Five ‘Stress Less’ Ways to Make Complex Fund Content Simple and Investor-Centric

Producing, translating, posting, sharing: these are all familiar verbs to a content-wielding fund marketer (for better or worse). Feeding the content monster is a tough job to manage, even before we factor in how changing demographics consume digital financial material.

Existing investors and high-net worth investors are big on returns, checking the numbers via portals. Potential leads may instead be scouring social media channels, websites and forums to see if your investment philosophy helps them reach their goals, savouring trust and security. At the other end of the digital line, the fund marketer is instrumental in making content clear and understandable at every level.

When outbound marketing is still vital to nurture investment opportunities of potential leads, thought leadership plays the lead role in drumming up those engagements. It’s primed for sharing everywhere, getting more eyes and ears on what you’re up to. So long as what you’re saying is articulated well enough to become a professional yet friendly voice. Doing so will make you stick out in a space saturated with extensively researched pay-for-play reports. Sure, these documents do convey granular market changes and bespoke fund performance, but regular short form updates are well adapted to the lower-attention digital marketing landscape where investors flock.

After all, your portfolio managers are unique experts, making informed and bold points aligned to the fund’s ‘way of doing things’ better than anyone else. Marketers tend to stress out thinking how to condense that into thought leadership fit for consumption, wrongly hinging on purely salesy content as a safety net instead. Here’s five ways we know can ease that worry!

Leaving the Writer’s Ego to the Side

Quite simply, a lot of fund marketers misjudge what marketing material should be. Thought leadership is not about positioning your brand as being so stupendous a customer has to invest with you. That’s just an impersonal profit-greedy hard sell, not promoting expertise designed to help people. Hedge funds may send out a quarterly fund performance PDF or phone investors weeks too late, without any personalised pieces to engage the end user’s investment brain. Investors will see through that, even grow sick of it.

Thought leadership is not transactional. Your CRM should show how engaged investors are with your fund range or thematic strategies, and they’ll expect follow-ups: a content roundup or event invite directed at their interests, reader-centric and without a bolshy sway from the writer, no matter what format.

Considering movements in the tricky, geopolitical investment world (and where your fund sits within it), maintaining a presence means documenting the quick, well-informed opinions of your peers across every marketing channel. Fundamentally, blogs, podcasts or 5-minute videos make it easier to forget jargon and convey messages as you would a one-to-one conversation. Making sense is smart, and ensures investor buy-in – content should be understandable for an 8 year old, despite kids probably not ready to talk through ESGs just yet…

Sharing Your Voice Far and Wide

This brings us onto ‘digestible’ formats ready to use throughout a go-to market strategy (particularly when distribution is automated). White papers that you’ve already produced have sustained shelf lives which, when ‘chunked’ become focused, attention-grabbing pieces by themselves. These keep your content train running for months, maybe years. Conveyed succinctly though guises such as videos or infographics, you widen the audience net to those that prefer formats outside the generic long-form paper. This ‘Russian Doll’ approach is well suited to constructing thematic nurture email campaigns over time per investment theme, too.

• On A Website: Copy should be to the point and add value to web surfers. Make it simple to access information without any stuffy language that could confuse their search for investment opinions or event forms. Every piece, from lengthy e-book to graph-heavy infographic to webinar episode, should have a concise landing page to promote it suitably on your comprehensive content hub. Not just to segment them for investors’ ease, but to capture their valuable touchpoint data to personalise future communications.
• For Social Media: Your strategists’ market views, monthly performance data and region-specific content should be made swift and shareable. A quotation, a reaction to the news, or even a behind-the-scenes filming of the fund’s ‘human side’ can position your friendly brand all over social media. Think about which channel works best: LinkedIn may be better to substantiate infographics with personal anecdotes based on the context, but YouTube works for an interview with a fund manager. Personality goes a long way, directly addressing prospects and brightening up their feeds.

Getting Visual

A book can be pooh-poohed for ‘having a lot of pictures’, but it’s the aim of the game of email to hinge on visual content with accompanying copy, curated with the signed-up investor in mind. Well-branded newsletters or fund updates that crunch down complex financial information into vibrant graphs and charts get the point across in a fun and concise way. This concept should be matched by an informative subject line that gets investors’ appetites up for exploring the content housed within.

Emails layouts should provide a comprehensive yet spacious view of interactive content. Photos of fund managers grant their thought leadership blurbs a personal touch. Interactive questionnaires can ‘pay back’ respondents with further financial content in exchange for their digital data. Embedded videos can be played directly in the email, and crafted call to actions can steer nurtured leads toward fund content they may not be aware of. Even if the lead magnets are more complex, a survey report for example, they’re hidden behind the template that’s easy to navigate and pique initial interest.

AI, Four Ways

AI is not a replacement for a fund content writer. It’s a tool that can save valuable resources in laying the groundwork for quality communications, when they’re finally dressed up in your fund’s branded language:

• Data processing: AI trawls through large historical data sets in seconds to identify common investment stories of interest through ‘word clouds’, and can showcase well-performing content formats in graphical form via dashboards – ideal for developing themed nurture campaigns.
• Generative AI: Platforms like ChatGPT cannot mimic your authentic, trustworthy expert copy, but can structure arguments, map a full blog series using human-led prompts, or pick out and condense key takeaways from your longer content pieces fit for repurposing.
• Language checks: You may have different investment writers whose own personalities shine through brilliantly, but editorial plugins like Grammarly can remove complex sentences, turns of phrase that may not apply to some regions, and adapt to your fund’s tone of voice for consistent short-form pieces. AI can also map content against market sentiment so it always hits the right notes.
• Cut compliance time: Regulations for data privacy in communications are a tightrope. AI, however, ensures any necessary disclaimers or risk warnings are used to avoid regulatory repercussions.

Use Your People (and Others!)

When thought leadership follows your brand guidelines’ tone of voice, multiple experts can work simultaneously across various content formats. That way, the fund remains current while continuously engaging audiences. Content tasks can be split even using an Excel plan according to a money manager’s area of interest, or where relationship teams feel they can add extended value to investors they talk to regularly. Market news reactions can be recorded on a mobile, then instantly translated through AI apps, or even YouTube for a final-chance edit.

Outsourcing may not be for everyone, but professionals exist to ease the load away from more time-sensitive and strategic marketing tasks. What you cannot do yourselves, pass to copywriters, social media pros or designers easily found via freelance websites, who transform your (human or AI generated) briefs into articles or graphics. Some may offer perspectives outside the financial realm to really make complicated themes more readable and big on resonant ‘storytelling’, or specialise in short-form social sharing formats.

Taking cues from competitors or content creators outside of funds can be inspirational in crafting insightful content that’s presented in a way that makes investing accessible for everyone. Plus, now that digital marketing has made curating and distributing this content more hassle-free, it’s easier to experiment with the pointers above and see how the content performs. It could be a key to a fruitful relationship with any number of new investors that will boost AuM once they’re in the door – simple, right?

ProFundCom can help fund marketers adapt their content marketing tools and strategies, all tailored to the financial industry:

• 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.
• Automated Lead Nurturing: Set up automated lead nurturing workflows to engage with leads at different stages of the customer journey, delivering targeted content, follow-up emails, and personalised messages to drive conversions.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.