How Digital Assists Budget-Strapped Fund Marketers

You could spend a whole afternoon responding to comments on LinkedIn, or staring at website hits with a morning coffee. But why? It’s true that fund marketing teams have long had difficulty in allocating the right time to the right metrics, when “time is money”.

Some low-rise tasks are fine. Yet with multiple back to back, this eats away budgets which will not be distributed so fondly next time by the C-suite. And now that there’s a million and one MarTech channels out there to preside over, a strategy-stricken team will be one that’s juggling plates and flushing their allocated monies down the drain.

Not all platforms can maintain effective capability – in fact, we speak often of the added 15% inefficiency that comes with each, and that’s before your outreach teams start making a splash with investors through time-consuming content. In the B2B world, around 7% of revenue gets given to the marketing department to do with as they wish (so long as it contributes to greater AuM).

There’s not a lot to play with in today’s economic climate. However, the most successful marketers get bang-for-buck with cheaper engaging campaigns that are repeatable, prove attribution, drum up more budget for new ideas, and keep up the good work in nurturing investors. When that happens, marketers become integral parts within the fund’s corporate strategy, to prioritise ROI-rich projects, compare year-on-year performance and put aside rainy day funds for exciting new hires, software updates, or freelancers and agencies to make their fund marketing more competitive.

With fund content’s ‘churning’ nature in feeding the beast, making campaigns more cost-savvy and AuM-raising is tough but not impossible, as we see in seven steps.

Select the Right Solutions

There’s a large-scale operational tool, plugin or Browser extension for anything. They’re not all built equal, and must contribute to specialised fund marketing functions. A platform needs to be customisable, not a fancy piece of kit that’s all style, no substance.

For financial houses that need to maintain a constant online presence to draw in investors, they have a lot of real-time touchpoint data floating around that needs to be ‘funnelled’. Centralising it calls for an integrated stack of brilliant solutions – either a monolithic platform or well-engineered connected tools through project managers or IT experts.

No matter which method, it’s down to the marketer to identify if the tools answers pre-set questions to achieve ROI:

• How does it garner marketing metrics? Is it easy to track email campaign success, or measure inflow timelines?
• Can it be fit for collaborative purposes and multiple users, to reduce licensing costs?
• Are APIs available to integrate it with current setups, to save time and money on training and deployment?

Working with CTOs can be useful to outline technical concerns that could carry extra unforeseen price tags, but a functional MarTech stack should bring in more than it gives out. If not, it’s worth ‘killing your darlings’ for ineffective programmes.

Plan Accordingly

Ad hoc content marketing can work if a relatable investment world story crops up that matches your fund’s strategy and philosophy. However, sales cycles are long and investors are engaging with your platforms 24/7. There needs to be a long-game for gaining engagement, developing investor appetite, and analysing the results over time:

• Hold a sensible dialogue with the budgeter to allocate funds towards campaigns more likely to lead to ROI.
• Create a one-view marketing plan with editorial access on spreadsheets or Google Calendar, including content formats to use (quarterly reports, weekly blogs or videos, email sequences) and themes that focus on real-world impact.
• Make deliverables realistic, and set dates and times accordingly.
• Identity contributors and make sure they know their responsibilities.
• Keep an eye on the analytics: content views and downloads showcase popular formats that future-proof campaigns or identify where changes are needed.

Align Sales and Marketing

Back in the day, marketing was the backroom staff sending out a few valuation statements and factsheets every now and again. It’s all different now, where their strategic, investor-driven focus brings them together with sales to achieve a common goal: paving a streamlined path to get hot leads over the line and raise assets.

By targeting prospects through personalised content, finding them in the CRM and pushing those towards the salesteam, you create a flow that only focuses on more immediate potential successes. You won’t be wasting time on an individual who filled in half a form, but the ideal persona who’s turned up to a few webinars and is, as shown by the data, highly interested. The C-suite will be very thankful for a sales/marketing duo that delivers the goods.

Utilise Your Workforce

CEOs, advisors and portfolio managers know their stuff. They’re passionate about it, mouthpieces for the fund brand, and can convey complex investment scenarios better than anyone else. Nabbing a few minutes of their time for a video or podcast ‘interview’, or even a statement for an email newsletter or a full commentary or article, is a (free) resource that can be repurposed in multiple ways.

Juice More From Content

Likewise, when you have spent a great deal on a mega-report, you want to get your money’s worth. All the insights within can be chopped up, and represented as videos or graphic-based images to share on socials. This Russian Doll approach is a gift that keeps on giving particularly when investment trends inevitably resurface. Some content is evergreen, and utilising channels such as websites, YouTube, or LinkedIn helps you reach investors with various favourite ways to consume content.

Automate With AI

With budgets dwindling but results being needed fast, it’s time to call in automation. They’re the ultimate ‘more with less’ solution, underpinning the work of popular marketing channels that can be set in motion, then tweaked accordingly. It allows fund marketers to focus where engagement and conversions are happening.

When used correctly, automations can fuel all the content delivery and data gathering within an integrated stack. Emails can nudge individuals according to triggers that remind them of an event, newsletters can be sent out according to subscriptions outlined in a preference centre and lead scoring automations can show, in a CRM, which prospects are ripe for a sales introduction or upsell.

They stop manual work, error and wasted resources, but also increase the ability to identify where to double down efforts for future campaign success. AI technology is behind a lot of automations: sifting through and segmenting data and even judging market sentiment. Predictive modelling can predict investor behaviours and or where marketing budgets should be re-allocated, while optimised split testing leads campaigns run in tandem to find the most optimised option to engage audiences.

Act On the Data

AI’s ability to show campaign performance in real-time or to generate detailed reports is amazing, so long as the marketer acts as the ‘controller’ of its usage and can interpret its results for clear decision making about what to change for better ROI.

Analysis involves representing raw data in more visually appealing ways. In a CRM dashboard set up in line with KPIs and goals, marketers can compare engagement levels with past performance, map campaigns to inflows, and see which regions are responding to certain themes and formats. Such insights therefore become actionable. They show how or where to target again for likely success, and whether your initial planning is bearing fruit.

McKinsey has noted how revenues can be raised by 30% using advanced analytics, and the human-led AI revolution is key to this for funds. Likewise, as great as internal controls are, there’s no harm in benchmarking analysis against competitors’ data to improve your own results to please the superiors!

Stretching budgets is a lot about reducing waste from the human effort point of view, but also in managing platforms properly to do what they set out to do. Digital means make this much easier in displaying where ROI success lies and where it does not, providing proof for long-term strategy that can become a reusable win.

Plus, with marketing people and their machines set up for success together, funds of any size can seem as big-time as the major market players, while still spending far less on more creative and effective marketing plays!

ProFundCom helps fund marketers allocate their budgets accordingly using digital tools tailored specifically to the financial industry, including:

• 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.
• Automated Lead Nurturing: Set up workflows to engage with leads at different stages of the customer journey, delivering targeted content, follow-up emails, and personalised messages to drive conversions.
• Lead Scoring and Qualification: Prioritise leads based on engagement levels and interactions through scoring and focus efforts on high-potential prospects.
• Data Analytics and Reporting: data analytics tools allow fund marketers to analyse the performance of their digital marketing campaigns, track AuM growth, and measure client retention rates.
• Cross-Selling Opportunities: ProFundCom’s reporting capabilities highlight cross-selling opportunities by identifying when a prospect shows interest in additional products or services.