Fund marketing can be challenging, and smaller funds are often in a David vs. Goliath battle.
You’re up against big brands with deep pockets, and when it comes to digital marketing, it’s sometimes hard to know where you should focus your attention.
The good news is that by adopting some important practices, you can get the most out of your budget and really impact the asset-raising process.
Like any great scheme, success starts with a best-laid plan. Even the most detailed marketing campaigns can veer into unaccounted-for lanes as they progress, but delving into the analytics shows why having an upfront go-to-market (GTM) strategy in the first place is so important.
The digital marketer’s toolbox is expansive to adhere to whatever channel an investor may use to discover fund performance, investment strategy or market analysis content. This has led to a shopping spree for technology promising the slickest, cheapest ways to share socials, press releases, emails and more.
As wonderful as many of these platforms are, they collectively slow operations to a grinding halt – our own research has indicated that every added digital channel contributes 15% inefficiency to business-as-usual practices . It’s simple for a fund marketer to immediately count out five separate channels they use, so after multiplying these percentages, it’s a wonder how any AuM-focused tasks can be undertaken at all. Every channel may plan to improve things, yet they often make them worse.
The trick is that every choice of platform, written content piece or designed asset within a GTM needs to adhere to the fund’s philosophy: what they do and why they do it. Without that thought fuelling every marketing habit, the results lack the authenticity investors search for. This can happen when funds quickly deck out a pre-fabbed, uninformed website to appease C-suite budgets, devoid of their own defined attitude to risk or insights tailored to their investors.
We see a solid GTM plan as a five-step process from outlining basic principles to adhering to your most valuable investor profiles. This overall structure helps instil the nine habits we will look into, which then help to take these theoretical ‘buckets’ into action: distributing great content, analysing its effectiveness, and setting up a consistently automated cause-and-effect ‘hamster wheel’ between the two.
The 9 Habits
Inspired by these fund marketing practices, maintaining compliance and creating a storm around your brand is all possible without actively ‘selling’ what you do. When a GTM is chunked down into logical chronological steps, it’s easier to get into a rhythm for a marketing journey that stays on track with those of an investor.
Habit #1: Provide a superior branding experience
A swoosh. ‘Hot Coral’. A Chevron. The phrase “Finger Lickin’ Good”. These are not merely words and images – they evoke feelings about the brands we instantly know they represent. These examples from clothing, cars, food, and banking businesses all enforce branding as an integral part of their company’s identity.
This is no different for funds. Consumers look to financial institutions as a place to look after their hard-earned money, and that takes a lot of trust.
Only 59% of 32,000 global surveyed individuals trust financial services companies to do what is right, compared to 75% and 71% for technology and education respectively.
Financial houses would agree that, as the famous expression dictates, ‘trust is earned’. There’s a duty placed on funds to continually stick to their culture and principles, and invest in ways they claim to over time. Much of this comes down to a sense of authenticity that successful fund marketers provide by:
Defining a narrative
Being clear and consistent with their messaging
Understanding audience needs well
When a firm can resonate with investors across many years in this way, marketing activity levels increase, trust improves, and a clearer picture is built around what constitutes a particular brand’s experience. It’s also where internal and external brand guidelines become important handbooks to maintain that all-important level of coherence!
This habit becomes a cycle. The more investors that choose you, the more you can provide better content for them, then draw in other prospects, and so on.
The question of a ‘refresh’
It can be easy to go on auto-pilot after a successful brand experience and think “What isn’t broken doesn’t need to be fixed”, or worry that investors can start to doubt a fund that alters its brand (for example, a logo on a factsheet or a change in tone in targeted emails), even though formats or aesthetics are usually second-best considerations after fund strategy of performance.
However, it’s usual – even expected – for a brand to redefine itself every 7 to 11 years. Unmistakable financial giants find ways to drastically tweak their content to remain relevant to a range of investor bases, despite knowing that consistent familiarity is welcomed. Elsewhere, more subtle incremental changes can modernise existing brands when performed well, including Prudential, Eric Sturdza, or Fulcrum.
Sometimes there’s no need to change a lot. Yet occasionally a forward-thinking lick of paint can drive new conversions, so long as it upholds that integral brand ‘essence’ throughout all of the content you produce.
Habit #2: Write something once, and keep reusing it
Content marketing is a gripe for many marketers and a valid one at that. It can be a headache to produce blog pieces, snapshot videos, infographics, video outlooks, factsheets and email chains. Gathering expertise relies on grabbing time from portfolio managers who may not see its intrinsic value immediately. Some smaller funds may not have the manpower to write or film thought pieces that continually feed the beast of multiple digital channels.
There’s a large, potentially obvious solution to the problem of knowing ‘what content should we be producing?’ It’s the website: a well-cultivated repository that allows marketers to repurpose content in visually diverse ways all from the same source. For example, a single video interview with an Investment Analyst could provide huge value beyond its well-research insights, as it can be re-styled in multiple ways:
In this same way, successful fund marketers think big to craft smaller content pieces, like a ‘Russian Doll’ of sorts. What starts as a large-scale study into market outlooks or ESG investment strategies could be broken down into specific segments and formats, and posted to various parts of the website to increase engagement in all of its corners.
Besides reformatting being quicker than creating anything from scratch, there’s also the bonus of website integrations. When linked to a CRM, data such as the number of time stamps of website visits or geographical hits showcase which content is popular with certain investors and which isn’t. This ensures that informed lead scoring is possible, and directs where best to install automations to reach active site visitors.
Changing a content strategy can cause horror. But with the promise of a better return on investment (ROI) from one simple multimedia habit, the promise of value is worth the pain of change.
Habit #3: Stick to a plan
Watching television at home on a Sunday is one way to relax before a working week, yet there’s been an influx of advertising on the box and public transport all about planning apps. Why? Whether for team calendars or portfolio management, they’re a reminder that maintaining oversight of your business needs is vital for digital marketing success (as well as removing ‘Sunday Scaries’).
For fund marketers who need to juggle the data processing and creative sides of the brain, this organisational discipline can fall by the wayside. When a plan isn’t stuck to, it can have knock-on effects on efficiency. That’s particularly true when multiple team members from marketing to sales or investor relations use various platforms to track a fund’s crucial outreach activity including:
Distributing emails in a nurture sequence
Scheduling posts across multiple social media channels
Designing and sending monthly factsheets
Overseeing written content editorial
That’s only scratching the surface, too. Yet with a monthly or quarterly calendar logging content creation, editing, publishing, sending and analysis, there’s one place where a whole team can follow or edit in real-time and make sure completed tasks aren’t repeated through an easy-to-follow approval process.
To do this, many popular task management platforms exist, such as Monday or Asana. They can uncomplicate the day-to-day workflows of content creation and distribution across multiple users and major digital marketing channels. Excel remains familiar to many and completes the same job with a simple interface to plan for every month of the year:
Habit #4: Lay the dashboard foundations
All modern digital marketers are data analysts whether they’re number-crunchers or not. Data is the lynchpin of understanding AuM over time: you collect it, house it, and use it to find out who your ideal investors are. Given the sheer volume of touchpoint data available on the web, it can also be a trap that separates successful campaigns from those that fall flat.
It’s impossible to maintain vigilance over streams of cells in multiple spreadsheets. Nor can a single great-looking data dashboard be a magic wand to achieve better outcomes. There’s a misnomer that visualising the information gained by your website, email automations or social channels is the be-all-end-all. Certainly, it looks clearer and more digestible in pie or bar charts, but it’s not actionable sitting there without input from a fund marketer.
Asking questions upfront is a planning habit pivotal to helping marketers build up a bespoke dashboard for their unique needs. It clarifies which fund content is working, and which isn’t, to inform human analysts if they need to make changes to increase investor engagement.
Concerning comparative questions, a correlation graph may make sense. If you need to track each platform’s activity for a continuous period, a timeline works. A word map may help pick out trending keywords investors are looking for so that you can focus your next campaigns around, say, sustainable investing.
A dashboard’s interactivity then helps you drill further into the visualisations to determine newly active investors, those that are consistently active, drip campaigns they’re involved with, and which other themes they may be interested in hearing more about.
Again, sometimes Excel remains king! After honing the skills to piece together an all-seeing colourful dashboard, unless it can be exportable to formats like XML, it’s far from flexible and may even be too complex. Often only the most critical touch points from outreach channels (such as email opens or portal sign-ups) are necessary to determine whether you are ahead or behind in completing the C-suite’s quarterly expectations.
After all, marketing attribution is the fine line between receiving a bonus, an extra marketing budget, or nothing at all.
Habit #5: Tackle the simple yet complex ‘ROI’ question
Speaking of, the boardroom’s language is not quite the same as a marketer’s. It’s all well and good to relay LinkedIn impressions or email bounce rates in a meeting, but the bottom line is whether the spending on marketing events, white papers, research, and a CRM is conclusively upping AuM.
When ROI is the C-suite’s barometer of success, demonstrating the cause and effect of your fund content on new leads or investor retention is a conundrum all fund marketers face. ROI is a tough thing to define – it can rely on the story told by the data around how much value your campaigns add across every part of the GTM path over time.
When set up correctly, dashboards are ideal for checking whether definitive outreach and inbound numbers are going up or down. This could include the number of new prospects generated by an email campaign or webinar sign-ups, plus those already spoken to or converted to leads by the sales team. It gives a deep dive into certain content formats or themes that are not resonating.
These internal growth insights can also indicate whether a distribution list is building up or scaling down, while benchmarking tools actively showcase how one fund matches up to another in terms of external performance.
Do not fear if the arrows are slipping downward! It’s usual as time progresses and indicates that one of the GTM stages needs to be readdressed. Whether that’s solidifying the brand message or focusing on ideal investor profiles to generate more attention on products or services, experimenting to see what’s newly popular with investors may come down to automating A/B (plus even C/D) testing, where the data can trace the engagement success of particular channels or campaigns.
Ultimately, understanding where digital marketing efforts directly influence buyer decisions is a great way for fund marketers to hone in on investor appetites to streamline future personalised campaigns, and ensure ROI success down the line to keep the powers that be happy.
Habit #6: Streamline the sales effort
While a fund’s sales and marketing teams may handle different functions, their close-knit relationship can make or break the efficiency of AuM-building. Both act as custodians of a CRM, ensuring that all engagement data is clean and optimised, and time is only sped up when marketers feed client-facing teams with the most valuable investors before any wires get crossed. It provides them with the who, what, and when for their communication efforts without the hassle.
The sales enablement function has seen a 343% increase in adoption in the past five years. (
A CRM can be an unwieldy beast in the wrong hands. For being able to house and track investor data across every channel though, its segmentation efforts provide the easiest way for sales and marketing teams to collaborate and see:
Low-hanging fruit: actively engaged users who have yet to be contacted
Cross-selling opportunities: existing investors interested in different funds
Redemption risks: current investors that may need to be redeemed having halted their marketing activity
Marketing alpha: long-dormant prospects that are re-engaging with your marketing again
When this information gets fed into a lead deck, it’s gold dust for a sales team to remain efficient in calling up only relevant investors, backed by the marketer’s automated data. Artificial intelligence runs the show behind the scenes here (processing investors’ behavioural habits to categorise the data accordingly), and its future potential will likely pose new avenues for marketers to experiment with for better lead generation.
Leads are the thread between marketing and sales – ultimately their combined goal is to find investors and turn them into regular, trusted clients after all – and sales enablement tools like the CRM are making that bond tighter and easier to maintain. Making it a habit to fine-tune this platform’s powerful data collection abilities leads to better marketing insights for one, but also better results for multiple fund teams.
Habit #7: Cultivate an internal comms channel
In this day and age, housing marketing data across various platforms is close to a cardinal sin. Missed links between investors, their interactions, and their activity status will hinder attempts to personalise content needed to nurture their interests. They’ll lose faith, leads will drop, and projects will remain undelivered, while marketing team members continue working independently away from a solidified golden path.
Just as a CRM works as a single source of truth for investor data, a useful habit is to use a focal point for internal collaboration. Gone are the days of post-it notes littering an office – simplified communication tools are available and suited to different-sized funds and their specific needs. For example, Microsoft Teams can work for brainstorming calls, Slack works for instant urgent messaging, or services like Trello help to track project management tasks. Ultimately, it’s best to pick a single platform that can help with the following tasks:
Solidify decisions
Standardise a documented audit system where decisive actions can be raised, and then implemented, from the outcomes of marketing data.
Communicate often
There’s no harm in over-communicating to ensure all marketing activities are understood and distributed throughout a team, responsible for each task (sales enablement, content creation, email sequencing etc.).
Establish timelines
Make a plan to deliver a campaign or project, but be realistic in expectations upfront, especially to clients, as delivery times usually get affected by many factors!
Without ambiguity shrouding each team member’s job, the day-to-day management of fund marketing is smoothed and there’s far less chance of blame-throwing or firefighting mistakes later.
Habit #8: Always keep learning
Every fund team member has their expertise to teach. As is often the case, some digital marketers may be from B2C or tech backgrounds, and can learn a lot about the fund landscape from portfolio managers, advisors, and investor relations.
It’s great practice to increase financial marketing understanding together in a way that suits the whole team, whether through housing resources in a knowledge base, establishing a mentorship program, or hosting lunchtime learning talk sessions.
Ideas for campaigns can come from everywhere considering the array of educational material online. To get started, build up a bookmark bar full of useful resources, subscribe to email lists, listen to podcasts, and follow best-in-class educators on social media. Everyone learns differently through audio, video or from reading articles in their own time, at home, on their commute or holiday, so we recommend the following:
Opalesque TV: In-depth interviews with world-leading hedge fund managers about how they think and how funds run.
HubSpot: an expansive archive on everything marketing, from branding to email automations, plug-ins, CRM basics, content writing and so much more, including downloadable templates.
YouTube: our channel identifies lessons learned from fund marketing as yearly trends come and go.
Knowledge is power. When a whole marketing team ‘gets’ the fund world and is connected to experts, it’s far easier to tap into trending content that investors look for.
Habit #9: Make the tech work for you
Not only has a fund marketer had to transition from creative to data scientist, but the C-suite expects them to make informed decisions about purchasing technology.
This is hardly easy given the murky landscape of marketing technology (MarTech), with each specialised product built for a granular task. As we’ve looked into already, it’s imperative to have a complete marketing machine comprising content creation, delivery, editing and audits, email sending, data analytics dashboards, and more. Building this stack is a bit like connecting a web from a detective show, visualised best in Scott Brinker’s updated MartechMaps:
This complexity gives fund marketers tough choices, and those who succeed deploy the right tools for the right jobs to adhere to their investor base. Many have pivoted away from the inefficient and costly path of connecting separate platforms in favour of generic platforms that can be manually bent to bespoke business needs. While these are especially useful for project managers, sectors like asset management require single platforms that integrate specific fund marketing tools for engagement, including content delivery across multiple channels and advanced analytics.
A major lesson here is to ‘do more with less’: keep budgets low, but equip teams with powerful means to handle time-consuming marketing tasks.
This brings us to the final bonus habit of adopting automations, which can send fund email updates according to an investor’s engagement levels, event invites depending on their registration activity (or lack of), aggregate lead scores, and inform a CRM of potential nurturing opportunities.
Automations are the best way to set off the ‘hamster wheel’ in the GTM process: run your well-planned marketing machine, then analyse the results of your brand awareness, demand and lead generation to see which step can be tweaked to increase AuM.
Get into the habit
Managing budgets, producing and distributing great content, and raising investor numbers to meet ROI targets are all part and parcel of a fund marketer’s overall GTM. After chunking each stage – from awareness to engagement to analytics – it’s simpler to experiment at every level using these tried-and-tested practices for success.
What works for some funds may not for others. But identifying the blindspots becomes a regular exercise when a whole team is on the same page, informed by the incline or decline of investor engagement data shared across clean, organised platforms.
Practice makes perfect, and we hope the planning, creation, distribution and analytical tricks included here can help get your GTM off to a flying start, securing success in the competitive market to find investors.
