How Brand Narratives Fuel A Formidable, Future-Proofed Fund Marketing Strategy
Have you recently found yourself in the fund marketing malaise? You find prospects, feed them into a funnel, create content, dish out content, make dashboards, look at the numbers. Rinse, repeat. Adjust, improve. And again.
Don’t get us wrong, these are all imperative tasks in the tricky day-to-day of a fund marketer, and digital platforms make ‘reaping what you sow’ from a data analytics point of view that much simpler to determine attribution. But what all of this ignores is the narrative behind the brand. Essentially: why the fund got started out in the first place.
What also gets lost in how that philosophy plays such an integral role before that analytical process. If you do not have a story, you would not have a memorable brand to tempt investors to read or watch your content, and therefore an empty CRM cupboard gathering dust.
Therefore every go-to market strategy must stem from the fund’s original history and all the relevant Intellectual Property that follows. It’s not just a few small sentences that the CEO came up with two decades ago. A narrative can build its own cinematic universe that’s consistent, memorable, entertaining, and most importantly focused on the values an investment audience comes to expect from a company with whom to trust their hard-earned savings.
What Sets a Fund’s Narrative Apart?
Online consumers get bored. In all of our digital journeys, we’re put off by the maelstrom of ads in our feeds and even the sight of potential bots. This is particularly true in B2B, where it’s really tricky to avoid the never-ending spiel about how brilliant a product suite is. In the fund’s case, performance is an overly indulged narrative that investors may find useful if they have holdings.
But prospects want stories that target their emotions and their financial goals. If it makes them curious about a new opportunity they had not ever known, or if a ‘sideways look’ at the market makes them laugh a little, that’s far more humanistic. It is not only entertaining; from an expert portfolio manager that knows their stuff, it’s informative and authentic from one passionate individual to another. When fund content links back to its origins – where it got started from the smallest of places, how it helps people, and its overall purpose in the real world – that’s something people can latch onto better than historical charts of data.
To take an example from the fast fashion world, it’s easy to get short-term satisfaction for cheap clothes, but they do not create memories or an association with the brand’s mission. Finance may feel divorced from this, but it isn’t at all marketing-wise. An informed decision to bolster an investors’ portfolio could be vital to their later life, and the fund’s narrative that kickstarted that journey will be remembered.
Where Can Narratives Be Used Strategically?
Fund marketing is not about quick transactional sales. Trust gets built over a winding sales process. Within this, the repeated use of a brand’s ideals through content keeps building on each individual investor’s storyline. Particularly when outreach is personalised, the end user’s nurtured interests are matched with the fund’s thought process, hopefully leading to a sale and long-term brand equity (how well the fund is perceived by audiences).
Consistency is key therefore. Naturally the easiest way to repeatedly showcase a fund story is with a repeatable slogan that showcases value and commitment to what they do. This can further develop into biographies and ‘About Us’ pages on a website, and every social media platform. But even more subtle could be the use of memorable taglines in email signatures, template images, and social posts.
Pictures of your team showcase them as your brand ‘storytellers’ in their own way, adding faces to even the most digital of communications. This is invaluable for smaller funds or boutiques, where it’s simple to utilise your workforce as ambassadors for the brand across all their emails, calls, and investor-facing roles at events.
Considerations for Crafting a Narrative
What do you stand for? Before anything else, take the time to reflect on the fund’s history and where it’s headed, with thought around attitude to risk, investment strategy and, yes, even performance where appropriate, to signal the fund’s areas of maximum benefit to investors.
Document what you do. This can be made an easily-accessible internal document to be introduced to new hires, or for training sessions.
Find your niche. Nobody wants the same-old. By identifying your strengths, you can stand out on digital channels with refreshing information, particularly in the world of investments where uniqueness can make complex information more accessible and interesting.
Use the narrative theme for all content. The fund story is the central character where all content formats, channel designs, topic-focused thought leaders and webinar themes can be employed tactically to consistently spread a narrative. A spreadsheet or calendar is recommended to make it more simple to ‘stick to the plan’.
Hinge on your colleagues to tell their own stories, or link up with external thought leaders, influencers and writers with shared values to grow the levels of insight and entertainment for your extended brand vision.
Always evolve. The financial world hates to be thought of as a dinosaur, and no living, breathing brand is done unless it gives up. The investment world changes, and a fund’s narrative along with it. By adapting messaging to market changes where the fund plays the role (sustainability, or a specific sector for example), it maintains its fundamental place in the ecosystem as a continually trustworthy source of information.
A narrative can be anything, so long as it’s true about what the fund tries to achieve or has achieved! As that single source of truth, it’s the ‘North Star’ that’s tantamount for sales and marketing people to develop campaigns, with guided content planning and execution that’s more likely to gain leads from initial brand awareness.
When all outward branding and communications revolve around the fund’s ideals and the investors it ideally targets, the consistency and quality that huge brands maintain is reached, setting apart the evocative storytellers from the run-of-the-mill that cannot survive in the competitive digital landscape.
ProFundCom assists fund marketers to create brand awareness of compelling fund narratives through various strategies and tools, including:
Thought Leadership Promotion: Leverage ProFundCom to promote thought leadership content, whitepapers, research reports, and industry insights to showcase expertise and credibility within the financial sector.
Social Media Integration: Amplify brand messaging across various social platforms by sharing content, engaging with followers, and participating in industry discussions.
Website Optimisation: 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 Communication: Deliver tailored content recommendations, and targeted offers to clients and prospects based on their preferences and engagement history to help increase client satisfaction and retention.
Lead Nurturing Campaigns: Guide prospects through the sales funnel by delivering relevant content, educational resources, and timely follow-ups, nurturing leads and converting them into investors.
