10 Tips to Establish Branded Fund Content Across the Globe
Digital marketing has made the world feel a little smaller – and that’s a very good thing for fund marketers. Back in the day, being able to promote your brand ‘offline’ would have involved in-person meetings with investors able to arrive via plane, train or automobile. Now, a whole pool of investors can be met whenever, wherever.
Funds can exhibit a bias for feeling they already know everything about who their main prospects are and what they want. But you cannot account for every engaged hotspot just from a handful of your hand-picked personas. Investments are naturally influenced by macro- and micro-economics, politics and more, so opening up services to other markets full of appetite for your fund content can be profitable – especially when digital channels exist to help you reach them more easily all from the comfort of your office space or home sofa.
Plus, identifying geographic investment trends assists a fund to rethink which subjects are hot to cover, leading to renewed interest in a range of your thought pieces, videos or webinars in varying regions.
Even the huge investment houses with worldwide reach struggle to reinvigorate their brand awareness, and asset managers looking to diversify their brand awareness may be wary of compliance, cultural and linguistic and hurdles that hinder fund content marketing to different jurisdictions. However, the insights and behaviours you see through marketing channels democratises any fund’s global branding strategy, when you know how!
Here’s our tips for reaching ‘invisible investors’ that’ll be searching for your fund from wherever they’re based online.
1. Keep Things Consistent
For every financial giant that offers multi-site instances in various languages with tailored product suites, a memorable brand will be understood by any investor from the first glance. In fact, maintaining that consistency is easier for smaller firms that will have fewer marketing channels to dress in their colours, and less chance of losing their voice or the story behind what the fund stands for. People choose to do business with companies they trust – keeping things authentic, professional and ‘together’ will make a brand more notable, no matter where it gets spotted online.
2. Showcase Your Website
As the go-to place for everything a fund exhibits (brand, content, forms, fund centres, portals etc) making a website easy to find for every global investor is paramount. SEO is what can tie your brand with your field of expertise, presenting your site content to the tops of Google’s (or other search engines) first page. Filling your website with entertaining content will assist this, as will optimising headings, alt text, and metadata with regionally popular keywords or backlinks to local websites, all able to be identified through some simple research.
3. Follow the Social Media Trail
Built-in analytics on popular social media sites are excellent to work out which geographies your posts are performing well in. Socials are powerful in taking branded insights to every corner of the globe in just a few clicks, and especially so with paid media that can target regions where certain investment content is met with a hub of interest. Even thinking simply about posting times that can reach many accessible timezones in one hit will get more eyes on everything you put out into the ether.
4. Analyse Your Online Interactions
When you have your CRM linked to the website or social platforms, you can track and accumulate every opened email or downloaded PDF in one place, allowing you to visualise the global reach for certain content formats or topics. The data web is vast, but dashboards, world heat maps and word clouds crunch down millions of investor interactions into snackable insights. These point marketers towards distributing popular content to the regions where it’s seen the most; effectively targeting the places more likely to contain potential leads.
5. Regionalise Content
It’s easier to tap into financial content that’s personalised to where you’re from. When appealing to certain geographies, even small edits to text or image around currencies, political affairs, and language-specific nuances go a long way. Videos, stats and infographics are great ways to convey complex financial information in easily understandable formats, while email templates can be duplicated and quickly edited to account for localised elements that can fit culturally with the target market.
6. Split-Test Success
The beauty of A/B split testing is you can take any hyper-localised content out on the road and see if it resonates with the intended investor personas – all before a rollout into that new market. Higher open rates or lead scores can showcase their quantitative success, while surveys or feedback sessions with different user groups can bolster the accessibility of your content campaigns. The customer knows best!
7. Automate Outreach
Achieving widespread campaign success is not easy, but automated tasks help to limit the manual tasks that make marketing to new markets scary. Email automations can be set up to send templates to regional groups of investors, while even quick CMS plugins and AI can provide suggestions for translations, grammar, market sentiment and contextual information to make sure communications respectfully address the end investor in mind.
8. Consider Compliance
Data privacy laws, as well as standards around disclaimers, all differ jurisdictionally to make financial compliance a minefield. Reducing the risk of wrongdoing (and subsequent fines for failing the rules) means conducting some expertise into cross-border outreach or investing in a platform that identifies marketing compliance. This is particularly true when promoting funds, but also when sharing financial content. Some countries do extend regulations to translated language use for disclosures and in terms and conditions.
9. Adapt to Different Devices
It should be a given already to optimise content for every screen, and it’s even more necessary knowing that certain regions are keen on accessing sites and content through mobile more than desktop. Ensuring web pages and email newsletter layouts look and feel great to navigate in ideal in letting investors engage with your brand at their own pace on their device-of-choice.
10. Go Sightseeing!
Sometimes the old school is the best school. While omnichannel marketing and automation ensure your content does the rounds in the digital world, sometimes learning about regional preferences for financial content means attending fund industry events in different countries, or joining online webinars and roundtables focused on trends. Transparency and openness around investing is always valued, and even simpler and more enjoyable in person, if possible!
Reaching global markets can involve many digital channels. But more often than not, these strategies involve delving into the data to understand the financial wants and needs that differ from place to place. Modern fund marketing is all based around personalisation: investors, no matter where, want to feel thought about and enlightened by an expert voice through fund content. Seeing zonal results can give marketers much food for thought when building sector-specific campaigns, as well as influence their overall expertise on the investment world at large.
ProFundCom assists fund marketers create brand awareness with global reach through various strategies and tools tailored to the financial industry, including:
Email Marketing Campaigns: With ProFundCom’s email marketing platform, create targeted campaigns that promote brand messaging, thought leadership content, and industry insights to a segmented audience, increasing brand visibility and recognition.
Unified Data Management: Fund marketers can consolidate customer data, engagement metrics, and campaign performance from various sources to gain a comprehensive view of their audience and marketing activities in one platform.
Social Media Integration: Amplify brand messaging across various social platforms by sharing content, engaging with followers, and participating in industry discussions.
Website Optimization: By improving website design, content quality, user experience and SEO strategies, marketers can attract more visitors and strengthen brand visibility online.
Scheduled Content Delivery: Send content across multiple channels, including email, social media, and websites, and pre-schedule campaigns and posts to maintain a consistent presence online and reach audiences at optimal times.
Personalised Content Recommendations: Using data analytics and user behaviour tracking, ProFundCom can recommend tailored content to website visitors and leads based on their interests and engagement history.
