How To Build A Demand Generation Machine For Fund Marketing
To succeed in fund marketing, you need a system that creates leads all the time – not just on an occasional basis.
This is your demand generation machine.
As laid out in part two of this course, your marketing process falls into five distinct sections – narrative, brand, demand, engagement and analysis. But the success of this whole strategy is dependent on having the third item on that list – demand. If you don’t have that, it means narrative and brand aren’t being noticed, thus engagement doesn’t happen and analysis is impossible – as you can’t analyse what isn’t there.
Creating this ongoing demand comes from a mixture of outbound and inbound marketing. The outbound component is through emails, fund updates, webinars, and social media posts, which are distributed to actively attract prospects.
But it’s key to have all this content available on your website in some form, e.g. video and articles, which is inbound marketing. People will come to your website, as they have heard about you through your inbound efforts, and then – by consuming content – will leave engagement data that can be fed into your CRM, lead scoring systems, automations and reporting tools.
Of course, demand generation comes at a cost, in terms of the time, money and effort you must put into creating content that people want to consume. There isn’t any room for short-cuts here, as if you don’t have content that attracts leads, then you don’t have an effective marketing operation. As we said earlier in the course, large content pieces – such as webinars and white papers – can be split into smaller formats, but these initial pieces have to be good for that strategy to succeed.
Quality content is your gateway to successful data analysis, as people will leave their details in exchange for hearing what you have to say. But if the content isn’t useful or interesting, then they won’t fulfil their half of the bargain.
This brings another cost into play, as you must develop systems that collect prospect data in exchange for content access. In order of cost, these are newsletter sign-ups, content gateways, investor portals and fund centres. Outbound content marketing is the first step in this process – as it takes around 7 to 10 digital ‘touches’ with your brand – through emails, social etc, before someone will be prepared to even sign up for a newsletter.
Key learning points:
A demand generation machine is needed to attract a steady stream of leads
You start it through outbound marketing content that interests people
The next step is having content available through your website, which encourages people to leave their data in exchange for your information
Data can be collected through newsletter signups, content gateways, investor portals and fund centres
