Digital marketing ideas have been under discussion since 1994, the birth year of the search engine. The discussion of fund managers’ digital and creative marketing ideas is probably only a little more recent. Yet, promoting your business has never been easier, given the broad range of effective digital mechanisms for delivering your marketing message to a targeted audience.
In 2022, everyone who thinks seriously on the subject conforms to a broad consensus: thought leadership is the key. Thought leadership is a way of taking your years of expertise, knowledge, and experience and positioning yourself, or key members of your team, as an authority on the subject matter most important to your target market.
Generating fresh content on trending topics, market movements, investment strategies, and your products and services is one of the quickest ways of becoming a “go-to,” trusted expert within your field.
It takes 8-10 points of contact before a new lead becomes comfortable enough with your brand to make a purchasing or investment decision. Content is one of the best ways to initiate those critical points of contact that can move your leads through your marketing funnel and convert them into paying clients.
Your digital marketing should engage your target audience in a conversation without the marketing itself seeking to be the subject of the discussion. From that perspective, content marketing is the ultimate trojan horse form of marketing. Thought leadership marketing allows you to present your messaging in the form of valuable information that your leads consider a service rather than “marketing.”
When we speak of digital marketing ideas and strategies for fund managers, we are talking about ways and means to implement thought leadership strategies.
We’ll explore six ways to create content and engage your audience:
Blogging
- Video content (Especially YouTube)
- Social media marketing
- Podcasting
- Interactive presence in forums and on community boards
- Email marketing
Each of these is relatively easy to implement and can generate great results.
Let’s explore the 7 marketing ideas in the exact order above. One might think of it as a rough developmental order, too. An easy way for an enterprise to get its feet wet in digital marketing is by starting its own blog. Email marketing can serve as a bridge between marketing and transacting at the end of our list.
Blog Content Marketing
This doesn’t mean that someone on staff keeps an online diary. Instead, the reference is to SEO-oriented blog writing that addresses the needs of a fund manager’s prospective customers.
Although search engines are important, SEO cannot be the heart of the matter. Instead, search engines must be regarded as an essential tail, not the dog. After all, user behavior changes over time, and the search engines change their algorithms rapidly, so best practices in the SEO world change faster than fashions.
As noted, the heart of every blog post should be thought leadership. Address yourself, especially as you begin, to your existing investor base, discuss what concerns them and tell them what they need to know, not what they want to hear. Find your voice.
Over time, you may well expand the audience of your appeal to potential investors.
Video Content and YouTube
Video content is one of the most powerful marketing mediums we have in the collective marketing toolbox. You put your message in line with the thinking of much of your audience when you express it in visual, auditory, and dramatic terms. This is precisely why YouTube is one of the most successful visual platforms.
A survey by Peregrine showed that although 70% of the asset managers asked said that they do make some use of YouTube, only 9% said that they do so frequently. Peregrine inferred that infrequently is not frequently enough.
As Peregrine also points out, YouTube is owned by Google and offers fund managers significant SEO value.
Social Media, Unpaid and Paid
Look for a social network to which people turn when they want to be informed or where they go when they are prepared to think about money matters.
Twitter and LinkedIn are both valuable. Tweeting should be much like blogging but more concise and intense. You can converse with your actual and potential investors and build your brand.
LinkedIn offers insight into the organizational structure of institutions where you may do business, telling you who the decision makers are. Further, LinkedIn has a wide range of special interest groups that will allow you to target your outreach: groups including Special Situations and Distressed Investments; Finance Plus; DealFlow Source Network.
As with other digital marketing ideas, so with social media posts: don’t use them to press your specific strategy, much less your performance numbers, unless, of course, you are asked about such issues during a conversation. You build a brand by meeting potential investors where they are, not by shouting about where you are.
Fourth, employ paid ads within social media to appear within search results, on a website, or on other digital platforms. In the digital world, the “pay” involved is typically determined by the number of views or clicks. This can get expensive quickly, so it is necessary to be cautious. But the paid ad can direct eyeballs to your YouTube or your blog. In addition, some social channels such as Facebook restrict organic content reach, so paid ads can be a helpful workaround.
A Podcast and an Inbox
A podcast — a program, often with a news-and-commentary format, made available for download — is a natural digital marketing strategy because it combines the auditory and dramatic nature of YouTube with the immediacy of daily news.
Creating a podcast can be expensive and time-consuming. Viewers notice the production values or their absence, so you do not want to stint the necessary expense or time to make it worthwhile.
Should the production of a podcast seem too daunting, consider an alternative: guest appearances. For example, one of your organization’s experts can be an interviewee or appear as an expert panel member.
Plenty of fund manager-oriented podcasts offer opportunities for effective thought leadership and marketing. Consider, for example, The Advisors Option, an options-oriented podcast out of Chicago sponsored by OIC, ORATS, and Swan Global Investments. The average length of one program is about 65 minutes. Its guests include Mike Tosaw of St. Charles Wealth and Aash Vyas, Pier 88 Investment Partners.
Forums and Community Boards
This is a catch-all category that notably includes both Quora and Reddit. As with micro-blogging, participation in a forum allows for appropriate links to your website. But, as with email, one has to stand out from the spam. So, engage in discussion on matters of importance, the markets in which you invest, and the types of investors you want to cultivate and look for occasions that call for a link.
A fund manager with a pertinent specialty might want to participate in the discussions in MainBloq, a “group collaboration on the latest trends, insights, content, and ideas about the blockchain and cryptocurrency markets.”
Email Campaigns
The goal here is to create tailored messaging that recipients will want to open, not something that will make them want to enhance their spam filter.
That is not as difficult as one may think. Indeed, email is almost 40% better at forging relationships with investors than Facebook or Twitter. An email can follow-up contact made through one of the other means discussed above.
The use of email campaigns also allows for various tests of whether the marketing campaign is making progress. For example, firms can measure the open rates and the reading times when they email out newsletters; They can also monitor the open rates of their white papers through programs such as Vera and Orangedox.
Gate 39 Media is here to help you strengthen your financial marketing strategy; Book a quick chat with us now to get started!
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About the Author: Christopher Faille
Christopher Faille has written on a variety of legal, regulatory, and financial issues for decades. He is the author of "The Decline and Fall of the Supreme Court" (1995), and co-author of "Basic Economic Principles" (2000). He was an early reporter with Lipper HedgeWorld and a senior financial correspondent with Reuters.
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