How To Harness Digital Marketing – The New Normal For Hedge Funds. Part 3

This is the third in a series of posts examining the new normal of digital marketing – and what hedge funds must do to make the most of it.

In this post, I’ll examine how you take the engagement data you derive from digital marketing campaigns and turn it into something that your sales teams can use.

Sadly, valuable information is often gathered by fund marketing departments that never makes it to the sales team.

This is a problem we faced in the early days of ProFundCom, when we saw lots of quality engagement data being produced in hedge funds – but nobody was using it. That’s because it was flying around in all sorts of different formats and wasn’t being categorised or collated.

The solution, we realised, was to create a ‘lead deck’, which would collect all the necessary information and put it in one place – so they could see everything about a client or prospect without digging around.

This concept is as useful today as it was back then. And it is much easier to set up, as you can simply deploy it through your CRM. Having this means your sales reps can instantly bring up a list of prospects and see information taken from across the CRM that shows key data about each person – without having to jump between various spreadsheets and tools, with all the hassle that involves.

The information on a lead deck should include where prospects are based, what is – and is not working, theme analysis to show what people are particularly interested in, and trend analysis to show what is current.

And the processes that run all this – and push pertinent information into the lead deck – are all automated. So data is being constantly analysed and used to update the status of everyone on your system.

The result is that both sales and marketing can see everything about a prospect or an existing investor in one place. So, any communication with that person will be guided by an accurate and current overview of preferences, interests and any existing investments. This results in more informed sales conversations, which ultimately boosts AuM.

So, is that the end of it all? Now we’ve got through the sales process, are we done with looking at the new normal of digital marketing?

Not quite. Because, digital can also help you with perhaps the most important step of all – keeping your investors.

I’ll look at that in my final post in this series.