When you market your funds, product or service – through email, social media, adverts or any other medium – you obviously want existing and potential investors to read what you’re saying.
But you also want your investors to actually engage with your messages. Engagement – clicking links, opening attachments and contacting you – puts you one step closer to an investment. With emails in particular, it also allows you to track and analyse what your readers are engaging with, which reveals valuable information about their preferences and interests. In turn, this allows you to maximise your relationship by sending material you know they are interested in.
In short, it’s vital. So, here’s my top five tips on how to increase investor engagement:
Provide something to engage with
This may sound like an obvious thing to do. But millions of marketing communications are sent out every day that offer no means for engagement. Don’t make this mistake, make sure you offer something that brings your investors a step closer to you – this could be useful information to download or click, or a reason to contact you to find out more.
Vary your content – then target your content
Don’t keep sending out the same old thing, or slight variations on a theme. Engage your investors with a variety of content – and offer different ways to access it, such as video, reports, eBooks and live webinars. Once you know their preferences you can start sending targeted content, also known as content marketing.
Encourage feedback
Direct engagement is the best sort, so make sure you encourage feedback. Ask your investors what they think about what you’re sending them and make it as easy as possible for them to get in touch by offering multiple options – email, social media, phone etc.
Tell a story and educate your reader
Good storytelling is at the heart of good marketing. So, if you can weave what you are selling into an educational story – particularly one that talks about helping someone else – then you will increase both interest and engagement.
Explain the benefits…and then explain again
If you want people to engage with something then you need to spell out why they should do it. It’s not enough to just show them something, you need to answer the question everyone is asking – what’s in it for me? And you do that by explaining the benefits of what you want them to do – how it will help them, or how they can profit from it.
