Everything we’ve looked at in this course – and everything we do at ProFundCom – comes down to one thing:
Enabling your marketing team to pass on qualified sales leads to your sales team.
That’s the ultimate purpose of everything you do. So, while the processes around this can be complicated, the end result is not.
And you will get to that end result – and provide lots of hot leads to your sales team – through analytics.
The importance of analytics goes back to the point made at the very start of this course – that the investor journey is now almost entirely digital. Analytics is there to make sense of all the data you collect on your prospects as they make their way through this journey.
Analytics enables a marketing team to look at everything on the creative side – narrative, brand, demand, and engagement – and analyse the engagement metrics related to all these stages. Obviously a digital, multi-channel marketing campaign is going to reveal loads of different metrics. So, what should you concentrate on?
Let’s narrow that question down with what you shouldn’t concentrate on. This is the basic stuff that often (wrongly) obsesses marketing teams, such as website visits, email opens, and social likes. But these are not terribly valuable as they are cumbersome to collect and also come without any context – as you don’t know why somebody has visited your website, opened an email, or liked a post. Also, by the time they have been collated, measured and recorded – they’re already out of date. So, they don’t mean a great deal or help you in terms of gathering sales-qualified leads.
What is effective are the metrics, collected from multiple channels, that reveal the behaviour of the prospects and investors on your radar, who can then be put into various buckets based on that behaviour. There are four of these, which is a good number as it stops things getting too complicated. We covered this near the start of the course, but it bears repeating as these are the backbone of asset raising. They are:
Low hanging fruit – prospects who are actively engaged with your fund, so are downloading videos opening attachments etc, but nobody in sales has yet spoken to them.
Cross-selling opportunities – existing clients who are looking at funds they are not currently invested in
Redemption risks – existing investors who have stopped looking at your marketing material, which suggests a redemption may be imminent
Marketing alpha – this refers to the prospects who have been dormant for months but are suddenly looking at increased activity in regards to the information you’re sending out.
Filling these four buckets with leads is what all the investment and hard work that goes into fund marketing is for, as it enables sales to contact the right people, at the right time, with the right information.
And the beauty of this is that you can track all this asset raising and retaining activity back to your marketing efforts. After all, we all want a pay rise and we all want a better budget – and this is the proof you need to show the C-suite what you are worth.
Key learning points:
All your efforts are designed to enable your marketing team to pass on qualified sales leads to your sales team.
This happens by analysing the whole investor journey to assess who is most interested in your fund
Basic metrics such as website visits, social likes, and email opens aren’t particularly useful
The vital metrics are related to prospects who are looking at lots of relevant content, as well as investors signalling a cross-selling opportunity, and investors who have stopped looking at content, suggesting a redemption risk
These metrics directly link marketing to asset raising and retaining activity, which shows the value of marketing
