Can Integrations Fuel Fund Marketing’s Evolved Engineering Role?
There’s an unavoidable truth in fund marketing that you’ll hear from fellow comrades, and especially from us: the job is getting much harder.
When digital was once heralded as an all-purpose helper for getting a go-to market campaign together, fund marketers are probably shocked to find they’ve become The Platform Custodian, expected to have lots of technical trickery.
Is that what many fund marketers signed up for? Unlikely! As many can attest, marketers are committed to brand-boosting through creativity, weaving stories, making websites pop and – in financial circles – hosting events and sending factsheets. Some arrive from outside the industry, too, where even a Marketing BA may not prepare its graduates for managing a full technology stack covering content creation, distribution, and analysis.
The fact of the matter is, fund marketers have to hone this role as an intersection of C-level execs, IT professionals, sales and distribution, and the (justly pernickety) compliance team. The usual GTM pillars from marketing school still exist, where a knowledge push around integrations can establish them as system engineers without the stress – and with eventual AuM to show for it!
What’s Behind the Changing Nature of A Fund Marketer?
Not many marketing tasks are manual anymore, nor can they be. The image of a desk littered with business cards from FundForum, an opened website editing interface, and tab after opened tab of content calendar spreadsheets still exists in living memory. This mix of media cannot keep up with the digital-only investors you have to adhere to: they require personal, packaged-up content to their inbox right away, which you’ll never be able to do scrabbling through scrawls in a notepad.
It requires a vast connected repository of audience activity and marketing channels and material all working in tandem – with the marketer as the ship’s captain. It’s because investment content has followed the paths carved by the Nikes or Amazons of this world. They’re masters at not just being household names, but catching your attention exactly when you’re thinking about buying something. It’s not luck; it’s from their marketers’ deep analysis of interaction data.
Funds are not glossy B2C businesses. They do not have crazy budgets to play with to advertise, and are under strict regulatory guidelines. Yet this way to adhere to consumers’ expectations (many of which will already be aware of your fund from their own research) is possible by juicing the maximum effectiveness from every necessary online channel through connectivity.
Five Pros of an Integrated System
When a marketer’s main role is to raise assets, the day to day is all about creating brilliant content for ideal personas, delivering them, and tracking the analytics to target them again and again. This latter stage usually vital for converting key leads involves automations – which cannot exist without integrations.
Doubling down on the most engaged users first involves building up a picture of who they are, where they’re based, their risk attitude and investment history. That’s impossible if all the information is disconnected. Instead, drawn-together intel using integration helps putting into place an automatic feedback loop between brand awareness and data analysis in the following ways:
You maintain constant diligence: The digital sales funnel is not linear, involving various entry points to anyone on the globe. Tracking all their activity in a centralised platform ensures no ideal investor gets left behind with 24/7 visibility no matter how knotty the buyer journey.
You can discover the most pertinent content: Certain regions and demographics all have distinct tastes in their investment style, and do not want copy-paste blanket messaging. Integrations pull together themes, formats and channels proving popular, helping personalisation and where to allocate budget to the right places.
It aligns sales and marketing’s workflows: Collated CRM data acts as a single source of truth to guide regular conversations between these teams to see which campaigns are proving valuable to inflows to appease business goals, and to stop repeated work.
It can segment similar prospects: Integrated contacts can be grouped according to built-up lead scores, identifying high-quality leads or other prospects that may need further steps in an automated nurture campaign to get more engaged.
It saves time hunting cooled leads: Time is money, and integrations allow marketers and sales to see new opportunities, developing journeys and otherwise changing in real-time according to their online activity to strategise accordingly.
Building A Connected Stack, Step By Step
Even with the overhanging expectation to act as system engineer, a fund marketer can still rely on their investor-centred branding instincts to identify what already works, and augment their trusty platforms with integrations to prove marketing attribution factors using AI helpers.
Think of Integrations to Achieve Marketing KPIs
Setting off automations to keep the GTM cycle moving requires knowing which systems and data to integrate in the first place. That takes a little work to first understand which investors you’re looking to target, and what data you need (and are able) to pull together in one place to make the marketing machine ready to bolster consistent communications and iterate success.
A dashboard that can track content campaigns through to conversions, and which hotspots around the world may be receptive to certain funds, will be pleasing to the C-suite that wants the empirical evidence for well-allocating marketed budgets. This planning ahead makes sure integrated channels do what they’re meant to do before the reporting stage, but can also account for any blind spots that may require assistance from investor databases or specialist marketing platforms for financial services that can easily be drawn into a stack.
Utilise What You Have Already
Remember that with every added channel comes 15% efficiency! Even when you choose five or six key players in your ecosystem, they can take away up to 90% of the workload that funds should use to maintain that creative streak.
It’s ideal to integrate pre-existing channels that are available to connect easily via APIs, and get a MarTech deployed and working smoothly from the off. A typical (yet powerful) integrated system for fund marketing includes:
Event platforms: Bringing Zoom or Google Meet together with socials and email platforms ensure a system takes care of all invites, remails and reminders without much thought!
Fund documents: Backend data from services like Dakota or Preqin can be funnelled into pre-built templates to maintain integrity, but integrations can also deliver predicted behavioural insights to sales teams based on investors’ public or proprietary data.
Portals: While being intuitive and great for investors, AI integrations can track redemptions and upsell opportunities in a CRM to adhere strongly to an existing investor base.
Websites: Busy, non-linear investors are likely already educated on your performance and strategy from your website, so compiling all their web-based actions helps you plot automations to send follow-up content they’ll require for a sale.
Social media: Socials are effective and simply integrated channels to track engagements that facilitate short and sweet one-to-one communications based on when someone connects, or engages with a thought piece.
Business analytics: Data visualisation providers like Power BI or Tableau can sync with channels to make a lot of actionable marketing data digestible for executive meetings.
Always Conduct an MOT
Like any technology, things may break and integrations are not a quick fix. There’s a lot of investor data and marketing channels running in tandem when data cleanliness is paramount to making a fund marketer’s job easier – and an end investor’s experience better.
Therefore integrations should always be managed routinely, to check for bugs or glitches, and able to assess if they’re achieving your fundraising goals. If not, they may require a tweak or a complete re-do. MarTech should be firing on all cylinders when inefficiency can be severely detrimental to costs and efforts!
Marketers should embrace the engineer moniker as a badge of honour. When a system is running well to identify and appeal to investors at any point in their individual journeys, other teams will see a fund marketer as a knowledgeable platform-wielder contributing brilliantly to the GTM strategies they’re hired for, but also the AuM-raising mission that keeps the fund flowing. Digitisation has perks beyond the initial humps, with integrations perhaps one of the biggest out there!
ProFundCom helps fund marketers drive more engagement with investors through integrated tools tailored to financial services, including:
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.
Website Analytics: Use analytical tools to provide insights into visitor behaviour, traffic sources, and conversion metrics.
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.
Data Analytics and Reporting: Measure conversion rates and analyse the effectiveness of their marketing strategies to monitor key metrics and optimise lead generation efforts for reliable results.
Automated Lead Nurturing: Set up workflows to engage with leads at different stages of the customer journey, delivering targeted content, follow-up emails, and personalised messages to drive conversions.
Lead Scoring and Qualification: Prioritise leads based on engagement levels and interactions through scoring and focus efforts on high-potential prospects.
