Last time, we looked into the powers of GTM planning to drive brand awareness, content creation and sharing: skills successful funds implement to boost their assets.
It’s also impossible to overlook how important data is to engage investors, track their activity, and adhere to their tastes to convert them to leads. Here are three habits we see continually that showcase how best to utilise housed data.
Data analysis
It’s strange to wrap your head around how much data funds collect daily. When an investor engages with content across a website, a YouTube channel, or by signing up to a webinar, it can be hard to understand where they are along the buyer journey without gathering their details into a CRM.
Then again, a human being cannot oversee every channel with eight arms or possibly remember every past, present or future investor’s preferences. Data dashboards offer the unique ability to compartmentalise data, including geographical location, fund performance, and competitor analysis, into visual representations. But it only tells half the story.
Marketers must plan for what they need to gain from their data according to the C-suite’s expectations. Building out a dashboard comes after, where the interface should help to display exactly how engagement data, fund inflows and lead conversions are connected to achieve AuM increases. Sometimes only metrics like portal sign-ins or fund page hits can identify this most accurately. More can be less.
Similarly, for all the rich interactive pie charts available via dashboards, if the data isn’t exportable to Excel formats as many funds look for, the dashboard may be too complex and fluffy to gain the proper insights you need.
Demonstrating ROI in Fund Marketing
Defining return on investment (ROI) is never easy. The C-suite demands to see the proof in the pudding, but when marketers must oversee so many factors at the start, middle and end of every investor journey, there’s no final number to draw up.
In answering the woolly question “How is marketing going?”, internal growth metrics are the best evidence marketers can use to present their case. One of the positives of a well-constructed dashboard is simply defining trends over time for considerations including:
New and active prospects
Contacted prospects
New opportunities created
Size of distribution groups
Unsubscribe rates
With a simple green arrow indicating an increase or a downward arrow showing the opposite, changes in these value-added insights indicate where extra attention needs to be paid to increase investor engagement for content or platforms. That knowledge can influence much-needed experimentation (with A/B tested campaign emails, for instance) to add AuM and prove which specific activities achieve ROI.
Sales Enablement for Fund Marketing
Sales and marketing are inextricably linked in their dual goal to reach investors and convert them into valued customers. Marketers collate the data from inbound and outbound efforts in a CRM, then supply the sales team with the actual contacts ripe for an upsell, cross-sell or introductory call or email.
The secret trick is to segment the activity of investors in a lead deck without any manual intervention. These days, artificial intelligence runs much of this operation, categorising the appetites of investors: those just starting to look at your webpages, once dormant prospects reacting to your content once again, or completely cold leads. AI does this through behavioural analysis of their interactions – in seconds, no less, that even the most super powered human analyst cannot!
Keeping the CRM tidy is not an afterthought, but a necessary spring clean that helps support insight sharing within a close-knit sales and marketing machine.
Next in the series, we’ll look into three internal learning and communication habits marketers can adopt to better their investor targeting.
