Investors are all over the digital realm researching funds to place their money into. Funds can no longer see them all face-to-face or greet them at events, so only successful marketing teams can track every email, website, social media or portal touchpoint to personalise the right content and drive potential conversions.
Building out a go to market (GTM) strategy is the cornerstone for any brilliant campaign planning, whereby fund marketers outline their investment narrative, brand awareness, outbound marketing channels, inbound engagement, and ways to analyse touchpoint data.
Assessing every step’s success comes down to business-as-usual habits that we’ve seen marketers implement well to boost AuM. In this three-part series, we’ll explore the nine key practices funds can follow to do just that.
Brand Experience
No matter whether we’re looking to invest in a pension, open a current account, or buy a pair of trainers, all buying decisions come down to trust. So much of this lies in consumers buying into a brand’s narrative, which revolves around building awareness in their philosophy: something that bleeds what they do, and why they do it.
Just because funds aren’t the biggest sports or fast food brand does not mean this exact method does not apply. In fact, the financial industry only seems trustworthy to 59% of people. Funds face an uphill struggle to get investors to place their money with them, where accessibility, clarity and authenticity in their messaging helps.
Successful marketers define a narrative upfront and blend it into their blog content, website copy, and brand design for social channels with utmost consistency. While investor appetites and user bases will evolve over time, the brand experience can be subtly changed, but even the largest fund brands with large budgets make sure to keep their familiar essence intact.
Gaining trust takes time, but when a wide group of investors starts to invest in your content and services, others will follow, and a better brand experience builds itself.
Content Generation
Producing thought leadership, marketing outlooks, interview videos and podcasts is a huge multifaceted operation. It feels like it can take military precision planning to pin down investment advisors or portfolio managers to put together an informed article or appear in a social media video, just to paste them once on LinkedIn for quick engagement.
However, there’s a far easier way to prolong the shelf life of the very best content: recycle it! Investors like to learn about investment strategies, fund performance and outlooks in multiple ways, so refashioning content pieces into digestible formats is incredibly valuable, especially so with simple social-sharing automations in place.
If you take a popular investment trend and spend some time compiling a high-quality white paper around it, you can take a ‘Russian Doll’ approach to make every section shine in the following ways:
Break down the research into a series of blogs to drip into nurture emails, keeping investors interested in the topic and wanting more
Pull out stats and quotes for infographics and quick-win social posts
Recap its main takeaways in a video, then post it to a website landing page to evaluate sign-up data
On the website topic, this remains the fund marketer’s ultimate lead generation tool. Content remains evergreen online and the site can integrate with a CRM to feed it invaluable insights into visitor demographics. Adhering to larger pools of potential investors lies in multimedia, where re-formatting content helps funds work smarter, not harder.
Planning
We all know that fund marketing teams comprise many members, not including the sales or distribution people that are tightly associated with marketing too. If they all work on independent schedules to write, edit, distribute and analyse content, there’s a real risk of inefficiency. Unnecessary repetition doesn’t just kill time, but it can alienate investors if they’re hit by the same external communications again and again.
Project and task management tools are a bloated market, but that goes far in identifying how important it is to control the content planning, approval and sending process. Even for juggling this task on every martech channel, a simple Excel interface can track fund marketers’ activities across weeks or months. Following a single path keeps things in check, and maintains that the GTM strategy domino effect is a positive one!
Check back soon for the next instalment of this series, where we’ll delve further into the data-handling habits fund marketers should adopt to refine their digital journeys.
