How To Use Digital Marketing To Find New Investors – Part One
Where do you find new investors in the digital age?
Tricky question – and not an easy one to answer.
Truth is, it’s tough – but it can be done. In this five-part series, I’m going to show you how to use digital marketing to uncover those who want to invest with you.
Let’s start by framing the problem you face as a fund marketer:
Your whole world has now gone digital. It’s a process that’s been going on for years, of course, but the pandemic and ensuing lockdown sent it into overdrive. Now the investor journey is almost entirely digital.
As a result, the awareness stage – when people first hear about your brand – is a maelstrom of emails, web pages, events, press mentions, articles, PR, social media and more. Any one of those things could persuade a potential investor to find out more about you.
But how do you know what’s working in this regard and what isn’t? If you don’t know, (and most fund marketers don’t) then it’s a constant game of ‘spray and pray’ – putting stuff out there and hoping that at least some of it connects with potential clients.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Using digital marketing, you can reach a place where you monitor what’s going out and how it’s performing and track the activity of the people who are reacting to your content and, by doing so, are putting their hands up as potential investors.
The first part of this is to put together a go to market strategy (GMS).You should develop this before you do anything else.
A GMS is a strategy document with three components. The first of these is a fund narrative based on what you stand for as a firm – so whether you’re long, short, equity-driven, distressed debt etc. You should also touch on your attitude to risk, investment strategy, and performance
The next part of your GMS is to create an ideal investor profile. What does your perfect client feel about risk, strategy, ESG etc?
Lastly, you must think about your top 100 investors. Who are they? Where do they live? Where do they hang out online? What interests them – and what turns them off?
These three elements of your GMS are essential to your fund marketing. In fact, they are essential to any marketing. Whatever you’re selling – whether it’s funds or fairy cakes – a GMS will serve as the basis for all that you do.
You will keep refining your GMS, as when things go live – and engagement data starts to come through – you find out more about your ideal clients and where to find them. It’ll probably take about seven iterations, and maybe more, before you hit on something you’re completely happy with.
But when you know what you stand for, who you want to sell to, and where to find those people – then things get a whole lot easier, as you can create a powerful five-step marketing process, which looks like this:
Narrative – lay out what you do and why you do it
Brand – use the narrative to create brand content that appeals to your ideal investor
Demand – deploy your content across various channels where your ideal investors can access your brand narrative (outbound marketing)
Engagement – encourage potential and existing investors to engage directly with you (inbound marketing)
Analysis – measure engagement data, so you know the best way to contact prospects and investors and what to say to them
Having this in place sets the stage for all your marketing efforts. So, if you only do one thing that I advise in this whole series – please do this.
