Tips for Staying Competitive in the Game of Raising and Managing AuM
Assets under management (AuM) is a firm’s golden nugget: a small acronym with very big meaning.
Not only does it certify a fund manager’s position in the grand scheme of things, but it carries with it a level of trust and influence that can be used to entice any potential future investors.
Like any financial circumstance, AuM can change at the drop of hat for better or worse. In the battle to retain loyal investors, funds are also charged with finding new ones through marketing and distribution teams. Raising and managing AuM effectively is a bit like having your cake and eating it – it’s a very tough balancing act to convert leads and adhere to investor tastes’ when their interests, and emerging investment types, are also fluctuating.
Plus, besides the onset of covid-19, growing interest in sustainable investing and the rise of digital disruption, funds are facing the threat of competition from major league tech companies like the Metas or Googles of this world.
When staying ahead in the field feels like a trickier task than ever, fund managers have their niche advantage: deep market knowledge that’s specific to investments for current clients and potential prospects. To monitor and raise AuM, and hopefully see more investors come forward, it’s all about using digital marketing that’s tailored directly to them.
Differentiate Your Fund Philosophy
Standing out in the crowd is an obvious way to get more attention (hopefully good publicity!), but that’s easier said than done. Ultimately, your voice is what sets you about – your offerings, your quality of care to your investors, your value – and how authentically that’s conveyed across all digital platforms and communications builds a level of trust potential customers while gravitate to during their own research.
Seeing which content topics or web pages are popular with your audiences helps to showcase what’s resonating, and where it can be leveraged for your brand awareness strategy in being as investor-first as possible. When you know what your top 100 investors look like (their lifestyles, budgets, and hobbies), you can focus asset-raising efforts on them.
Educate and Entertain
Investors’ time spans are reducing, their expectations higher, and their demands a little more bespoke when approaching a fund to invest with. In fact, the average time to close new prospects has increased from six to eight months in the past couple of years.
Any branded content that goes out onto your digital platforms must be informative in regards to changing markets, and tackle themes your audience re-visits time and time again. You can build out campaigns that purport to popular investment strategies, construct easy-to-navigate resource centres, applications or online portals, and use socials to highlight the credible expertise of your portfolio managers.
Define Collaborative Best Practices
As fund marketers and salespeople have the distinct common goal of raising AuM and maintaining great investor relationships, any tension or breakdowns in communication between the two can cause negative ripple effects in the asset-raising game.
The old days where marketers saw distribution people as bullish number chasers, while sales teams saw marketers as fluffy aspiring ad execs, are long gone. Both need to rely on cross-referenced investor insights from one repository (a CRM, for instance) to drive demand generation and conversions.
One cannot do their best job without the other: regular communication and established workflows helps to fix gaps in reporting or signal keen investors through analytics, streamlining the ability to hand-hold leads through the buyer journey.
Set Up Automations
Being able to engage directly with your current and future investors is the best way to build rapport in the hopes of maintaining or upping AuM. To do so around the clock, automated processes are ideal to draw interested parties into nurture sequences from email clicks or subscription forms. Preference centres gauge what they want to receive to their inboxes, so you’re only sending their favourite things without irritation, while automated reminders for events or webinars can boost attendance by 20% to 30%.
All these touchpoints construct a reliable picture of individual investors, their common behaviours, and where they may be on your ‘lead’ radar. Implementing lead scoring means you can define more ‘hungry’ users depending on their activities and split them into categories worth a resell, upsell, first sales engagement, or re-activate communications after a cold spell. It all helps oil a well-functioning lead conversion process to increase assets.
Tweak Digital Journeys Using Analytics
Just as AuM can be volatile, no go-to market strategy is completely foolproof every single time. The successes of gated content, website landing pages, fund centres, email attachments, event invites and more can all be shown from gathered data in your CRM or marketing automation software.
Soft analytics may be available through social media, but they provide cloudy low level insight that doesn’t get to the heart of user behaviours that highlight AuM building potential: what processes investors have started or stopped engaging with, what your most sought after content type is, what’s popular in certain geographies, and who remain as highly interested contacts still on the ‘to call’ list in the sales team’s phonebook. You can see what stages of a GTM need to be improved through the data, before going ahead and doing just that.
AuM is the ultimate marker of a fund’s success, so improving that magic number takes a number of routes. The lucky thing is that marketers can utilise the digital platforms available to them if they choose, test and adjust their success rate to gain more attention, build trust, and hopefully make more sales.
Plus (as an even better side effect) tracking any AuM retainers or new business back to marketing efforts is all good for a better budget and to get a pat on the back from the C-suite – data provides the ultimate biscuit crumb trail to prove it!
ProFundCom can help fund marketers retain and raise AuM through digital marketing strategies and tools 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 Communication: deliver tailored content recommendations, and targeted offers to clients and prospects based on their preferences and engagement history to help increase client satisfaction and retention.
Lead Nurturing Campaigns: guide prospects through the sales funnel by delivering relevant content, educational resources, and timely follow-ups, nurturing leads and converting them into investors.
Data Analytics and Reporting: data analytics tools allow fund marketers to analyse the performance of their digital marketing campaigns, track AuM growth, and measure client retention rates.
Cross-Selling Opportunities: analyse client behaviour and preferences to recommend additional products or services to existing clients, thereby increasing AuM through upselling.
Compliance Management: maintain compliance with industry regulation standards and best practices in digital marketing to build trust with clients and protect reputation, supporting AuM retention.
If you’d like to find out more, get in contact with our team today!
