How to Make Content That Speaks to A Fund’s Brand Philosophy
Marketers at hedge funds and private equity firms face a daily tightrope walk: maintaining their ‘business brain’ to convert leads with sales teams for the C-suite, and flexing their ‘human side’ to create long-term connections with invisible online investors through content. Of course, they cannot ignore how a CFO’s Excel spreadsheet looks, nor disregard when target investors have been routinely perusing the shelves of their website’s resource library. Yet despite feeling caught in the middle of two opposing forces, raising assets and building content are, in fact, both underscored by brand philosophy.
Ultimately, a well-performing fund range will be fundamentally driven by the firm’s established values, especially those aligned with investors’ demanding expectations, risk appetites and financial goals, and presented routinely through nurture campaigns. In principle, once a brand gets buy-in from a trusted audience, increased deal flows can then lead to heftier marketing budgets for crafting educational and brilliantly enticing content for audiences further afield. From there, the cycle can continue – albeit sticking to that guiding philosophy is easier said than done!
All successful investment firms have a USP, especially the hungriest household name brands. They grow bigger by re-emphasising what makes them them – as their loyal fanbase will be able to recall at the drop of a hat – and especially through the online content they publish. As Steve Jobs once said, “a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality”, which only happens when both a fund’s employees and customers promote its integral investor-first expertise.
So, finding key opportunities means spotting investors that are invested in the brand well before they reach the allocation stage, and maintaining that across their buyer journey. This can be done strategically by assessing the thought leadership that best amplifies brand philosophy through an authoritative voice, and creates consistent ‘reasons for engagement’ that are paramount to feeding the sales funnel. Here’s how.
What Is Brand Philosophy?
In everyday life, we’re powered by our inherent core principles. It could be a moral decision – maintaining honesty, integrity, or a positive attitude at work, for instance – down to being committed to daily exercise or always eating a healthy breakfast. Whatever it is, a personal philosophy is a driving force that’s repeatable, and reinforced over time.
This works the same for a fund brand. A shared philosophy underlines the company’s culture, ethics, ways they communicate with their investors, and even their strategies for investing. Some may prioritise simplicity in their messaging to appeal to more inexperienced investors, while others may value sustainability above all else, while a more sophisticated approach is needed for target allocators.
Brand philosophy goes well beyond a product suite to instead highlight the fund’s quality of service in reaching its mission, which is ultimately to enhance the financial lives of their investors. To earn trust is a long game – especially for high-net worth individuals looking to invest larger capital – and involves greater tailored engagement than piling factsheet after factsheet of positive returns onto them. Fund marketers and sales teams must understand their wants and needs, and adhere to them thoroughly in thoughtful, timely and authentic blogs, videos, online webinars that will attract leads to a brand they believe in.
Luckily, a multi-phased digital marketing strategy is making it more accessible for funds of any size to share quality content across every channel, and therefore power-up their brand’s philosophy in the online spaces where prospective investors will want to learn more.
Map Out Your Differentiators
A core brand voice will always separate one fund from another. Such distinct brand differentiators were likely determined when a fund was set up, and cementing investor value every day comes down to translating a collective purpose throughout all written and verbal communications.
Ogilvy cited five “SUPER” factors to determine how consumers perceive a brand – Social, Useful, Personal, Economic, and Rewarding – each of which can help plan out a fund’s outreach strategy. For instance, some funds will want to maintain an esteemed white glove professionalism for long-term institutional investors with decades of building diverse portfolios, through in-depth reporting or exclusive invitations for personalised events. Another fund will prioritise ways to draw in new audiences through sleek, user-friendly digital experiences, where well-designed and attention-grabbing websites and email templates can establish a consistent brand appearance and philosophy far and wide.
Key demographic pain points and risk factors for a fund’s investor base should be determined in advance too, as these can assist fund marketing and investor relations teams to start developing thematic multi-purpose content that will selectively speak to the investors that they are targeting – so long as the content remains truthful to the investment areas that the fund serves.
Be Strategic About Your Content
Not many people like to hear a commentator tooting their own horn. This is a trap some fund marketers fall into: letting their executives talk about what they think people want, and not what audiences truly look for from the brand as a whole. However, when the fund’s philosophy reflects an LP’s personal interests and investment strategy, it creates a genuine and unique bond from the start.
Yet given investors are numerous and may be hidden anywhere in the world, understanding even the most nuanced tastes is achieved using data analytics. A marketing automation platform should serve as a hub that tracks touchpoints, and therefore builds a very specific picture of existing content that’s working for your deal team’s target personas. Drill down individually, and you see nuanced characteristics that indicate which personalised content different drip campaign lists should receive (which they are therefore more inclined to engage with).
Some dashboards may offer word clouds that selectively draw out popular trends aligned to your fund philosophy to double down on. Or, a simple survey that asks for customer feedback can reveal plenty about what makes a fund stand out in the crowd straight from existing investors. Either way, sales and marketing brains can use quantitative and qualitative data to collaborate, and identify which content makes qualified leads tick – as well as which areas of a go-to market strategy may need tweaking to enhance brand recognition earlier on in the digital buyer journey.
Spot Changes Over Time
When you collate historical interactions, it shows the most eager prospects, but also the quality of certain webinars or reports at any given time. A CRM’s investor data such as website traffic, open rates and downloads are a good indicator of where brand awareness is occurring along the initial courses of a sales cycle, and even better if such metrics are audited over time to evidentially lead to conversions.
Sales enablement platforms ultimately measure how effective content is in raising AuM for the business. AI-driven automations cherry-pick key investor behaviours, accumulate lead scores, and can segment popular regional content, too. This does not replace the inherently human role of understanding a fund’s brand philosophy, but possesses the data processing power needed to make quick strategic decisions for re-focusing outreach efforts more likely to end in conversions.
When valuable content is performing well across multiple channels, it’s clear that a fund’s digital presence is working, and how it can be reiterated in future campaigns. A feedback loop between digital analytics and the brand awareness stage is great for a marketer to prove to the boardroom that targeted communication is driving opportunities, and that investments in technology is working to spot opportunities that benefit the bottom line.
Tips for Make Brandworthy Content
Highlighting a fund’s brand philosophy over time is all about maintenance and discipline. That’s not easy in the fast-paced fund marketing environment, but possible with a few simple content planning considerations:
Create brand guidelines: as a centralised document of the right tone of voice, areas of expertise and useful resources, any employee at a fund can ‘live’ the brand and re-emphasise its culture through socials, or any content pieces they produce.
Share the task: with the brand’s philosophy highlighted in internal marketing material, the ability to craft engaging content can be shared among the firm’s fundraisers, CEOs, and analysts that know the market and their investor bases well, or to outsourced writers supplied with brand guidelines to gain fresh industry perspectives.
Think about reusability: some key reports may be evergreen in underpinning your business’ mission, and can be broken down or reused in high quality formats such as podcasts or video scripts.
Keep up with SEO: optimising content with keywords that differentiate your USP helps fire them up the search engine page ranking, down to how simple and user-friendly webpages are.
When there’s a recognisable brand throughline in every content format, it will make a fund jump out to a range of diverse investors surfing the web for the ideal partner to invest with. That initial interest and ‘hook’ is essential to kickstart a digital buyer journey, where trust grows through considered content campaigns fully tied to their investment goals, but always back to the fund’s initial philosophy. It remains the essential ingredient to keep fund marketing and sales teams focused on effective brand boosting, all in their own mission of raising AuM for the business.
ProFundCom can help fund marketers increase their brand awareness through content with tools and strategies tailored to the financial industry:
Thought Leadership Promotion: Leverage ProFundCom to promote thought leadership content, whitepapers, research reports, and industry insights to showcase expertise and credibility within the financial sector.
Email Marketing Campaigns: With ProFundCom’s email marketing platform, create targeted campaigns that promote brand messaging, thought leadership content, and industry insights to a segmented audience, increasing brand visibility and recognition.
Website Optimisation: By improving website design, content quality, user experience and SEO strategies, marketers can attract more visitors and strengthen brand visibility online.
Lead Scoring and Qualification: Prioritise leads based on engagement levels and interactions through scoring and focus efforts on high-potential prospects.
Unified Data Management: Fund marketers can consolidate customer data, engagement metrics, and campaign performance from various sources to gain a comprehensive view of their audience and marketing activities in one platform.
