REPLAY::Fund Marketing Outlook 2025
REPLAY::Fund Marketing Outlook 2025
In our first webinar of the year, we delved into our latest research piece, “Fund Marketing Outlook 2025.”
At ProFundCom, we surveyed industry professionals to understand how they tackle key challenges like demand generation, content creation, and lead nurturing.
The results were eye-opening, revealing a wide range of approaches and varying levels of success.
In this 30-minute live webinar, shared our key findings and insights, highlighting the areas where fund marketers need to focus their efforts in 2025.
We’ll also discuss practical strategies for implementing these insights and achieving success in the new year.
2025 Fund Marketing Outlook Report
Webinar Summary
Sadly, marketers are still not given their dues as a core function at a fund. In the hunt to increase leads, the difficult path to that destination is not the concern for the C-suite – it’s the AuM numbers that speak the loudest.
Nowadays, ‘going digital’ is so invaluable for fund marketers, offering tools to boost those assets through online investors, and also to show (with evidence) that they’re a profit centre and not a costly expense.
At ProFundCom we spent a lot of time last year flying around the globe to meet with fund marketers personally, identifying their major challenges in putting together go-to market (GTM) plans that yield consistent results. Following up on that, we conducted a cross-section survey to see what marketers, salespeople, IRs and managers at financial services companies were prioritising for the year ahead. Here’s what we discovered.
The Biggest Hurdle: Lead Generation
Surprisingly 90% of those we surveyed stated that gathering new leads was the hardest fund marketing exercise. Of course, more leads means more assets, but it does require a smooth marketing and sales effort backed by smart data intelligence platforms that these teams invest a lot of their budgets in.
Among the lead generation doom and gloom however, 6% declared having no glaring challenges. So what’s their secret? To move that the ‘number of leads’ needle from the red zone to the green, a successful go-to market team goes beyond fixing website banners and posting to LinkedIn. Instead, they spent time differentiating themselves by producing and refining their GTM funnel:
- Solidifying the story of what the fund stands for
- Building the brand through thoughtful, educational content
- Targeting outreach efforts to ideal investors through channels, forums and event spaces
- Honing their details for future engagement
- Analysing what’s making great campaigns profitable
That way, marketers can adapt to the online-first GTM evolution, where investor journeys cover many digital touchpoints housed in a CRM. Finding out what makes 10 prospects tick (compared to 100) makes it easier to nurture those interests with follow-up emails, socials, or a personal phone call from the sales or investor relations team.
A process to better cater to an ideal audience should come before splurging money on a shiny new toy that showcases the stages following engagement. A strategy built on better foundations should make the quality of leads improve dramatically.
Keeping Up Conversations with Automations
On the topic of the CRM, we found these platforms are used across the board, Salesforce or otherwise. The pain point, though, is that 56% are not automating their marketing efforts after having the CRM-website tag team in place.
Automation tools exist to keep reiterating the most appealing content to existing and potential investors. To be clear, while AI is useful for automating many things, ChatGPT or DeepThink is not quite the right way to refine your brand voice and set automated marketing into action. Appealing to ideal investor profiles means creating a feedback loop: after analysing which audiences are pulling on the fishing line at the brand awareness phase, you can automate brilliantly personalised materials to those that are highly engaged, or refocus efforts on those interested in other topics or content formats.
Only 10-30% of online investors may interact with you across your digital real estate – it’s a long sales cycle that calls on your fund to stay front of mind and memorable enough to grow lead scores over time with the investors that count. The automated cycle makes sure you’re reiterating on successful lead generation steps.
Going Beyond Data Tracking
The results revealed that a quarter of respondents feel generating and acting on analytics could be improved. It’s not that they don’t have the data, it’s just knowing what to do with it.
‘Tracking’ involves understanding the likes, dislikes, locations and behaviours of the investors you’re adhering to in very granular detail. This is done through documenting their every move on multiple channels, where AI steps in. The technology can identify (and unify) their activities on website landing pages, forms, investor portals, social media accounts, email URL opens, factsheet downloads and more.
Collating this as a map for every investor in a CRM dashboard helps build accurate portraits for who’s who, where they’re based, what investments they’re likely to be interested in, and their likelihood for a sale. When your salesperson picks up that phone, they can use that automatically tracked information to understand who’s on the receiving end. A personable, informed conversation is extremely valuable for a trusted business relationship.
The Appetite for Specialist Platforms
Generic marketing platforms are losing favour. So much so that 77% are hoping to embrace more specialist digital solutions that can boost conversions for asset managers, hedge funds or other sectors.
This indicates that funds are hoping to scale up their marketing operations. Of course, any smaller business can get started with a free CRM, Google Analytics, and a spread of siloed Excel spreadsheets. But more customers means adding tens or hundreds of additional products for specific use cases like Pokemon, when the need for them arises. When trying to connect them all, the marketer becomes a data engineer on top of their important GTM-building duties!
Juggling multiple systems takes an awful lot of time. It also does not necessarily streamline your investor-centric efforts. Expanding personalised marketing means moving ahead with CRMs, portals, and automation platforms that specifically understand the financial markets they serve. These may incur larger costs than generic providers, but ‘doing more with less’ in the long run gives fund marketers far more wiggle room to double down on their successful campaigns – all to increase that AuM count.