Published: 31 August, 2022

What is Brand Awareness and Why is it Important for Fund Managers

Brand awareness represents how familiar your target investor is with your firm, fund or brand.

It also means how well these potential investors recognize it. Brands with high brand awareness are simply ‘popular.’ – Blackrock, Vangard and PIMCO. Establishing brand awareness is the very cornerstone of fund marketing, especially in the early stages of a fund or increasing inflows. Brand awareness might seem like a mumbo-jumbo concept, something that was dreamt up by some marketing revenue team at an agency and it probably is as it does not generate tidy numbers, dashboards or even reports. But for a fund, brand awareness is incredibly important for business success and overall marketing goals.

Brand awareness promotes trust – a  face to your fund, investors can trust easier – whether that is a fund manager or a portfolio manager talking about the fund or an analyst talking about a new set of research. Brand awareness efforts give your fund a personality and a platform to be sincere, receive feedback and tell a story – which should be informative, enlightening as well as entertaining. From a humanistic point of view, this is how we build trust with one another especially in long-tail sales cycles like fund sales.

Brand awareness creates an association – whilst your fund may not be the next Hoover, Scotch Tape or BandAid where the product and brand are associated with each other, brand association is built out of brand awareness campaigns subconsciously encouraging us to be front of mind when potential investors are thinking about a particular strategy.

Brand awareness constructs brand equity – Once an investor is aware of your fund, they will probably start recognising it in articles, journals and other fund marketing content. These investors will do this without assistance and will consequently seek it out to invest, whilst preferring it over other similar funds but also providing recommendations to other investors.

 

How to Build Brand Awareness in Fund Marketing – Tell Great Stories

Storytelling – is the most powerful and understated marketing tactic for fund marketers. The reason why? Because it gives something real for your investor and potential investor to associate your fund with. A narrative around a fund moves the positioning from performance, performance, performance to something a bit more human and gives it depth. Building this narrative into your fund marketing reiterated the connection in a conscious and unconscious way.

What should your narrative be about? Anything, as long as it’s true. It can be the narrative of your founder, the tale of how your business had its first product idea or the little-engine-that-could story of how your small business made it in this big world.

People love stories about each other and even more about themselves. So the ultimate ninja move is people seeing themselves in your stories. Authenticity is impactful, and it can lead to a big boost in brand awareness.

 

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