Four Useful Ways to Qualify Prospects Using Digital Marketing
Knowing which prospective customers will break through to fully-fledged investors is a fickle matter. At least, it was, without the digital database to more easily label accounts as “highly interested” qualified prospects.
During the joint mission for a fund’s sales and marketing team, a large influx of event sign-ups, or blog views could be met with celebration. But ‘more’ initial interest does not necessarily mean ‘better’. Only a slice of those connections will be immediately keen to learn more, others tentative. Many may watch one webinar, leave and not return, depending on their personal preferences.
From a few hundred candidates, only two may end up investing. It’s just the way the tricky marketing cookie crumbles.
Plus, these digital touchpoints are the doorways opening up a sales cycle to take nascent investors to hot leads to converted clients. That journey is especially long in the financial services department, and it can be agonising when contacts nurtured down the line pull out at any stage.
Proving your fund marketing attribution calls for improving a measure known as return on marketing investment – MROI in short. It’s not about herding every possible site visitor and marketing personally to all of them. Instead, generating high-quality leads makes the likelihood of building AuM stronger, rather than a database full of prospects that opened only a single email.
Quality over quantity should be the approach to increase MROI. When marketers are selective about qualifying investors who are more likely to enter a buying process (based on online behaviours, investment appetite, demographic and more factors) there are likely to be more big fish from a smaller pond – the leads to funnel through to targeted, informed sales calls.
Likewise, streamlining the qualification practice means that the sales team stops doggedly chasing less fruitful prospects for hours with no cigar. Taking prospects to leads effectively involves sales and marketing people, but also marketing automation platforms for that data-backed punch. Here’s how in four simple steps:
1. Understand Your Ideal Investor
“Qualifying” a prospect easily means weighing up how well each one matches the persona you want to be marketing a fund to. When these customers could be most interested in that product or service, they become priorities for targeted marketing.
To warm these potential leads from the outset, it requires mapping out who that ideal investor is: What is their demographic? Where are they based? What are their lifestyle choices? Are they looking to start investing, or are experienced and hoping to diversify?
It involves dipping into the headspace of what they’d see as useful to them (like embodying a character in an acting workshop!), then identifying what investment themes they’d likely pursue through your events, white papers, blogs, commentaries and more.
One other framework to predict investor behaviours, popular in the sales world for any industry, is BANT:
- Budget (what the investor can afford)
- Authority (if they’re able to call the shot – the final purchase decision)
- Need (if you can help overcome their challenges or achieve their goals)
- Timeline (when they can complete the buyer journey)
These barometers help marketers and salespeople cross-reference prospects that could qualify them as likely future customers, or even supply intel for cross-selling opportunities with existing investors.
2. Follow the Data Trail
Not only can a data rich marketing strategy help distribute content to get ideal investors to take notice, but digital platforms can centralise intel and assist in sculpting more hyper-personalised campaigns, and qualify high-quality prospects.
In one case, CRMs offer a lifeline for quicker sales cycles. With a data dashboard tracking and presenting all digital touchpoints, marketers can see which are consistently viewing content or opening emails. Applying them lead scores gamifies their likelihood to be qualified; CRMs can identify the activities of newly active engagements that should automatically be assigned to sales, as well as cross-selling opportunities.
Despite being ‘cold leads’, not all your stalled readership should be disregarded. In fact, a database can display historical timelines for lost readers (unqualified) against those that have dropped their engagement in the past few months, who may still be ideal investors in need of a personalised content reminder.
3. Power Up Using Automations
Sales teams will be buying treats for the marketing department when qualified leads land in their laps straight away. An automation platform can do just this: underlined by AI’s rapid-fire data processing, they can scan every digital touchpoint across webinar forms to portal sign-ins and qualify leads if they pass a lead score threshold. The sales funnel remains solely focused on adhering to prospects that are behaviourally consistent. ‘Lukewarm’ leads can be looked at at a later date.
Elsewhere (and often used in account-based marketing), identification tools sit within websites to automatically convert anonymous visitors clicking around your content to actual leads, gathering such details as their names, job titles and companies they work for. Their regularity and kinds of pages they’re visiting – fund products, fund philosophy, themed blog series – craft an understanding of their interests and keenness to invest. Like a CRM, these tricks are excellent timesavers to segment ideal prospects from the rest.
4. Iterate the Nurturing Process
With qualified leads in the hands of sales and marketers, the nurture process should yield greater MROI success. Drip campaigns follow qualified prospects to create a marketing echo chamber, and hopefully follows their trails to conversions without letting high-quality leads slip away. After seeing how campaigns perform, marketers can see how similarly segmented prospects should be nurtured in the future too, or how they can set up different tailored content routes for those that missed on qualification this time around. Cold leads should never be discarded unless they showcase hard bounces or consistent unsubscribes, for example.
With a solidified idea of what makes up an ideal qualified investor, fund marketers can put platforms into action and match those attributes to digital activity across multiple channels. That deep understanding improves engaging investors truly interested in your fund, and automates the routes to convert the customers that are primed for long-term profitability.
ProFundCom can assist fund marketers consistently identify and qualify high-quality prospects with tools specific to the financial industry:
- Lead Scoring and Qualification: Prioritise leads based on engagement levels and interactions through scoring and focus efforts on high-potential prospects.
- 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.
- Personalised Content Recommendations: Using data analytics and user behaviour tracking, ProFundCom can recommend bespoke content to website visitors and leads based on their interests and engagement history.
- Cross-Selling Opportunities: ProFundCom’s reporting capabilities highlight cross-selling opportunities by identifying when a prospect shows interest in additional products or services.
- Data Analytics and Reporting: Track the performance of lead generation campaigns, measure conversion rates, and analyse the effectiveness of their marketing strategies to monitor key metrics and optimise lead generation efforts for reliable results.
If you want to find out how ProFundCom can help you use digital marketing to raise assets schedule a demo here