.com (19%).

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The $181K in spend for ads linking to blackrock.com was spread across three campaigns.

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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

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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

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The third campaign leveraged three different messages to promote bond ETFs.

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Ad placement was nearly equally split between desktop and mobile display.