Published: 30 October, 2022

The ProFundCom Time-to-Value Guide for Fund Managers Looking to Use Digital Marketing and Marketing Automation

What provides the return on marketing investment and how can you achieve it in a short amount of time? Learn how fund management marketing teams do this with ProFundCom.

Are you a fund marketer considering a tool or platform to make your marketing more efficient and effective? Are you looking for a way to demonstrate what impact marketing is having on inflows?ProFundCom, the leading fund marketing automation solution, can assist. One of the biggest unknowns with any new process and system is the time to value — how can you minimise the time between getting it and seeing if the benefits are worth it? After all, the risk of doing nothing can sometimes seem very appealing – right?

In this guide, we cover what proves the return on marketing investment, how you can achieve it in the shortest time, and why ProFundCom is the premium marketing automation solution for funds of all sizes.

In this guide, we cover

  • What proves the return on marketing investment?
  • How can you achieve return on marketing investment quickly?
  • Why ProFundCom is the premium marketing automation solution

What Proves the Return on Marketing Investment?

Whenever your firm invests in a new undertaking, you need a way to measure the outcome. The effectiveness of marketing investment is all about the return your firm receives from its marketing activities – including marketing automation. This in a fund, is measured ultimately by an increase in AuM however, it can also manifest itself in some other non-investment ways:

  • Growth in the contact list
  • Growth in engagements
  • Growth in inbound queries
  • Growth in opportunities

The return on marketing investment (or MROI for short) is a catch-all measure that accounts for all of your marketing. You can use the data within your MROI to learn how each of your marketing channels and campaigns performed and make adjustments accordingly. Once you have identified your most effective and profitable channels, you can target and re-target your marketing spend to focus on those channels and reach more potential investors.

Digital transformation can be scary but there is a cost of no action. Don’t underestimate what marketing automation can do for your fund. A properly implemented and adopted marketing automation system will give your fund a widespread boost across all of your sales and marketing operations – and will also help them be aligned. Fund managers that have adopted marketing automation systems commonly report a quicker time to investment, clearer marketing attribution, increased insight into the performance of marketing campaigns, and streamlining of outdated sales and marketing processes among the most visible benefits of their investment. In simple terms, you can expect marketing to help raise and preserve AuM once your marketing automation system is up and running.

Measuring return on marketing investment for automation can be broken down into four basic categories that track back to the commonly reported benefits mentioned above:

  • Increased inflows
  • Generation of more high-quality sales leads
  • Time saved in marketing
  • Money saved in marketing

To measure your MROI, you’ll need a solid measurement strategy. Start with the basics:

  • Set clear goals
  • Identify costs
  • Identify total cost of ownership – licence + implementation + consultancy
  • Get the right domain specialist technology
  • Know the cost of the acquisition of an investor
  • Create a formula for calculating MROI
  • Know the lifetime value of an investor LTV

The MROI for fund managers is (Cost of Marketing/ Inbound Leads) : Lifetime value of an Investor. The ratio you are looking for is 1:10 or more

How Can You Achieve Return on Marketing Investment Fast?

Digital technology has put scores of potential leads easily within the grasp of most fund managers, especially after the digital transformation in current years. But when it comes to marketing success, lead generation is about quality over quantity. A smaller CRM filled with qualified leads is worth far more than a large one full of dead-end prospects. The rapid adoption of a quality marketing automation platform is a solid way to boost your MROI and the quality of your leads. Marketing automation works to improve the quality of your fund’s leads in two very specific ways:

  • Lead scoring and grading separate quality top-of-funnel leads from the pack, so you can focus sales and marketing resources where they matter most.
  • Lead nurturing campaigns tighten your funnel, ensuring that quality leads don’t slip through any cracks.

This is done by qualifying leads into:

  • Low-Hanging Fruit – People that are actively engaging with your fund but haven’t been spoken to
  • Cross Selling – Existing investors that are looking at funds they are not invested in
  • Investor Retention – Investors that are not engaging with your fund but should be
  • Marketing Alpha – Prospects that have suddenly started engaging with your fund that previously have not

Passing quality and timely leads to your sales team or relationship managers not only improves their chances of raising assets, but it also saves them from wasting time chasing unqualified prospects who are unlikely to invest in anything.

Needless to say, you have to find leads before you can qualify them and pass them to your sales team. It helps to have some good lead-generation tactics already planned and mapped out. According to our studies, the three channels with the highest lead generation ROI are LinkedIn Direct Messaging, existing investors, and email marketing – once you know exactly who your ideal investor is. You can learn more about how to use these channels and about lead gen and marketing funnels more broadly with our white paper here.

But today’s investors also want to trust your brand and feel good about the investments they buy from you. Earning new investors’ trust and being front-of-mind means building a relationship with them over time. Ultimately, lead generation is about using the right channels to find high-quality leads you can turn into relationships and, ultimately, investments.

From there, a process called lead nurturing helps your leads get to know you, and vice versa and boils down to delivering relevant content and information to leads based on their preferences, interests, and interactions with your brand.

As mentioned above, automated lead nurturing and using the ProFundCom LeadDeck focuses your sales funnel by making sure that every one of your leads receives the right attention based on their behaviour pattern across all your digital estate:

  • Email
  • Web sites
  • Social media
  • Forms
  • Investor portals
  • Event platform and
  • Online communication platforms.

Content drips campaigns can be triggered by customer actions like visiting your website, opening emails, or filling out forms or any other action mentioned above. Drip campaigns can also be scheduled at preset time intervals. Marketing automation makes it easy to try different strategies, compare results and outcomes, and create custom campaigns and journeys for different investor personas and product offerings.

ProFundCom is built to handle everything we’ve discussed so far and then some. But it’s also built to seamlessly integrate with your sales team’s technology and the asset-raising process and related workflows. The Connector architectural nature of the platform ensures that it integrates with the rest of your company’s technology stack. From automated routing of marketing leads to sales to putting complete investor histories at your sales team’s fingertips, ProFundCom builds marketing automation into the core of your firm so you get a complete 360-degree view of every investor and potential investor’s marketing activities.

Here are some case studies on how ProFundCom’s clients have achieved this

Third Avenue “We were using Pardot, but it wasn’t the right solution for a boutique firm like us – as it was so difficult to send custom emails. It’s not a point-and-click system; you need to be an HTML coder – a skill we don’t have in-house. So, as Pardot didn’t offer support as part of the package, I was paying an external consultant to advise/support me on how to use the system in this regard. I found myself in many situations where I needed to get emails out quickly but having formatting issues and no support from Pardot to help me with it.” Christopher LaRegina, Director, Business Development and Head of Digital Strategy

Waystone “Because they’re focused on financial services, they understand the name of the game.” Alison Mitsas-Sims, Marketing Director

Equinox Partners “ProFundCom has enabled us to do something unique in hedge fund marketing.” Daniel Schreck, Partner

London & Capital “It’s a close and genuine relationship which you just wouldn’t get with a bigger company.” Victoria Carroll, Marketing Director

Why ProFundCom Is the Premium Marketing Automation Solution For Fund Managers

Fund Managers don’t have time or resources to waste – and choosing the right platform can be a daunting task. There is generally a need to move fast and a requirement that the tools are affordable and easy to set up. But it’s important to also look for a marketing solution built to help you raise AuM and understand how managers operate.

One of the biggest considerations is if the solutions you’re considering offer data-driven insights that help you target money coming into the fund and alert you to money that may be walking out – straight out of the box. And if not, what is the whole cost of the project – licences, consulting, service and ongoing support? ProFundCom’s biggest advantage is that these are built into what we deliver so there are no drawn-out consultancy or service agreements to set up and maintain. Our support and training is included in our licence fee.

ProFundCom helps marketers align with sales and understand which marketing efforts drive investments so you can accurately work out marketing attribution. One of the biggest benefits of ProFundCom is that, out-of-the-box, these reports are immediately available.

Another advantage of ProFundCom is that you can reap the benefits of your existing CRM. Things work better when sales and marketing work together and are aligned – making it easy for the different parts of your fund to share information and insights. That’s why ProFundCom integrates into any CRM with an API. Funds that integrate their CRM with ProFundCom see leads get from marketing to sales faster than those who use a generic third-party marketing automation solution. The faster you get leads into your sales team’s hands, the higher your conversion rate. And that is great for raising AuM.

And because our integration is so customisable, you don’t have to be tied down to very specific data models or workflows or fund structures. That saves you time and money now and makes it easier to grow and add new functionality down the line, too.

 

If you want to find out how ProFundCom can help you use digital marketing to raise assets schedule a demo here

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