Published: 14 October, 2024

REPLAY::The Power of Data: 4 Steps to Drive Investor Engagement

REPLAY::The Power of Data: 4 Steps to Drive Investor Engagement

No fund’s marketing success comes from a shiny website alone. Iterating the success of campaigns comes from seeing exactly which channels are popular, and which themes are prevalent to audience bases over time.

This is the power of data: granular investor-centric information that shows what they’re looking for from your fund, and just how much or how often they are engaging with your vital investment content.

The more insight you get, the better the richness of your buyer journey timelines, segmented investor profiles, and lead scores. A combination of data-led strategies make up the magic GTM formula helping sales and marketing teams combine to increase AuM.

In this webinar, Paul Das breaks down where data plays an integral role in differentiating a brand through 4 tried-and-tested digital marketing techniques, as follows:

  • Conducting analysis from a data dashboard
  • Understanding micro and macro investor insights
  • Personalising various engagement routes
  • Measuring ROI for the C-suite

For more insight into how to best set up CRMs and marketing automations to handle large-scale data sets, check out the full replay available at the link below.

 The Power of Data: 4 Steps to Drive Investor Engagement

Webinar Summary

A question that pops into any fund marketer’s head from time to time is “how well is my marketing working?” Some may think that publishing an interactive, vibrant new website is the ticket to receive a huge influx of investors overnight. This is of course not true. To get into the good books of the C-suite, marketers need to showcase their effect on return on investment. While this endgame is tricky, the clues lie in the data.

Data underlines every step of the marketer’s overall aim: constructing a brilliant go-to market plan that takes the fund’s narrative and branding to the web, full or investors old and new, engages them, then reiterates on successes using analytics. Using these metrics can kickstart a new lead generation funnel with increased AuM at its finishing line, fuelled along the way by marketing automations that help you do more with less.

Which investment strategies, people and geographies you target all differentiate your brand, and the resulting content you produce will have a huge effect on how your fund is perceived. Particularly on digital channels where access to firms is more open than ever, standing out is crucial, and it’s by actioning your vital data that can help you get there with four simple steps.

The Data-Driven Advantage

Marketers by their very nature are driven by visuals, using the right-side of their brain. In fact, many CIOs or CEOs are similar. What we mean by this is their cognitive decisions are mainly driven by emotion, storytelling and imagination, as opposed to the left-side that’s analytical, logical, ordered and mathematical, as discovered by psychologist Roger Sperry in the 1960s. It’s not the case for all fund marketers, but many would rather spend time creating thought leadership, infographics and videos rather than digesting the sheer weight of data at their fingertips.

This is where digital marketing tools can handle the problem of data. The olden days of collating ten various Excel spreadsheets and other systems always meant salient investor touchpoints got missed. Instead, data visualisation tools can gather everything a marketer needs to make decisions about what marketing is working, and where, in an easy-to-use, 360° view.

Website activity, social interactions, email activities, and link opens can all be tracked in real-time. More importantly, marketers can drill down into the most successful fund offerings or regions attuned to certain investment trends, as well as visually comparing how certain campaigns affect inflows. In building out ROI models, marketers have usually looked to four popular metrics: touchpoint rates, active prospects, newly generated prospects, and new opportunities, all perfect to hand off to IR teams to use accordingly.

With the tools in a CRM or marketing automation software crunching the numbers, marketers can segment the data they need for their quarterly reviews, and to make iterations for new campaigns – the creative stages that many thrive in.

Understanding Your Audience – The micro level

Getting into the nitty-gritty of what investors find useful is amazing for tailoring communications that’ll help guide them to a sale: we like to call it ‘investor centricity’. If you spend the time to construct an accurate ‘want’ list for each individual person, it makes them feel special and thought about, which we all ultimately want during a purchase decision.

Understanding your own fund narrative is important to provide investors with information around how your product can drive success for their bespoke challenges. Some may want high returns, others instead want to balance their portfolio or hedge against other investments. Giving them the pointers they need to achieve their financial goals exactly when they need them is a sign that you’re a fund that listens.

Each touchpoint can amount to generous lead scores in a CRM’s timeline, all mapping out according to which content they’ve interacted with, and where they’ve headed next. It helps determine who to pursue from a sales perspective.

Understanding Your Audience – The macro level

Away from the more granular details, artificial intelligence has a knack for collating segments of contacts according to their marketing activity. An account manager will need to know these signals to determine who they need to call, but also to construct a relevant conversation in line with where they are on their digital journey:

  • Low hanging fruit: very active prospects yet to be contacted
  • Cross-selling opportunities: existing investors looking at other products they’re yet to invest in
  • Redemption risk: existing clients who have stopped looking at your content
  • Marketing alpha: dormant prospects that have re-activated engagement with your marketing.

Machine learning insights are also excellent for macro information including the best time to send emails, how many prospects have been engaged, and which themes are particularly well-viewed. Even knowing that a sales call at midday is 20% more efficient than any other time, with five sales members calling then, that’s 100% efficiency achieved – like gaining a whole new salesperson!

Personalised Marketing

Automating content feels like a very new-age digital marketing concept, but personalisation balances the old school and the new school. Both work extremely well to use data to develop relationships that differentiate your firm, its philosophy, and its marketing, as follows:

  • Marketing automations: data helps craft email sequences that are based on the interactions and responses of certain types of investors.
  • Direct mail: it may sound old-timey, but the relevance of direct mail has been championed by marketeer Jay Abraham, as well as technically achieving a 100% open rate. After all, who doesn’t like getting a hand-delivered letter in the post? It’s the ultimate show of value between sender and recipient.
  • LinkedIn: Direct messaging, so long as it’s informed by background research into ideal investor profiles, can be great for introductions that rely on showcasing hand-selected content that solve an investors’ current needs. Sales Navigator is a perfect tool for this.
  • One-to-one meetings: For all the success of online webinars and Zoom, not much beats a face to face meeting to build trust and apply a friendly, knowledgeable face to the firm, where the investor has an open forum to ask any questions in a relaxed way.

After all, mixing up these various methods shows funds thinking of novel ways to use their investor insights to get their marketing out there – and those differentiations will be obvious to audiences.

Measuring Success

Every firm’s goals are different, so demonstrating ROI is very much in the hands of the marketer’s relationship to the powers that be. That being said, the value and success of marketing is very much informed by the quality of the leads they generate, and how many of these result in conversions. The combined marketing and sales effort is upping AuM: a story told through the digital touch points gained via the GTM funnel we talked about before. A CRM’s Lead Deck remains a one-stop solution to surface digestible leads along the way requiring further action.

Real-time insights do point toward quick successes, but understanding how investor appetites for certain themes or channels wanes over time is also highly valuable. Maintaining a dashboard that can plot historical changes in content type against investor interest shows where change-ups may be needed. It’s also highly recommended to see where your digital marketing matches up with your competition, peer group and the wider industry. Easy enough, benchmarking tools exist for a marketer to do just that.

So while data may not be for the less mathematically inclined marketers, it ultimately provides multiple avenues to understand investors, get their attention, and curate a relationship that can ultimately boost the number of investments in a firm. Data and digital tools let the content strategy side sit comfortably with the fund marketing professionals – they know how to best use their insights to remain different from the field, and that goes a long way in maintaining marketing success.

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