5 Game-Changing Integrations Every Fund Manager Needs to Stay Ahead
Adapting To The Digital Investment Universe
It can be a baffling concept, but fund marketing has gone so far beyond the odd email, the monthly fund factsheet and the casual visit to an industry event that there’s no going back to those simpler times. The coronavirus lockdown shifted mindsets, and indeed methods, for marketing practicality. Mostly, it introduced the need for integrations to assess the growing online activity of investors from anywhere around the globe.
In the brand awareness phase, every potential investors’ behaviour is varied, making it tricky to understand your audience and prove to the C-suite where inflows begin and which platforms gain valuable leads. It’s they who’ll be keen to hear about ROI from fund content creation, and not to mention your sky-reaching AI approaches!
But it’s not just a larger number of investors (that you won’t see in person) and today’s trends making fund marketing more difficult these days. The sheer amount of systems available to decision-makers can be confusing. Not all of them will serve their purpose to help engage investors and increase or retain assets, but marketers will still need a few to act as a connected hive, mind tracking and mapping investors’ digital touchpoints that are sporadic at best.
On one hand, systems need to push content out. They also need to serve you connected data for deeper analysis, which can help the investor-first relationship managers doing the tough job of calling people up and pitching the firm or a fund product. Luckily, for crafting targeted drip campaigns or finding renewal opportunities, integrating multiple systems together, then feeding AI with touchpoint data, segments insights in a single convenient view, where further actions can have a brilliant impact on upped AuM.
Integrations may make marketers step aside from their artistic merits (content creation, factsheet designs etc.) to enter data analysis mode, yet it’s imperative to harness tools like PowerBI or even intricate ExCel formats to tie together timely investor reporting. Plus, uniting every integral marketing pillar is ideal to set automations loose, reduce manual time and pinpoint contacts and contribute to quarterly KPIs. In this series, we’ll discover our five best integrations every fund manager should utilise for growing contact bases.
Connecting To The CRM Hub
Marketing technology – or MarTech for some – has come a long way in identifying a range of digital touchpoints across a website, email, investor portal, social media or event platform. Some marketers may be handy in ExCel to collate information, but that’s still a long winded cut-and-paste job that doesn’t provide the long-term automated benefit of integrations.
The golden ticket is to get all of the interaction data from these martech platforms into one place. That’s the CRM’s role: your go-to Yellow Pages for every contact and every part of your marketing ecosystem that they look at or connect with. The CRM is therefore quality for the marketing/sales tag-team, showing who’s been active across varying content formats or themes. Behaviours become obvious (particular frequency ones) and are tracked in real-time beyond the classic static Rolodex data like addresses, holdings of valuation statements. With AI integrated into a CRM, it can actually surface these appetites into ‘levels of engagement’ groups so that time isn’t wasted on investors that gave up looking into your content a year ago, as follows:
Low hanging fruit: your actively engaged investors
Cross-selling opportunities: existing investors expanding their portfolio with different funds
Redemption risk: investors that have cooled interactions with your content
Marketing alpha: dormant customers with recent renewed interest
The AI CRM integration therefore grants a systemic, timely report system for a sales team who traditionally would spend their BAU trawling through these contacts. AI is still fairly in an infancy for fund marketing day-to-day, yet as an integrated tool lying below the surface, it does an awful lot of heavy lifting.
So how to set up a CRM integration? So long as you perform an audit of your CRM, related tools and their APIs, you’re good to go in integrating platforms that visualise contacts ripe for a call or email sequence. Starting this journey comes down to understanding the organisational behaviour of your fund and the connection between a marketer and a CTO. Their motivations may differ, but a buying mindset for APIs and integrations should always be done with the whole fund’s AuM-boosting outcome in mind. Some CTOs are ‘empire builders’ that set out to create and connect the architecture themselves. Others will buy best-in-breed solutions that encompass adds-on as standard.
There’s no right or wrong way here; whether you’re connecting applications like Zapier, Mulesoft or other, integrations are as much a technical challenge as they are a dynamic shift for marketing operations. Having the discipline to maintain integrations and automations properly over time is what’s key – it’s wrong to assume systems will work all the time, every time when they need updates!
Making Events Your Engagement Powerhouse
Neglecting events altogether would be a fund faux pas. Not only has the move to digital provided instant access to potential and existing investors, wherever you or they may be (for 1-to-1 catch ups or for hosting investment-themed webinars), but they’re low-cost, fast and provide the richest source of engagement.
What do we mean here? Time! If an investor signs up (and hopefully turns up) to your talk, they’re showing that they’re willing to give up the most valuable commodity to hear what you have to say. That’s invaluable to learn who among your audience is in tune with what you’re offering.
Like with any digital marketing platform however, an event manager only levels-up with deep integrations that can house, harness, and cross-reference event and website data with your custom reporting dashboards. This is because attendee behaviours can be all over the place due to individual circumstances, or how powerful your communications with them are:
Did they register and leave their details?
Did they attend the meeting?
How long did they stay in the room?
Did they interact/chat with your host?
Did they receive and/or open the webinar replay?
It’s your captured CRM data that will identify who stayed the whole course, those who downloaded a replay, and who has interacted with up to 4 or 5 things across your marketing ecosystem, all segmented accordingly using integrated AI. Such granular details signal hot leads for salespeople on one hand and display the most engaged subscribers for a fund marketer to build out next steps using automations, including where to trigger follow-up emails or content roundups in nurture campaigns.
The good thing about event automations is that, like a revolving door, you can send out communications to see what sticks, or carry on out the way you came in if it doesn’t. It’s a bit of an experiment!
Investor Portals Beyond A First Impression
Portals are a bit of a pet peeve. Fund marketers can spend an age building out an expensive looking interface with all the whiz-bang user experience functions imaginable. As pretty as they can be, the trouble is that many investors will always rather download and file away fund performance documentation anyway. That’s just an old school way of doing things that’s still preferred to this day!
Remember when U2 made their album available on iPods no matter what? The same principle exists here – so often a portal that goes beyond its primary function is something investors do not want or need. What is important, however, is discovering from your integrated CRM data how many investors are using the portal or would rather receive fund information via email, to determine how much time to spend on improving each platform.
It’s also useful to be able to see portal sign-ins on an interaction timeline. When this information is hooked up with your CRM, and grouped by behaviours via a lead deck, this will show who’s consuming this product-centric information, if their activity has reduced across both portals and website pages, and indeed which other funds they may be looking at beyond their holdings. This is gold dust for salespeople to latch onto cross-selling opportunities.
A portal works fantastically to account for buyer decisions. But it’s far greater an asset to a fund marketer when you can integrate every investor’s touchpoints from portals and beyond into a single view. This ensures you gain actionable insights to serve them more content around what they’re investing in, or alternative themes they’re clearly interested in learning more about. When you catch their preferences and serve it back to them unprompted, that’s the personalisation they’re looking for in today’s competitive financial landscape.
How To Always Stay Front-of-Mind
Websites and social media feel like a given for fund marketers now, and many may wonder what all the fuss is about these days. However, the two brand-heavy platforms are considered workhorses for a reason. Generally speaking, around 5% of investors know you already and are actively keeping an eye on your content. The other 95% are still floating out there in the ether. You need to present your fund content their way, all the time, and draw their credentials from socials and websites into your CRM.
To do this, it comes down to (you guessed it) integration. Namely, pulling together such useful numbers as page views, subscription list increases, sign-ups from website landing pages, and even polls and surveys on LinkedIn into your one-view dashboard. The two mediums are always there as night-and-day awareness tools, but cannot work alone. So long as you check through these drawn-together metrics, you can see which web pages are popular, which call to actions need to be optimised, and where ad spend or UX functionality.
Ultimately websites and social media channels are drivers in scaling up a customer base, and with some TLC they can continue to scale a fund’s popularity through increased engagement, while providing marketing attribution through investor data shared and cross-referenced via integrated channels.
A Dashboard Tailored To Your Fund
Gaining intel across every platform is what helps a marketer determine their contributions within the overall MarTech stack. When you have email automations, portals, sites, event platforms, CRMs and maybe YouTube channels all running in tandem, it’s a serious effort to maintain oversight on every major metric you need to justify fund or campaign performance and marketing spend including:
Touchpoints across website landing pages and forms
Email opens or URL referrals
Conversions
Inflows into a fund
Instead, getting advanced insights into each of these factors relies on visualising the data together from a singular hub. Advanced reporting tools can be integrated well with this omnichannel marketing approach to do just this, all in real-time. Marketers can correlate touchpoints to timelines that showcase investors’ increasing or decreasing appetites, or they can mine further into maps, seeing which individuals, companies and regions are particularly receptive to certain content formats or themes.
Whatsmore reporting platforms such as PowerBI or Tableau are relatively simple to master over a weekend or two of video tutorials, and are a consistent, returnable resource that acts like a Venn diagram of quantitative results across many strands of a go-to market strategy: brand awareness, demand generation, email and content marketing. Such data underpins the sales team’s customer-facing operation of locating and selling to investors to up AuM.
From Integrations to A Content Marketing Carousel
Integrating data and various marketing channels is more than a quick fix; it takes a prolonged mindset to maintain data cleanliness and integrity, check that all systems are running without glitches, update them accordingly, and see whether add-ons are in fact contributing to your goal of increased investors and assets.
When every channel is working as one unit though, they’re all tools that help your marketing exist 24 hours a day for all potential customers on the lookout to make an investment. Your fund is always an option to be found online – from the collected data, it’s up to the strategists to build cadences for their universe of investors, putting a tailored content marketing plan into action.
Integrations are integral to any sized firm, from boutique to large scale asset managers, that reach out to at least 50 investors a week (and hopefully counting!). There’s no need to waste precious time or effort in observing data when machine learning tools and APIs ensure no investor data goes amiss, helping you polish outreach programmes built to last from an easily controllable, one-view nerve centr.
Get started with your integrations today, and to learn more, check out our webinar replay on all things connectivity for digital marketers.
