Published: 1 September, 2012

Is Hedge Fund Marketing Leading Or Lagging Traditional Marketing

The big trends in hedge fund marketing are being driven by a couple of important things that have happened in the hedge fund space and in the financial markets.

The first is the large number of marketing messages that individuals are bombarded with daily – which low estimates put in the high hundreds. So, the question is, how does your message stand out against the backdrop of other funds sending information to fund performance aggregation sites and inboxes? Passively posting performance data to popular industry databases or trumpeting pedigree and waiting for assets to flow in is a waste of time.

It’s a sad fact but in hedge fund marketing we are lagging behind the rest of the marketing industry by about two or three years.

The irony of this is that a couple of important things that have happened in the hedge fund space and financial markets are driving big trends outside hedge fund marketing.

The first is the large amount of marketing messages that as individuals we are bombarded with daily, which conservative average estimates put in the high hundreds. The question is how does your message stand out against the backdrop of other funds sending information to fund performance aggregation sites and inboxes? Passively posting performance to popular industry databases or trumpeting pedigree and waiting for AuM to come is a waste of time.

The second finance-based trend is the ‘perceived’ global downturn, which is making every investment one that is examined in great detail. Basically, no-one is taking purchasing risks and is therefore making pretty safe investment decisions. Unfortunately, many funds fail to understand that performance is often an initial quantitative metric used in the evaluation and selection process to eliminate managers.

There is a third trend, although it’s quite difficult to quantify. This is that business decision makers are constantly on the go and have little time to absorb anything that is even a little subtle or clever. This means that when it comes to marketing messages, less is more – so summarise your key features and be quick and responsive when more details are requested.

With this in mind, financial marketers need to concentrate on the following core ideas:

Relevance – if your messages aren’t relevant they will simply become background noise. So make sure you understand what the market perceives to be relevant.

Proof – if buyers are being cautious, you have to look like the safe bet, so you have to prove value.

Effectiveness – messages need to be direct, to the point and unambiguous or they will be lost or misunderstood.

To any experienced hedge fund marketer this may all be second nature, but the problem for many is that in the last few years we have become so bound into the new media – Facebook, Twitter etc – that we have forgotten the basics of good solid marketing, especially in fund and financial markets. However, social media has no impact on fund inflows – fact.

So for us and a lot of our clients who are hedge funds or asset managers the new trend is getting back to basics and using a smaller number of more appropriate messaging channels that we know can be measured and do work.

The one other ‘new trend’ is measuring engagement of emails and web activity and feeding this information back to the sales team. Many managers have traditionally been unable to measure the value of their marketing, which is surely unacceptable in such an important business function. So measurement is important and marketing your funds is going to be an uphill struggle without this capability.

That’s exactly what we do at ProFundCom – we provide a marketing and sales intelligence software platform for asset managers, wealth managers and hedge funds that shows how your communications are being received, offering in-depth understanding of a campaign’s effectiveness.

Our platform automatically generates detailed reports that can be filtered by metrics such as salesperson, emails opened, emails read, emails printed, emails forwarded, websites accessed and attachments opened – providing market leading communication analytics, lead scoring and marketing automation.

ProFundCom gives you the ability to see deeper levels of prospect and investor potential in your funds by tracking prospect engagement and investor engagement.

Here are some specifics on how it works:

Sales intelligence for hedge funds: