Four Strategies to Smooth Out Complex Fund Marketing Operations
One huge priority for fund marketers is concocting what your ideal audience will see.
If they’re engaged with your branded website or a particular investment blog series, that’s great right? But it’s only half the story. What your investor doesn’t see is the pain-staking backend work marketers do to make digital campaigns run like clockwork – the train wouldn’t work without the engine room.
Overseeing day-to-day operations can feel backbreaking. Firstly, there are multiple stages to a go-to market strategy from the very start in identifying investor profiles, to generating AuM at the end. Lots goes into this including plotting out, drawing up and distributing content before gathering investor touchpoints, analysing the intel and tweaking tailored buyer journeys.
Secondly, fund marketers can be burdened by tech stack paralysis in order to complete these tasks. Are they all achieving what you want? For a successful GTM, that means finding and handing over hot leads for the sales team to convert. Speaking of, multiple disparate solutions will separate key teams committed to the AuM-building world. That’s not great, as each platform adds around 15% to the inefficiency chain.
Fund marketers aren’t wizards, but they can appear like they relieve the heft of these operations by narrowing down digital marketing to core processes and juicing the value of the most effective platforms. This streamlines the ‘echo chamber’ between two key GTM steps: brand awareness, then analytics.
Stick to the Plan
Being able to feed the ‘content monster’ is overwhelming. There’s a constant online demand for it, and investors expect timely market insights from funds to help them assess their financial options. Worry can kick in, especially for smaller funds that do not have time nor resources to house hundreds of investment writers and video makers in a room with typewriters and iMovie.
But even the big players do not need to do that. Content output needs one quality internal process that marketers, fund managers or IRs can use easily in one hive-mind that serve your team’s primary needs:
Are you looking to divide blog write ups between different colleagues?
Are you setting up a standardised workflow from draft to sign-offs to analysis?
Are you briefing themes and timelines to freelance writers?
Whatever you’re producing (email copy, market outlook blurbs) and where you’re posting them (social profiles, an event landing page), it’s best to not overcomplicate the content machine. Project workflow tools like Asana are useful to assign roles, even Google Calendar, but many funds tend to stick to the old faithful – an Excel Spreadsheet. There’s a reason it’s still a reliable workhouse and useful to plot content calendars, workflows, and responsibilities via colour coded tables or tabs that cover various marketing channels.
A single easy-to-follow planning interface can take a full GTM campaign from start to finish, so long as it’s shared internally to the right people. For any smaller queries, one platform for cross-communication is all that’s required to keep teammates talking and workflows on track – Slack or Teams perhaps.
These make sure no teams’ schedules run independently, no workloads get repeated unnecessarily, and it negates the possibility of sending the same communications to investors too. You can enjoy planning and creating content weeks or months in advance instead.
Consolidate Your Marketing Materials
Creating go-to hubs to aid each specific outreach task shouldn’t require a lot of engineering. Fund marketers should act as the knowledgeable gatekeepers for all marketing materials and make them easy to find for multiple teams to not waste time in reaching out to investors, as follows:
Content repository: OneDrive (or an equivalent) is useful to house brand guidelines and components, content plans or calendars, white papers, webinar recordings, and more. This maintains consistency for any personalised collateral, ready to be downloaded and used as appropriate.
Website: not only is the website great for showcasing your position as an industry thought leader to visitors, it’s the ultimate gallery for finding past content (much of it evergreen) to be reused and repurposed. Tagging content with keywords in your CMS of choice helps categorise your web assets so they can be segmented like a library, fast and simple to discover, while the most popular content can be pinpointed in the data gathered by a CRM connected to the main site.
Email automation platform: ‘master templates’ can be created and stored here according to their content type: an event invite, a monthly fund report, or a newsletter. These can be simply duplicated and filled with personalised content when needed.
Run Off of the Same Data
It’s cynical to think there’s too much data out there – it’s the ultimate helper for tracking touchpoints, measuring campaigns, and tailoring marketing to the most engaged investors. The sheer weight of data can be managed in what HubSpot called ‘the united front’: every platform integrated well to sync accurate investor data for all teams to analyse and use as a single source of truth. APIs are making this dream a reality for fund marketers, with integration capabilities ramping up considerably.
The CRM is the underlying data powerhouse, linking to websites, portals, social profiles, and email platforms. By building up every digital interaction over time without manual effort, it helps marketing and sales teams identify which channels, fund searches or content formats are really successful – especially with certain demographics or regions. It’s not just a win for speeding up marketing operations, but the end user who will be on the receiving end of the investment material they’re after!
Leverage Automations
Posting content and gathering analytics can all be automated nowadays. Considering the popularity of the format to investors, email automation platforms are an outstanding tool to distribute your planned webinars, blog pieces or video content. Users can set up drip campaigns that trigger emails according to the end user’s actions – there’s no errors in missing your engaged contacts due to manual toil that way.
Visualising gathered data in the CRM dashboard is also vital. AI underlines much of this process automatically, giving time back to analyse investor insights and decide how to improve the GTM funnel. It looks at historical online behaviours in granular detail, segments engagement appetite via lead scores and maps out conversion rates in graphs. This brings sales and marketing together in one place to identify key potential investors, or existing customers that may be open to upsells.
The joy of AI is there’s no need to indulge in yet another platform. Your martech stack can stay the same, just with the added benefit of add-ons that track investors in real-time, constantly. It assists the asset-raising decisions left to AI’s human fund marketing counterparts, while less platform maintenance leads to better budgeting and, hopefully, marketing ROI.
When people and platforms work with the same data points at the same time, teams are far more efficient. That can have a knock-on effect for campaigns, where the right content can be delivered to the right investors, exactly when they need it. The backend operation is the start of a happy investor experience, so getting that right plants seeds that should bear fruit. With automated platforms doing the gruelling data-heavy graft, it’s just up to marketers to iterate the best results rather than getting involved in the gardening!
ProFundCom assists fund marketers manage their operational complexities with various tools tailored specifically to the financial industry, including:
Time and Resource Efficiency: ProFundCom understands the need for efficiency, offering a comprehensive platform that is easy to set up, affordable, and designed to help raise AuM.
Data-Driven Insights: ProFundCom provides data-driven insights that help target potential investments and identify potential fund outflows for fund managers to make informed decisions quickly.
Immediate Reports: The platform offers immediate access to reports that help marketers align with sales and understand which marketing efforts are driving investments. Quick access to actionable data is essential for optimising GTM strategies.
CRM Integration: ProFundCom seamlessly integrates with any CRM using an API for better collaboration between sales and marketing teams, faster lead conversions and, ultimately, better asset-raising efforts.
Customisable Integration: Integrating with ProFundCom is highly customisable allowing fund managers to adapt the platform to their specific data models, workflows, and fund structures. This saves time and money in the short term and facilitates future growth and functionality enhancements.
