Fund Marketing’s Digital Playbook for Fuelling the Asset-Raising Sales Engine
The fund marketer’s reputation has U-turned in recent years. No longer are they relegated to the basement like Harry Potter, crafting creative campaigns that may not see the light of day, or charged with sending off pre-made factsheets now and again…
Be it through delivering multi-format content or connecting tech stacks, they’re now key enablers in the hunt for new business and to upsell existing investors. As such, the salespeople also embroiled in the AuM-raising race count on marketing material to entice prospects, and to help visualise the responsive touchpoints that take place on multiple online channels all day long.
So, communication between marketing leads and heads of distribution is massively important to maintain an exciting, authentic and philosophy-driven fund brand in a competitive financial landscape. Not just from an occasional meeting – instead, with constant vigilance over investor engagement analytics.
That’s only truly possible with an integrated digital platform. Teams may be running with the same script to reach the asset goals of their superiors, but the sales stream will only run smoothly when interactions can easily be tracked by the very same teams that contribute to constructing brilliant online experiences.
There’s way more to a digital marketing platform than meets the eye. Let’s mine the depths to see how it can connect the entire fund function and its surrounding investor ecosystem.
Introduction: Exploring the ‘Hybrid Sales’ Approach
Imagine an early January stakeholder meeting. The C-suite will set expectations for the year, focused on getting more investors’ feet through the door. Budgets will be allocated for digital spend, campaign planning, and events. There may be cake. What’s certain is that the AuM numbers will dominate the chat, with the fund’s marketing and salespeople charged with increasing them.
The trouble, as it always has been, is how long the sales cycle is. Financial institutions have investors’ personal incomes at stake, even more so than many B2B companies that can expect the average time from awareness to closed-deal handshake to take over 11 months. This path shows no signs of quickening either, given the sheer gamut of information available at our digital fingertips:
Investing is a serious decision taking multiple personal factors into account, and a packed landscape of funds offering strategies that may suit one person, yet not another, in an ever-changing macroeconomic climate.
The modern buyer is self-servicing, conducting their own research for a solution that matches their goals. They’ll prefer some marketing outreach formats to others, and may not always be keen for a sales call down the line.
Personalisation is absolutely vital. Cutting through the noise of other solutions in their weekly inbox takes understanding an investor and delivering the goods that will engage their ongoing communication.
What’s more, digitalisation feels very hands-off for marketers and salespeople who have traditionally gotten to know their target investors on personal levels. Many will find that too many potential touchpoints creates too large a dilemma for the outreach team to handle.
But the opposite is true. Marketing automation platforms are secret weapons keeping investor-centred teams on one aligned track – and to truly understand the mindset of every individual that’s checking out your fund’s content along a planned go-to market campaign, which could look like this:
This helps illustrate the important roles of humans and the technologies actively working in the stack. There’s a purpose behind what the fund puts out digitally, driven by the company’s original philosophy and aimed at ideal investor profiles determined by the combined sales and marketing arm. Then, to get the right people reading or watching the right content, triggered automations do the heavy lifting in keeping interest over time.
A salesperson should not have to ask the marketer for lead updates every week and hear tumbleweed. Nor should spotting interested investors be a wild goose chase through thousands of data points. With analytics drawn into a CRM, there’s a centralised place for outreach teams to see progressive prospects, and potentially short-track that notoriously long cycle.
This also provides evidence of fundraising to make the outcomes of those stakeholder meetings far more positive: bigger budgets for future campaigns, and maybe more in personal pockets. Already, 70% of salespeople identify their change to a ‘hybrid’ digital role in remote and in-person selling, where they can bank on marketing’s tools of the trade.
We’ll explore that people and platform interplay here. Let’s dive in.
Part 1: Turning Marketing Insights Into Qualified Leads
There’s a reason why marketers have to distribute so much content onto various channels. Investors can be based anywhere with varying portfolio-building experience. They each have their preferred place to brush up on investment news or hear the views of industry experts. Trade publications once dominated before email subscriptions became the norm, and now make up a large portion of investment readership.
Another difference for financial marketing specifically is that hedge funds, private equity firms and asset managers are not trying to get a quick sale for a piece of merchandise. We’re talking about nurturing valuable one-to-one relationships with investors that could last for months or years, potentially without ever seeing their faces.
What separates a genuinely interested investor from a one-time visitor is their frequency in checking out content across the awareness and demand integration phases, and exactly what types of content they’re consuming. This information is great. However, even better is knowing when they’re likely to respond well to a deal-worthy sales call, as investors’ digital journeys never have a straightforward beginning, middle and end.
For instance, it’s highly unlikely for a prospect to see a banner ad, give the firm a call for an introduction and immediately place £50,000 into an ETF. They’ll rack up touchpoints as one giant digital footprint, from downloading a factsheet from a website to signing up for a roundtable or two, all indicative of their growing investment appetite.
A marketer without tracking oversight here can be pulled this way and that, misunderstanding the true picture of what every prospect is after. Being able to focus on the highly engaged individuals in real-time cuts to the chase and is possible with smart sales tools.
Lead Scoring
Prioritising the most valuable prospects should be based on their activity over time. You’re essentially ‘gamifying’ the process. Like when a video game character picks up items on their quest and their progress bar increases, this is how lead scoring works per investor.
With AI-based automations pulling data constantly across channels, this task is made simpler. The marketer can assign numerical factors that build scores, such as their job level, company size and industry, or what their online behaviours consist of. A website page hit or opened email may not yield as big a score as downloading a gated report.
With AI accruing every score per contact, a hierarchy is created from those that may have ducked out after a couple of interactions, up to those that keep coming back across a campaign’s run. They’re essentially ‘optimised’ contacts that a salesperson can reach out to, equipped with the knowledge of exactly what they’ve been looking at.
Sales Triggers
We’re all aware of how tricky some B2C marketing can be when we get hit with a push notification on our phone, urging us to take an action (like a Duolingo lesson, or calling an Uber). That’s the effective power of real-time triggers.
In a fund sales and marketing context, this is a good thing. With a quick set-up, a relationship manager can be instantly notified whenever someone reaches or exceeds a certain lead score threshold.
No more do outreach teams have to scour the CRM databases on the off-chance of a change in investor activity. It’s right then and there, delivered to the fund to take the appropriate action to nurture the individual.
Syncing to a CRM
Integrations ensure that gathered data ends up in a centralised view. All ‘hot’ lead scores can be pushed and ranked in a dashboard that’s easy to access and analyse for relationship teams, tagged with appropriate source data to create an audited trail. Whether it’s a platform linked to Dynamo or Salesforce, all the individual clicks that are once abstract become quantifiable and genuinely actionable business intelligence.
These techniques all ensure no time is wasted on the outdated notion of cold outreach, taking real-time personalised insights to a new level. Pre-qualified clients are ‘warmed’ toward a final interaction from a human that’s fed data by fast, accurate AI. It’s a perfect dance between marketers, sales, and the platforms at their disposal.
Part 2: Visualising Individual Investor Journeys
Some fund marketers would say that it’s part of the fun to repurpose content: chunking down a large-scale report into blog pieces, soundbites, infographics, or topics to fuel a podcast series. Some may see it as a burden. Either way, it’s necessary to cater to investor preferences that are paramount in a hyper-personalised digital world.
Essentially, the website may act as the general store for your complete resource repository, but it is not a given that investors will discover you there first. Instead, they may come across a short video of your portfolio manager on LinkedIn or YouTube, fuelling them to learn more about your firm’s story and investment strategy before registering for further updates.
The sporadic nature of multi-format marketing can mean losing sight of definitive investor personas – their products of interest, attitudes to risk, past investment opportunities and favoured content themes. Instead, mapping out their paths along the all-important GTM funnel is possible using digital platforms and their built-in behavioural analysis to boot.
Pieces Leading to the Whole Pie
One digital touchpoint is not much to look at in isolation. Yet,every one is a gem when viewing an investor’s entire digital experience. For instance, a quick look at an ‘About Us’ page signals early learning, but repeated visits to particular fund pages or a succession of online events show there’s been a furthering in interest from that starting place. They’re doing their due diligence, honing in on certain themes or products.
When you have all these little nuggets of engagement data corroborated as CRM intelligence, fund marketers can determine where an investor is along the buying cycle. Individual clicks or sign-ups do a lot more than rack up numbers, and slowly illustrate the story of one prospect’s hunt for a fund they trust.
Showing The Human Side
It’s then up to the marketers and sales to respond after the platforms have done the digging. Such rich insights prompt any additional outreach needed, like an invitation to an in-person conference on their favourite choice of content. Detailed profiles stored in a CRM make for fewer chances to ruin a nurture cadence with a piece that they will not want to look at.
Segmentation offered by AI capabilities can dictate the moment when an investor moves from the ‘interested’ league to the ‘ready to allocate’ pile, but that phone call hinges on the salesperson prioritising those most poised for a sell, and knowing the context of why they’ve made it so far along the funnel. That informs a conversation piece more likely to go places.
Maintaining a Running Pace
Along the winding sales path, the C-suite will want to know which campaigns are gaining traction, or if there’s been rapid advancements in certain geographies or demographics. These are not road bumps in the process, but necessary checkpoints to see whether return-on-investment is being generated most effectively.
A Reporting Studio in a CRM can give a highly decorated visual guide into what’s hitting. A world cloud showcases themes getting eyes on them, popular URLs display traffic, and certain content pieces can be tracked against historic inflows in graphs. This keeps a continuous document of the AuM-raising job at hand with actual evidence, and especially marks out areas where marketers can improve brand awareness.
Part 3: Automating Nurturing Techniques
A White Glove Service From Behind Screens
Everyone knows that time is money. Perhaps none more so than financial salespeople, dependent on shaving off the hours required to bring more AuM in. In the past, trying to match remembered faces to business cards would have taken ages, and likely strewn with errors to cause awkward interactions to the wrong people!
Now, even the most unwieldy numbers of prospects in the sales funnel can be reached whenever needed, without the hours of hard graft. It’s due to marketing automations at every stage of the nurture train, from scheduling content according to plotted calendars to logging downloads and page views attributed to every end user.
It’s not just that automations work around the clock when the fund marketing and sales engine is resting – although that’s crucial! – they also work off of investor data to ensure the most receptive contacts receive the right information for compliance purposes.
This is paramount to a specialist industry like hedge fund management. In the same way a purchaser of a luxury home or vehicle would, a high-net worth investor wants to feel fussed over and understood before parting with large sums of money. This expected white glove service can still be achieved digitally, as hand-picked insights can be hyper-personalised to the investor before they think to ask for them.
Direct messages on LinkedIn or cold calls are never aimless. Automations make such relationship builders between IRs and prospects convenient, especially with attention spans arguably at their all-time low in the digital age.
AI, the Fund Marketing Way
Automations also work as a way to beat expectations, as if you’ve already experienced the future, then been sent back in time to deliver what the investor wants at a later date. It’s not mysticism or even science fiction, but achieved through readily available AI methods.
Reaching Segmented Groups
AI-compiled investor groupings help marketers set up nurture campaigns predictably in line with their characteristic choices, either what they’ve disclosed in a preference centre or from historic interactions. Every piece of sales material should appeal to their communication styles, but also to regional regulatory considerations and risk appetites.
Elsewhere, AI can detect inactive users that could diminish engagement rates. Instead, these could be entered into a re-engagement drip campaign with additional ‘value-added’ messaging or lead magnets. They may be inspired to pick up where they left off with the fund somewhere else – not all cooled leads are lost!
Dynamic Content
Using these segmented factors, AI can change which messaging and content get presented to individuals on webpages or through emails. For example, if one investor typically engages with real estate insights but another with ESG reporting, these topics get prioritised when they interact with a fund’s marketing channel.
This automation enables a personally curated exhibition of articles or videos to show on a fund’s website homepage, or get pasted into email templates. Even AI-driven chatbots utilising Natural Language Processing (NLP) can grant investors immediately generated answers whenever they need, based on the fund’s historical webpage data.
Investor Reports Commentaries and updates regarding an investor’s holdings can be accurately auto-generated by AI’s analysis of their portfolio, quickening a once treacle-slow task to mere seconds (with a fund marketer’s final sign-off, of course).
Continuous Learning
Getting personalisation spot-on takes tweaks, but AI can self learn to iterate its own predictive capabilities. Through A/B testing across different audience streams and taking on feedback loops through the GTM roll-out, it can more accurately automate the most relevant content per user.
The nurture phase is the make-or-break to ensure every potential future customer is thought about. Bespoke content makes this consistent education possible, only super-charged with automations that act as invisible worker ants, tirelessly engaging prospects while the campaign plotters strategise the next steps toward fundraising.
Part 4: Uniting Sales and Marketing As An Operational Powerhouse
The fracture line between a fund’s sales and marketing units has long been speculated. Sure, there may be personality clashes getting in the way of their aligned AuM goal, in the same way an egotistical striker might greedily undermine the buildup play from the rest of their football team. But what about when everything’s rosy?
The problem is not so much about worth ethic as it is the lack of a connected system. If someone is combing through a prospective lead Excel sheet and another a proprietary database, there’s no cohesion there in crafting value to very unique investor goals. The end objective is the same, but the mission stages to get there are not.
Even if there’s an occasional chat in the office kitchen about one keen prospect or which emailed content pieces seem to be getting opened, that will not solve any problems in asset-raising. Collected data can, as it creates discipline in maintaining oversight for investor behaviours. Continuous vigilance is easier when a single source of truth gets updated straight away for all to see, creating true collaboration.
This old school relationship still works when utilising the digital new school. Funds should maintain weekly CRM meetings to determine opportunities together, and facilitate ongoing team-networking through channels such as Slack, especially with increased home working.
The Power of Reports
In sales, the numbers talk the loudest. The CRM is a continually useful ‘informant’, tagging investors as they reach digital milestones in their buyer journey toward allocation, and in its ability to generate daily, weekly, and monthly reports of these historical changes.
The quality of a report is governed by the information it’s meant to visualise – ideally evidence of an investor moving closer to conversion potential. Determined factors lie at the behest of the marketing and sales cross-function, such as newly engaged prospects, leads exceeding certain score thresholds, unsubscribes, or the following:
Low-Hanging Fruit: New prospects engaging heavily across marketing channels.
Cross-Selling: Existing investors accessing content away from their usual preference.
Redemption Risk: Investors who have cooled their access to portals or fund updates.
Marketing Alpha: Previously disengaged contacts that have re-warmed suddenly.
Seeing the Latest News
Even though executives may only want semi-regular updates on how many new accounts the sales team has curated, the ability to see an investor accumulating fund content voraciously in real-time is extremely valuable.
It helps an augmented sales/marketing function act immediately on those preferences, increasing the likelihood of higher AuM numbers before the inevitable KPI review comes around. What’s more, salespeople no longer have to nag marketers for whole spreadsheets of complicated quantitative information that will be outdated only a few days out, and cumbersome to comb through for relevant metrics that define their lead status.
A CRM’s records should continuously update with investors’ latest interactions when they’ve been engineered properly to connect with multiple channels such as social media, email platforms, survey sites (such as Mailchimp), and event software. That way, everything works like clockwork so the humans do not have to!
Removing Repetition
Alerts for downloads and registrations may feel just like small-fry coin collections, yet these lead-building indicators are all worth sharing. When automatic notifications go to both sales and marketing people, it’s far quicker to cross-reference who should handle the ‘next steps’.
Perhaps a contact will have signed up for a webinar on ETFs, and should be entered into a thematic campaign on the subject. Or, they’re an existing investor downloading plenty of factsheets on a fund not in their current holdings, who may be more ready for a call from a relationship manager. When those subsequent actions get logged in the CRM by authorised users, this creates a tracked workflow where no toes get stepped on (and no investor gets inundated by the same communications).
Hyper-personalised fund marketing to invisible investors relies on a one-unit outreach approach. Sales and marketing teams, and their connected platforms of choice, become a hive mind from the data side, retaining all the personable buyer psychology considerations that have defined selling for as long as any people-first industry has remembered.
Part 5: Identifying ROI for Every Sales Conversation
Proving one’s worth feels odd, but that’s unfortunately the lay of the land for those tasked with bringing in deals. It’s also one of the most difficult. Before the days of dashboards, a fund’s sales success was binary and determined by upticks of downstrokes by yearly profits – all else was fluff.
With multiple platforms in play, there are more data-backed credentials showcasing the work behind creating and distributing content. Yet more data does not necessarily mean the merrier, as bloat clouds actual ROI numbers. Is it proving that the tech budgets marketers fought for are worthwhile? Will failed AI experiments see employees’ commission cut for the next year, or allocation needed to engage more investors in creative campaigns?
As the middlemen delivering goods to investors and reaping their assets for their employers, distribution heads and fund marketers must control what data is tracked to achieve attribution – and not be at the whim of a platform’s less strategic spread of information.
In lighter news, determining ROI is eased by comparing historical data. Financial marketers have this in abundance from investors’ digital touchpoints to raised capital, where benchmarking proves value across campaigns and across time frames:
Comparing Channel Performance
All fund marketers are expected to grow octopus arms to manage an omnichannel strategy, but for all the initial connecting wires and set-up between platforms, it can prove pivotal in increasing ROI. When a social ad strategy may be expensive and ineffectual for lead generation, as opposed to a white paper outsourced to an external writer, it’s obvious where to chop and change platform usage.
Real-time intel makes it obvious where free digital webinars featuring your internal investment experts might pull in more registrants than a physical, budget-demanding roundtable in a conference hall. Channel analysis is a good start to narrow the avenues for where to pump more resources into, specifically channels that move the needle towards greater conversions.
Matching Campaigns to Inflows
When you run multiple nurture sequences in tandem, the goal is to see whether some segmented audiences or topical themes ring more true than others. This may be determined from email opens or report downloads, but ultimately if these sequential steps do not culminate in eventual deals, the efforts to build them are not justified.
Successful campaigns in a CRM identify which content touchpoints built towards any deals made, which should be repeated for other investor profiles. The aim is to repeat proven outcomes from one trialled strategy, shortening the path of asset-raising without having to dream up a GTM from scratch.
Insights such as this can be visualised and exported across a range of business analytics platforms. Simple enhancements can be found through PowerBI or Tableau: powerfully ‘talking’ the fund boardroom’s language.
Data trails become the gold standard thread that links sales and marketing leadership and their effect on the firm’s growth. Understanding proven investor content routes is not just a quick step to higher allocated budgets, but a higher likelihood of scaling campaigns to new geographic regions and user bases – taking the sales engine stratospheric!
The 5 Principles Behind a Fund Sales Engine
As we’ve determined, there can be no fund without its strategically creative marketers or its lead-tracking sales team. There also cannot be one without the other. It’s a symbiotic relationship that’s united by a platform’s investor data, and strengthened by it.
The truth is that the sales engine never gives up the gas. For every successful financial year of upped AuM, the clock keeps ticking, and more investors are waiting in the wings to better their financial lives. They require a fund to share its expert ideas and maintain a close-knit relationship, potentially for months or years. That’s where repeatable digital marketing has its pros, with regard to these five pillars:
Marketing engagement data has to be measurable and transparent to all areas of the business.
CRMs require data connectivity to properly inform outreach steps.
Automations can best nurture initial awareness into leads between campaigns.
Sales must act on a platform’s qualified signals rather than playing a guessing game.
Management must be aware of measures taken for inflow-building.
A hybrid people-platform strategy is the best way to share a fund’s ‘human’ authenticity in every corner of the digital world that investors use to seek expertise. Every channel and employee involved is united by a common AuM raising goal – achieving it efficiently is what separates the digital maturity from one firm to the next, and how effectively they can remain in the competitive fund landscape for the foreseeable future.
