We’ve already covered why digital marketing is so important – as the investor journey is almost entirely digital.
But what do you need to do it successfully?
When you first get serious about fund marketing, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by this question and feel you need everything at once – great website, incredible content, top-quality tech stack and dashboard, consultants to advise you etc etc
But when you’re starting out, there’s only one thing you definitely need:
A go to market strategy (GMS).
You should develop this before you do anything else. It’s a strategy document that should have three components. The first of these is a fund narrative based on the following:
What the fund stands for
Attitude to risk
Investment strategy
Performance
The next component is to create an ideal investor profile. How do they feel about risk, strategy, ESG etc?
Thirdly, you must think about your top 100 investors. Ask yourself – who are they? Where do they go online? What interests them? Where do they live?
When your GMS is complete, you have the basis of all your fund marketing work. Of course, you will need a website, tech stack, dashboard etc – but the GMS is the bedrock of everything.
When you have a fund narrative, ideal investor profile, and top 100 investor summary, you have what you need to start developing content and analysing the resultant engagement data by creating a powerful five-step marketing process, which looks like this:
Narrative – lay out what you do and why you do it
Brand – use the narrative to create brand content that appeals to your ideal investor
Demand – deploy your content across various channels where your ideal investors can access your brand narrative (outbound marketing)
Engagement – encourage potential and existing investors to engage directly with you (inbound marketing)
Analysis – measure engagement data, so you know the best way to contact prospects and investors and what to say to them
Key learning points:
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by fund marketing, but you don’t need much to get started
The key thing you need is a GMS (go to marketing strategy) that identifies a fund narrative, your ideal investor, and the behaviour of your top 100 clients
This enables you to develop a five-step marketing process that uses your narrative to create content that can be analysed to improve the sales process
