How To Measure Marketing Attribution And Push A Fund Forward
A digital marketing campaign is like a candy trail, where every piece of content follows from the last on the way to the final destination: converted investors. After all, inflows are the main goal for a fund, with marketers tasked to achieve them.
Content marketing is not a vanity project intended to boast about a fund’s knowledge. It acts to provide clarity during changing financial markets and helps budding investors along the way. Using data analytics, marketers are able to see if a prospect is undertaking their buying journey according to continued interest in sequential content pieces.
Data can take multiple formats. Even a like on Facebook counts as a metric, but that’s not going to pinpoint whether your ideal investor is actively searching through your strategy pages or reading multiple insights around ESG investing, for instance. Instead, more advanced data oversight identifies regular touchpoints and who sales teams should call, armed with the knowledge of a prospect’s most visited themes or webpages.
Luckily, technology is moving the needle for marketing attribution. AI tools are available to be integrated into existing marketing platforms. They are able to automatically track every interaction across a range of marketing platforms, and then crunch down these vast amounts of quantitative and qualitative information to be viewed through word clouds, charts and tables in CRM dashboards.
CRMs can identify where website visitors have been referred from, be it calls to action on email newsletters, social media links, or paid ads. That goes some way in identifying which digital channels perform the best in presenting fund content. But lead scoring instead is more granular, assigning points to visitors every time they access your content. Their behaviours can then be segmented according to their interest:
Low Hanging Fruit – potentially significant leads that are highly engaged with your content regularly.
Cross-Selling – existing investors that have been checking out funds they haven’t already invested in.
Redemption Risk – inactive investors that may be worth calling after consulting the investor relations team.
Marketing Alpha – long-dormant contacts recently re-engaging with your current content.
We’ve waxed lyrical about the power of this automated grouping system. That’s because it’s so useful to create better conversations and boost AuM.
When fund distribution teams and salespeople know what clients are looking for, their human connection over email or phone is felt by tapping into the investor mindset. It feels like a sneaky way of knowing their wants and needs, but ultimately investors will be served content they like rather than sporadic cold emails containing blogs or videos with little to no value to them.
Content marketing is far from an exact science. With data analytics underlying every published piece, it can inform the best course of action for a fund to take to convert leads. It’s man and machine working in tandem for the better.
