When it comes to attracting investors to your ETF, marketing is everything. You’ll need a clever marketing strategy to draw their attention and boost your AUM. 

Of course, growing your ETF AUM means getting your product in front of the right investors who need it, whether you’re an established ETF provider or launching a new ETF from scratch. Once you grab their attention, you’ll need to be quick and efficient about how you communicate your product’s benefits.

Use these seven expert ETF marketing tips — from finding your product’s niche to establishing PR opportunities and working with micro-influencer — to help you attract new investors.

1. Start with a custom ETF marketing plan

You’ll need a custom digital marketing plan to generate buzz and raise brand awareness for your exchange-traded fund. This means leaning into digital ads in all the right places where investors interested in your product like to spend time. 

Define your audience

When you market your ETF online, start by asking yourself, “Who am I marketing this to?”

For example, if you have a product that focuses on commodities, you need to get your product in front of investors who are interested in alts. An investor who holds a clean 60/40 portfolio and sticks to the world of equities and fixed income isn’t going to be interested in a commodities product. 

Your index service provider can actually be a valuable partner for finding new investor leads, especially if they have access to data that charts investor interest.

Use real-time data to customize your marketing plan 

Most investors research online. As investors become more aware of your brand and product, a custom digital marketing campaign can help you reach them faster and shorten your sales cycle. 

Don’t let your sales team waste time on cold leads. By targeting the audience that actually wants your product, you can discover better market opportunities and dramatically improve your ETF’s AUM. 

A big part of a customized digital marketing plan is making it, well, customized. Use real-time data insights and analytics to track your ideal investors. VettaFi’s lead subscription tool does just that, connecting issuers with the investors whose digital behavior suggests a match.

2. Find your niche

Your product development should start with a fundamental question: What specific investment strategy problem does this ETF solve?

In other words, what’s your niche?

The answer comes down to your ETF’s unique value proposition, whether you’re targeting retail investors, institutional clients, or both. That could be anything from enhanced tax efficiency to superior diversification, exceptional liquidity, or protection against volatility.

Other ETF niches might include:

• Risk-adjusted performance optimization.
• Cost efficiency in fee structure.
• Strategic diversification across sectors and regions.
• Tax-advantaged portfolio construction.
• Ehanced liquidity mechanisms.
• Income generation in challenging environments.
• Outperformance potential versus a specific benchmark.
• Specialized wealth management solutions for specific investor segments.

The most successful issuers identify real market voids, or combinations of attributes unavailable in existing products. 

By examining where current offerings fall short and understanding the regulatory landscape, you can find a niche for your ETF and offer meaningful solutions to your investors beyond what mutual funds can offer.

3. Use conferences and events to find sponsors

Event sponsorships are one of the most exciting ways to accelerate your ETF’s growth, enhancing brand visibility and creating meaningful connections. The most effective event marketing comes down to two areas: industry conferences and targeted live events.

Industry conferences

Financial conferences like Exchange bring together the entire financial services ecosystem, creating ideal conditions for:

• Building strategic partnerships: Connect with potential index providers, data services, and technology partners who can enhance your ETF offering.
• Industry intelligence: Gain valuable insights about market trends and competitive positioning.
• Distribution opportunities: Meet with platform gatekeepers who control access to advisor networks.

Live events

Conferences aren’t the only live events that can bolster your ETF’s marketing plan.

These other face-to-face interactions deliver big benefits that other marketing strategies can’t replace:

• Direct access to decision-makers: Get to know financial advisors, fund managers, and portfolio managers at specialized workshops, educational seminars, and private roundtable discussions focused on specific investment themes relevant to your ETF.
• Relationship development: Invitation-only roadshows, regional advisor appreciation events, and thought leadership dinners can strengthen your current partnerships and encourage meaningful conversations in more intimate settings.
• Brand humanization: Humanize the face of your ETF by hosting “meet the portfolio manager” sessions, bell-ringing ceremonies for fund launches, and investor education forums where your team can show off their expertise while connecting with potential investors.

When conferences and other live events are part of your ETF marketing strategy, they reinforce your position in the marketplace. "Sponsoring live events offers an unparalleled opportunity to put your company name and ideas directly before your target audience," said TMX VettaFi Head of Marketing Sarah Alexander. "Live events, like our Exchange conference, can foster deep engagement that digital channels cannot replicate. They also serves as an excellent medium through which to conduct business and build relationships." 

Looking for sponsorship opportunities? Talk to VettaFi about how our event sponsorship services can help you source sales opportunities, amplify your brand, and grow your AUM.

4. Create an ETF comparison tool

Adding an interactive comparison tool to your website is the best way to instantly showcase your ETF’s competitive advantages, while giving your potential investors real value that builds trust:

Design for decision-making impact

• Use compelling visualizations that make market price performance and ETF shares liquidity immediately apparent.
• Develop proprietary metrics that highlight your fund's unique strengths within its asset class.
• Enable personalized scenario testing based on individual asset allocation needs.

Implement strategic competitive positioning

• Carefully select comparison peers within the same asset class to frame your ETF's advantages effectively.
• Emphasize specific metrics where your product outperforms alternatives—from market price stability to optimal asset allocations.
• Provide contextual insights that connect ETF shares’ behavior to real investment benefits.

Leverage the tool for lead generation

• Offer basic comparisons freely while gating premium asset allocation models behind registration.
• Track which metrics (market price trends, asset class performance) drive decision-making to refine broader marketing messages.
• Create shareable comparison outputs for advisors at every major brokerage to demonstrate your ETF shares’ advantages to their clients.

Remember that a well-crafted comparison tool should guide potential investors toward understanding your ETF’s value proposition through interactive discovery, not passive marketing claims.

5. Look for PR opportunities

Say yes to any media or PR opportunity you can. A strong public relations strategy can expand your visibility and reach while building credibility.

Here’s how to make the most of every PR opportunity.

Podcast interviews

Accept interviews on financial podcasts regardless of audience size. Even niche shows can reach the right investors and influencers who might not encounter your ETF otherwise. Your outreach strategy should target both industry-leading and specialized podcasts.

Thought leadership

Establish your team’s authority by publishing thought leadership content, such as:

• Regular market commentaries on your website.
• Guest articles in respected financial publications.
• Insightful LinkedIN posts from key team members.
• Original research reports that demonstrate your investment philosophy.
• Detailed commentaries explaining your approach to asset management and your active ETF's current positioning.

Media relationships

Develop a media contact database and regular outreach schedule. When something happens in the market that aligns with your ETF’s strategy, reach out to financial journalists with concise, insightful commentary they can quote.

Measuring your PR strategy’s impact

Track your publicity’s performance by studying how it drives your ETF’s growth.  By examining the right key performance indicators (KPIs), you'll quickly identify which media activities actually convert interest into AUM, so you can double down on what works and eliminate what doesn't.

Here are some tips for analyzing your PR performance data:

Install tracking

 

Use dedicated tracking codes for each PR initiative to measure website traffic, content downloads, and subsequent investor engagement.

Connect activities to results

 

Analyze the correlation between PR activities and AUM flows by implementing attribution modeling that captures:

• Website traffic sources
• Advisor engagement metrics
• Conversion paths from initial awareness to investment.

Keep improving your approach

 

Review performance quarterly to reallocate resources toward the PR activities delivering the strongest ROI for your specific ETF.

6. Establish micro-influencer relationships

Micro-influencers who love your product are some of the most cost-effective messengers you can find. They speak directly to people who could be your next investors. 

Here’s a quick overview of the different types of micro-influencers and how they can contribute to your marketing strategy.

Types of micro-influencers

There are many different kinds of micro-influencers in the finance world:

Financial educators who explain products to beginners

 

These can be social media personalities like Kyla Scanlon, who helps her Gen Z audience understand the world of finance, or popular established bloggers like Michael Kitces. 

Market analysts with dedicated followings

 

Many influencers are analysts who have built up their own audiences over time. People like VettaFi Voice Todd Rosenbluth or Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas are great examples.

Niche Investment Specialists Who Align With Your ETF

 

Niche investment specialists are influencers who cover a narrow slice of the market, but tend to attract passionate followers worth tapping into. This is especially true if your product focus is in alignment.

How micro-influencers help your ETF marketing efforts

Micro-influencers are often exceptionally skilled at explaining complex financial products, making advanced concepts more digestible to a broad or beginner audience. 

Here are the advantages:

Connect with investors who prefer influencers over stock prospectuses

 

While plenty of investors love to pore over a prospectus, others may lose interest when they see one. Those are the people who are most likely to pay attention when their favorite influencer’s latest podcast episode goes live. 

Get mentioned more than once 

 

Another advantage? Once a micro-influencer knows your ETF’s name, they can deploy it at any time. They can also help you grow momentum by highlighting milestones in your ETF assets under management.

Boost your credibility

 

Finally, third-party credibility is hard to beat. While personal thought leadership may be considered biased, third-party advocates have no reason to plug your product if they don’t genuinely believe in it. That credibility will go a long way to helping your product establish itself.

7. Optimize your ETF’s search visibility

When people search online for ETFs like yours, you need them to be able to find you. The ETF industry is crowded and it’s not always easy to stand out. Thankfully, search engine optimization (SEO) ensures your ETF is discovered when the ideal investors are hunting for their next investment opportunity.

• Target the specific terms investors use when researching investments:
• Optimize product pages around high-intent keywords like "best small cap value ETF" or "low-cost dividend ETF."
• Create different landing pages for every investor need your ETF addresses.
• Arrange any technical date (expense ratios, holdings, performance) in search-friendly formats.
• Add schema markup to your website to enhance search listings with rich data display.

By using SEO to make your ETF more discoverable, your product will appear when investors are actively seeking the type of solutions it provides. In other words, top-notch SEO practices turn search engines and financial platforms into your most efficient marketing and distribution channels.

Discover the best ETF marketing tactics

An ETF is a marathon, not a sprint. If you want investors to invest in your product, you need to invest in the right marketing tactics.

VettaFi can help support your product throughout its lifecycle with competitive marketing materials and other specialized services that offer deep insights for engagement and growth. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help you grow.