Seven Strategies for Driving Your Ideal Investors to A Fund Website
As far back as most can remember, an advertisement acted to point intended buyers toward their website for the final pull. Even in the early internet days when the idea of a long-form URL made life tricky for radio DJ Pete Tong – something that’s hilarious to hear now.
Not much has changed for the fund marketing department. It’s paramount to get as many views on the fund’s ‘shopfront’ as possible, the trouble now being that a webpage’s novelty no longer exists. Websites have to be more intuitive, aesthetically pleasing and packed with resources, and accessible to cater to the needs of any potential visitor.
The website’s status as a consistent hub – the International Space Station for outreach teams – means it often gets preferential treatment before all else. It’s likely been the first marketing platform firms have used for decades, before connecting them with flashy automations for data capture and newfound channels. Still, it should always be updated to remain the cornerstone of a brand’s philosophy, investment stance and content.
Yes, organic traffic is wonderful when a website can do a lot of data-harvesting for a marketer with gated content and forms, affiliate buttons and links, and a portal sign-in integral to managing allocations. However, it cannot do it all. To get more eyes on all your well-crafted content, there should be a dedicated strategy to tempt more investors to snoop on your website as part of their consideration research. It can double the pool of potential AuM conversions, and takes a few simple steps.
Refining Your USPs
Something you may have crafted even before website v1.0 was what differentiates you from the rest of the pack. Is that still reflected in your current version? It’s an excellent idea to bring your outreach teams together to come up with the ultimate reasons investors should choose you, and not another. Then, expand that through messaging across your online channels: your experience, customer service, and corporate social responsibility are all important factors that can propel an investor to seek out your products and knowledge centres.
Targeting Your Valuable Prospects
Most fund marketers may believe they know their audience back-to-front. But do they?
Digital touchpoints do manage to paint fuller profiles when the data’s brought together, and it’s worth checking a CRM to identify their work, region where they are based in, their investment experience, existing portfolio, and marketing preferences.
If these match the ideal profiles your sales and marketing teams have built together, these make up the category of ‘most likely to invest’ following a little nurturing. A fund will benefit from singling out investor behaviours that will be more responsive to your ‘check out our website’ call-to-actions and landing page links in direct messaging. LinkedIn Sales Navigator still works segmenting investors, finding those you may have connected with at offline or online events, and providing an instant messaging service to begin a conversation.
If your ideal investors exist on other channels, focus on the platforms that are integrated well with the website already and build up from there.
Become A Google Presence
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a fickle business – a complete strategy in itself driven by expert agencies and a lot of indexing changes and rules. It can become a ‘free traffic’ scenario, but it’s a long-term plan. Search engines take a while to find webpages, and it’s tough to fill-in the right keywords in everything you do.
SEO should still remain a constant pin in the marketer’s mind when producing content though, as it all adds up to a website propping up first in line when an investor is curious about you – especially for localised SEO to become a ‘local legend’ in targeted areas. Always come up with a list of keywords you should be affiliated with, and optimise it within your web messaging without it looking crowbarred into the copy.
Also, do not let this duplicate content or lead to defunct pages; this ruins web quality that will rock Google’s boat. Organised XML sitemaps and URL structures go alongside SEO to better webpage performance and improve your rankings (and authority to audiences).
Promoting Great Content
Whether it’s a short-form video or stacked report, lead magnets are valuable to draw prospects to your site. Especially when they see it on a social media page, or in a banner or promotional targeted email that’s personalised to them. It’s offering something for their time in checking out your website, and may lead to them subscribing to you or handing over data through a form or log-in.
When you repeatedly construct your website into the go-to place for your range of multi-media thought leadership, you also build credibility in the online space for educational material, and so draw in more regular organic traffic from initial content posts.
Using Paid Media (When Necessary)
Social media can be free, but not always. In our experience, LinkedIn paid ads can be a drain, while paid search could be more bang-for-buck in effectively getting visibility that draws investors to your website and content. Where to advertise really depends on where your investors lie, where industry competitors are acting, and ultimately what will be most efficient in targeting consumers for the lowest cost per acquisition. Financial returns (and eventual AuM numbers) can be brilliant if paid advertising is used strategically to draw in ideal prospects from all over the web.
Checking Your Housed Data
A website will fail when it isn’t a well-maintained DIY project that morphs with investor interest. To identify exactly where to make the right changes, an integrated CRM can do the job of identifying webpage or content-specific stats that identifies where any UX design or SEO do-ups should be focused, including:
Organic search traffic and sources
Page views and times
Bounce rates
Exit rates
Conversion rates
Lead attribution
With the worrying prevalence of bad bots out there inflating traffic numbers (particularly in pay-per-click contexts), be sure to identify anomalous behaviours and implement safeguards against them.
Go Old School With Referrals!
All your effortful relationship building with leads can spread further afield. If a happy investor is welcome to refer you, it’s a good idea to recommend the website as the first port-of-call to draw any of their friends or colleagues that want to investigate your fund’s potential.
This also brings to mind the fact that it’s not all about potential investors! Your existing customers have different marketing needs, such as product updates or fund performance documents. Website pages or resources dedicated (and duly distributed) to them may lead them to research other funds they haven’t invested in, and that’s AuM growth achieved without starting the long sales funnel from scratch.
Driving investors to a website is a multi-disciplinary action: a mix of digital platform effectiveness, time spent investigating your customer bases through data, and even classic one-to-one chats. What it’s all for is to kickstart their own fund strategy, content and product comparisons, and hopefully their ensuing journey through targeted staggered content. The website has been a lynchpin for decades after all – and it doesn’t seem to be stopping!
ProFundCom helps fund marketers drive more engagement with investors through various tools and strategies tailored to financial websites, including:
Scheduled Content Delivery: Send content across multiple channels, including email, social media, and websites, and pre-schedule campaigns and posts to maintain a consistent presence online and reach audiences at optimal times.
Content Recommendations: Personalise content to website visitors based on their interests and engagement history to enhance user experience and increase lead conversion rates.
Website Analytics: Use analytical tools to provide insights into visitor behaviour, traffic sources, and conversion metrics.
A/B Testing: Conduct A/B testing on website elements such as landing pages, call-to-action buttons, and forms to identify effective strategies for lead generation and refine website content for better conversion rates
Data Analytics and Reporting: Measure conversion rates and analyse the effectiveness of their marketing strategies to monitor key metrics and optimise lead generation efforts for reliable results.
Cross-Selling Opportunities: ProFundCom’s reporting capabilities highlight cross-selling opportunities by identifying when a prospect shows interest in additional products or services.
