Listen Up! How Investor Feedback Can Better A Fund’s GTM Strategies
Not every well-laid plan can come to fruition.
A great go-to market (GTM) strategy must be created with desired outcomes or KPIs in mind, that’s for sure, be it more exposure in a certain region or upped daily web traffic. But if they don’t happen right away, there’s no need to scrap the whole thing! A marketer’s GTM is often organic: an elastic plasticine model that needs to be tweaked to get the maximum end results that please the quarterly boardroom.
That’s not to say that planning is out of the question. Far from it. Fund marketers spend a great deal of time coming up with creative solutions to draw in investors old and new, sparking interest through new content formats or drawing on advanced expertise and their niche brand voice. Unfortunately, the marketer is only the delivery service, and they have to see how well received their intended parcels are with the end user to keep building success.
That’s not always easy, particularly through digital means where investor ‘responses’ will be link clicks, portal sign-ins or webinar views rather than a thank you card. This is where the fund marketer’s intuitive role as a customer psychologist comes in. You can see qualitative data in your CRM – how can you analyse that properly to make changes that will make prospects convert and make inflows go up?
This direct, real-time feedback from investor responses or engagement data are the bites marketers need to revise GTM blueprints and make overall campaigns that much more efficient, stage by stage.
Is Your Narrative Making Sense?
Even the largest enterprises are reluctant to change their brand experience. Not only is that a gargantuan expense (and a gamble!) but familiarity is the essence of a brand and its philosophy. Funds largely stick to their staple philosophy to serve content consistently to investors.
What does change is the clarity of the message, and how it can be adaptable to changing generational appetites and user bases that are inevitable. Is a message tired? Uninteresting? Will it provide benefits to current pain points? Are your portfolio managers on-the-ball with trends?
Communications with sales teams can be telling, as can disengaged subscription bases. Simple surveys via phone calls or personalised emails to cooled contacts can identify what investors find valuable at that point in time content-wise. It doubles as gold dust for a marketer to rethink their positioning and rewards feedback with an earlybird event ticket or free report. If this re-engagement wins back interest, even better! Hinging on loyal customers is easier than finding new ones.
How Well Do Investors Recognise Your Content?
The potential investor pool morphs all the time, and what adheres to one ideal group may not to another. Likewise, no content is old content unless the whole history of man has seen it. That’s highly unlikely, so re-formatting content into multimedia snippets is a great way to keep GTM outreach fresh and see how different formats perform month-to-month.
The audience’s touchpoints can then be segmented: building lead scores for highly engaged users in one instance, but also painting a picture of which content is popular with prospects. In a CRM (especially run with AI automation), marketers get digital feedback to see patterns that can influence which themes or additional funds could strike a chord with certain jurisdictions or demographics.
More content interactions equate to the investors well worth reaching out to, so it’s worth adapting GTM plans to adhere to their preferences, changing markets, and from being inspired by attention-grabbing campaigns you see from competitors.
Are Your Channels Firing On All Cylinders?
Buying journeys can start, continue and end via any of your digital platforms. Keeping track of all of them, let alone every investor that uses them routinely, is almost impossible unless their interactions are pulled together into a central hub. That’s the power of fund integrations: curating a one-view feedback dashboard can help track channel performance across email newsletters, factsheets, social media channels, or your website.
Some investors may blow hot or cold with individual channels, that’s just the way preferences work. But the numbers show where ROI is more likely, and where to place greater budget allocations. Some platforms may be lower-touch (socials are still important, but sharing is quick, easy, and often free unless you’re trialling LinkedIn ads), while high open rates for email campaigns indicate that investors are very keen on that ever-faithful channel – well worth plumping more time and design resources to see how targeted efforts work out.
Can Experimenting With Engagement Work?
Considering investors’ varying interests, putting one GTM into action without leaving room for various outcomes is like betting larger distribution lists all on black. Within that framework, drip campaigns work to customise offerings to different persona groups that have – through surveys, or through in-person and online engagement – identified what they want to specifically hear from you.
Luckily, grouping these audiences and delivering multiple nurture sequences in tandem can be automated. Email marketing software and CRMs can run independently following a fund marketers’ inputs, tracking user feedback in real-time. AI can even self-learn from investor behaviours, adjusting timings and next stages. Content successes and blind spots can be gleaned; which marketers should double down on or change immediately.
Are You Analysing for Attribution?
AI is outstanding at plucking out valuable tidbits of investor wants and needs, but the marketer’s eye for putting them into action is ultimately what makes a GTM deliver on its promise.
The CRM’s structured dashboard data can be set up in a way to track figures that can account for ROI, such as conversion rates, or which nurture campaigns can be linked to inflows, or packaged into reports using AI’s data-crunching ability. Such historical graphs and those all important numbers identify where highly engaged investors are being fostered by the marketer, then passed to the sales team to increase AuM.
While not every marketing trick between brand awareness to analytics can have this effect; it’s all about learning by degrees. Identifying positive digital feedback in the GTM funnel means less wasted hours on campaigns that aren’t doing well, or investor bases that are unresponsive. Analysing your responses everywhere is all good practice, helping you automate a highly-functioning loop between grabbing investor attention, delivering what they need, and iterating on those wins.
No GTM gap should be seen as a weakness. When highlighted, it will only push a fund marketer’s future efforts in the right direction. Investor attitudes change, and the fund providing them a service needs to do the same – luckily armed with the data and digital platforms to assist any marketing home makeover project!
ProFundCom can help fund marketers analyse investor engagement with tools and strategies tailored to the financial industry:
Client Engagement Tracking: See engagement across digital channels including email interactions, website visits, and social media engagement and identify opportunities to enhance communication and strengthen relationships with investors.
Personalised Content Recommendations: Using data analytics and user behaviour tracking, ProFundCom can recommend tailored content to website visitors and leads based on their interests and engagement history.
Lead Scoring and Qualification: Prioritise leads based on engagement levels and interactions through scoring and focus efforts on high-potential prospects.
Automated Lead Nurturing: Set up automated lead nurturing workflows to engage with leads at different stages of the customer journey, delivering targeted content, follow-up emails, and personalised messages to drive conversions.
Data Analytics and Reporting: Track the performance of lead generation campaigns, measure conversion rates, and analyse the effectiveness of their marketing strategies to monitor key metrics and optimise lead generation efforts for reliable results.
