Category: Asset Managers

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Asset Managers Featured

The Power of Email in a Down Market

Marketing is a lot like dating. That was the topic of a recent presentation we did at an industry conference. In dating, a key to getting to know someone and developing trust is through clear and consistent communication.

The same holds true for asset managers marketing to advisors. To establish a relationship, you must communicate consistently and clearly…in all market conditions. When the market goes down, this becomes even more critical. You can’t disappear.

Stay in Front of Advisors with Email

This is when a very cost-efficient marketing tactic like email marketing should be at the top of your list. Yet many asset managers discount it and its effectiveness.

It’s important to let advisors know what’s going on with your company, your fund, and the investments they may have their clients in. You need to consistently show up. They don’t expect you to explain the market volatility or repair it – they just want to know you’re still there and what you’re focused on. You consistently communicating with advisors means it’s easier for them to give their clients who have invested in your funds updates. Advisors will remember this and that you made their lives easier and made their clients feel more comfortable.

What Advisors Want

To bring the point home even more, as we have talked about this topic with advisors, some of the key things we hear are, “I want to hear from the asset managers”, “I want to understand what they’re doing”, and “I want quarterly updates.”

The asset managers that are ranked most highly by advisors as firms they would work with are those that communicate clearly and consistently.

There you go…you have your mandate. Don’t ghost advisors. Show up for them, support them and educate them in ALL market conditions.

Marketing Intent Can Help

At Marketing Intent, we’re skilled at helping our asset manager clients keep the conversation with advisors going. If you need help, reach out to us.

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Asset Managers

Utilizing All Marketing Platforms

Have you seen that meme where it says, “You’re not my friend if I’m not tweeting you, Instagram messaging you and texting you all at the same time, but about different things?” 

Let’s discuss how this concept can apply to your business successfully.

Using LinkedIn, Website and Emails Together

We often see asset managers create a report or a paper and just post it on their website for financial advisors to find. They think that’s enough to distribute their content and they don’t email it out as well. And if they do email it, they often don’t also promote the content on social. We know there are times you can’t share certain types of content on social, but when you can, you should.

Getting Information in Different Ways

All advisors you’re targeting are not reading their email, and all are not visiting your website. They are interacting with your firm in different ways, seeing different messaging and building their knowledge base about who you are and what you do.

So, make it easy for them. It’s very likely advisors aren’t seeking you out. You need to show up where your target audience is and demonstrate thought leadership. Educate them. Help them solve client problems. And don’t worry about repeating content. People need to see/read messages multiple times for them to sink in.

Getting more views of your content creates more interactions which drives conversations.

Take your content, repurpose it, put it out across all possible mediums – and help drive advisor engagement and capital raising.

If you would like to talk more about how we can help with your content strategy, reach out to us.

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Asset Managers Featured

Marketing That Helps Bring Capital in the Door

If you’re not doing marketing that’s helping bring capital in the door, why are you doing it?

The reality is that there’s a lot of marketing done in our industry that just does not support the sales effort.

Sales-Focused Marketing Strategy

Yes, we’re a marketing firm. And we appreciate all things marketing. But in the asset management and alternative investments world, we focus on marketing not just for the sake of marketing, but to help raise capital for your investment offerings.

For example, while we appreciate branding and the importance of it, it can be taken too far, which can take the focus off sales-focused marketing efforts. For example, instead of using effort to make sure an advisor lunch is well branded on site, consider instead putting resources into providing a solid marketing follow-up effort for the event, which will better support the sales team and the capital-raising effort.

Educate Advisors

Another key area that can help push capital raising is advisor education. Educating them on your asset class, your company, your management team and your offerings. Think about how you’re giving advisors updates and staying in front of them so they develop trust and faith in your firm. And how you’re providing the information they need so they understand your offering and can explain it to their clients. Make that easy and your sales team will have an advantage with advisors and establishing the type of relationships with them that lead to capital coming in the door.

Deciding Where to Focus

Thinking about where to focus your marketing can be overwhelming. As you’re prioritizing your list, evaluate each marketing project by what it does for your sales team. Does it help explain something better? Address a common advisor objection? Highlight what differentiates your firm? Explain the investor problem your firm’s investment solves?

If you’re looking at your project list and don’t know the answers to the above in relation to each piece, get the sales team involved. The marketing-sales feedback loop is critical in understanding which marketing efforts move the capital-raising dial. And remember, that marketing is iterative. You won’t always get it right the first time, but through collaboration with the sales team, you will consistently improve and make sure marketing contributes to bringing in capital.

At Marketing Intent, we help our clients focus on prioritizing marketing that helps bring capital in the door. If you need help deciding which marketing projects to focus on, we would be happy to talk to you about it.

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Asset Managers Featured

The Power of the Pivot

Your fund just closed and you expected it to be open for six more months.

Your marketing plan is out the window.

So what do you do next?

This is where the power of the pivot in business comes into play.

Changing Direction Quickly

In marketing, we love to create project plans, line up our content calendar, schedule campaigns and set everything in motion.

We have this ideal set out on how everything’s going to go. Your fund is launched, it’s live, your sales team is raising capital and your firm is planning on selling it until it reaches $X in capital or as of a certain date. But then your sales team raises capital faster than you expected.

All your marketing plans are out the window. What do you do next? The sales team doesn’t get time off until the next offering. And the next fund launch is likely months away.

This is where strategy comes into play. And your ability to change on demand. Especially in a volatile market. It’s important to prep yourself mentally and with strategy to quickly change direction. 

Develop Your Next Steps

First, bring the entire marketing team into what is happening and the pivot your firm and your team need to make. Sketch out the situation, which marketing programs are now obsolete, what advisors’ information needs will be around the business event that just occurred and what they will need to know going forward as you launch a new fund.

When you have a gap between funds, a great place to focus is on brand awareness. Just because your fund is closed, doesn’t mean your brand’s gone. Your sales team works hard to establish relationships with financial advisors…part of your job is to help them keep those relationships intact even if you don’t have a product in the market. Miss this as a marketer, and capital raising will be slow going at the start of your next offering as you try to make up for lost time in maintaining a presence in the minds of advisors.

For example, advisors are looking for education – on alternative investments, on your asset class, on lifestyle trends affecting commercial real estate. Focus on that between offerings. You can also distribute content from third parties and note how the information relates to your firm. And keep featuring your management team on webinars to provide advisors with updates or insights.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you plan for the pivot, reach out to us today.

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Asset Managers

What’s Your Story

Financial Advisor sharing charts

We tend to think that financial advisors or high net worth individuals have an elevated level of understanding of investment products – and they likely may – but we also know that everyone has a very short attention span which impacts how you should tailor your offering story to your audience.

Let’s discuss ways to boil down the complex investment offering story in a way that’s relatable to advisors.

Boiling Down Your Story

What is the foundation that asset managers should have to help boil their story down? The key is simplicity. We’re proponents of not using jargon, and getting down to the basics.

Don’t Get Lost in the Jargon

It’s important to have the story be clear and concise with not a lot of jargon – focus on the basics.

There are so many great offerings out there, but they get lost in the jargon and the complexity of the language. Making sure you tell your story simply is going to help you gain more traction.

Focus on Supply and Demand

What is the basis of the story that you should be telling? It largely boils down to supply and demand. Think about commercial real estate buildings and different asset types, what is the demand for those? And what’s driving the demand?

Oftentimes, demand is driven by lifestyle. What’s happening in the world today? What is changing? What are people focused on that’s driving demand for your asset class? Boil the demand drivers down to the basics and the relatable so advisors can quickly grasp and remember what your story is and what’s behind it.

Let Graphics Tell Your Story

Graphics are a great way to tell your story quickly, and it’s way better than reading a paragraph. If someone has a graphic and a paragraph in front of them, they are going to be drawn to the graphic every time.

If you would like help telling your story, reach out to us at Marketing Intent. We’d love to set up a meeting and discuss it with you.

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Asset Managers

Don’t Be Held Hostage by PowerPoint

A client we recently worked with was frustrated with their PowerPoint presentations.

Every slide was an image created by a graphic designer appearing very polished (and very hard to update).

Problems with PowerPoint

We get it. You want your presentations to be on brand and look amazing. But that doesn’t make sense when you have regular updates to make – like that last minute change from the CEO before a webinar – and you’re frantically calling an outside designer for a revision because you can’t make it yourself.

Pasting in images instead of using native PowerPoint functionality takes away PowerPoint’s…well, power. PowerPoint is meant to be a support program to make your life easier and not hold you hostage and limit your flexibility and productivity. It’s meant for you to easily update presentations. And when set up correctly, it’s like a right-hand man that can make you far more efficient.

Maximizing PowerPoint’s Functionality

Learn about the functionality that is built into PowerPoint and utilize it. One of the amazing things about PowerPoint is the master slides function. Master slides allow you to apply your brand to the template, set fonts, heading styles, a color palette, spacing, bullet styles, etc. You can set up various types of slides as well, like a cover, a content slide and a diver slide. There are very detailed settings that can be created to help you maintain your branding.

Although, branding alone does not help you raise capital. Branding is important (obviously) but if a bullet’s off or a logo is placed a little bit too low on a page, it’s not going to affect an advisor’s ability to understand or bring capital in the door. It’s a balance between maintaining brand standards to a T and ensuring you’re positioning your firm in a way that allows you to develop and deliver clear messaging to advisors on your offering that generate sales conversations.

Making PowerPoint More Efficient

How do we make our clients’ PowerPoint presentations more efficient? We always start with the master slides. Behind the scenes, it sets the stage for more efficient work going forward and less management team disappointment in timeliness of updates. We call this “being kind to your future self” because you’ll be able to be nimbler with changes and more responsive to requests for changes from management and the sales team.

We design as many elements as possible in the native PowerPoint platform. These can be supplemented with designed graphics, but any element that may change frequently we suggest keeping in PowerPoint.

We also convert charts of data to native PowerPoint charts that are linked to Excel files…another big time saver and a play that helps non-designers be more self-sufficient in PowerPoint.

A lot of people dislike PowerPoint, but if you’re using it correctly, it’s actually a great tool. When you put the work in behind the scenes, it’s easier, it’s smoother, and it just works better to help support your marketing goals.

Do your PowerPoint presentations need an overhaul? Do you need help making them more user friendly? We would love to work with you to provide suggestions on how you can improve your presentations and improve your relationship with PowerPoint. Contact us today.

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Asset Managers

The Financial Marketing Strategy Award

Marketing Intent is honored to have won a 2023 Financial Marketing Award for Strategic Excellence from The Gramercy Institute.

The Gramercy Institute, an industry think-tank focused on the intellectual needs of senior marketers from the world’s major financial firms, established this award twenty years ago to recognize the critical role strategy plays in successful marketing campaigns in the financial services sector.

We have found that strategy is the foundation for all of our marketing, whether it’s our own or what we do for our clients.

The Power of Agriculture

We won the award for the strategy we developed for our client, Gladstone Land Corporation, for a “Power of Agriculture” campaign. The campaign included a conceptual re-branding, robust content marketing, email marketing and video to explain the farmland asset class as an investment along with marketing material for Gladstone Land’s preferred stock offering designed for financial advisors.

The Results for Our Client

The results of the campaign for Gladstone Land Corporation are more important than the award itself. First, we increased their brand awareness. They were getting more conversations with advisors, and advisors they had been trying to engage for some time became interested in learning more about their offering. Their capital raising increased, and they ended up closing their fund earlier than expected and expedited launching their next fund.

The campaign drove home who Gladstone Land Corporation is and increased their audience of advisors interested in learning more about the agricultural asset class and its merits as an investment.

Marketing Intent was founded in 2020 to provide sales-focused marketing to the alternative investments industry. Our team of experts, led by Founder and CEO, Cherie Fournier, and VP, Client Success, Alise Lucero, have deep experience in financial services and alternative investments. Cherie and Alise previously held a Series 7 license and have decades of financial services marketing experience – demonstrating a thorough knowledge of marketing in a complicated and highly-regulated industry.

Learn how we can help create marketing that helps raise capital.

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Asset Managers

Is a Video Follow-Up Email Right For You?

The other day I received an email, but it wasn’t just a written email, it was a video follow-up email. It was super cool and it immediately grabbed my attention.

In this article, let’s discuss how wholesalers can employ video in email in their day-to-day to captivate their audience.

Grab Attention with Video Emails

We all get a ton of email. We love email and from our experience, it’s still a key way to communicate with advisors in our industry. But we need to find ways for emails to stand out. And that’s just what this video email did. It grabbed my attention. I read it, I listened to it, and I watched it. I was interested to see what was coming next, and it kept me engaged and wanting to listen to the sender – and respond to her.

Going Beyond the Canned

Another great thing about the video email is that it wasn’t canned. It was specific to me. Too often, wholesalers resort to a canned email, like: “Thanks for meeting with me,” “Here’s the fact sheet we discussed,” or “I hope you have a great week.” The email I received went beyond this. It was personable. The sender mentioned things we talked about, she was upbeat, it was fun, and it added some joy to my day. It fostered a connection…and we all know that sales start with relationships.

How to Do Video Emails

There are so many platforms available that wholesalers can use to create video emails for their follow ups: Loom, BombBomb, Sendspark, CloudApp- these are just a few of them.

Up your connection game with advisors by using video email. Do you need help getting started?

Contact us to help you decide on a platform and get your sales team out of the canned email business. Grab the attention of advisors and keep that conversation going.

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Asset Managers

Hiring the Right Marketing Agency

How is hiring a marketing agency like prom?

I know you’re probably thinking, “I haven’t been to prom in so long, I don’t remember.” For me, I never enjoyed prom. There was the buildup to the event…getting your dress, your shoes, figuring out what you’re going to do with your hair. But then you get there, and it wasn’t what you expected. I know I felt disappointed with my prom experience.

When I was working in corporate marketing, that’s the exact feeling I had anytime we had the need to hire an outside marketing firm.

Few Marketing Firms Truly Understand Alts

You’ve been searching and you finally find a marketing firm that looks like they’re going to be amazing. They have great work on their website, they look like they’re creative and fun to work with, they have experience…but you quickly learn that they don’t have the experience you need.

Financial services marketing – and even more so alternative investments marketing – is truly unique and requires a specific marketing skill set that balances being detailed oriented and analytical with creativity. It requires an understanding of financial products and more importantly, a deep understanding of the target audiences of advisors and investors.

A challenge in the alternative investment industry is that few marketing firms understand the ins and outs of commercial real estate offerings, the compliance requirements and how to explain offerings to advisors.

Marketing Intent Has Decades of Alts Marketing Experience

When we started Marketing Intent in early 2020, we did so with the goal of bringing a firm to the alternative investments industry we wished we’d had in our corporate lives. A firm that understands the industry, the lingo, the requirements. A firm that can balance the analytical with the creative. A firm that helps its clients produce and distribute marketing that generates sales activity.

We have decades of experience, not only financial services, but alternative investments as well. We understand your offerings, we understand the compliance requirements, and we understand how to talk to financial advisors in a way that helps them engage with your sales team. We partner with our clients to help elevate their marketing and stand out among a growing number of alternative investment offerings.

Nothing Happens Until Something is Sold

At Marketing Intent, our mantra is that nothing happens until something is sold. Raising capital is at the heart of your business. That’s why our approach centers around making sure your sales team has what they need to bring capital in the door.

We start by identifying the gaps between marketing and the needs of your sales team. Next, we prioritize where marketing can generate the most activity—and streamline the sales process. Then, we bring marketing in alignment with sales.

Need help avoiding the disappointment of hiring an outside marketing firm? Do you want to work with a firm that understands your industry, the needs of your sales team, your target audience, your product and your compliance requirements? Marketing Intent will help you avoid the “prom disappointment”. Contact us today to set up a meeting.

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Asset Managers

Make Your Website Great

Websites are a journey.

When somebody visits your website, they should be taken along a path. Even though they may not necessarily know they’re on a path, you need to guide them.

Poor Functionality Interrupts the Journey

Recently, as I was searching for some clothes online for a weeklong trip, I thought of asset manager websites. I searched online at a cute boutique’s website and found some items I wanted to buy. However, the purchasing process was horrific. The functionality was outdated and time consuming. So, I just tapped out. I figured I could find the items elsewhere. I Googled the clothes and ended up spending longer on this than if I had just bought the clothes on the boutique’s website. However, I couldn’t take how annoying the boutique’s buying process and functionality was.

While advisors aren’t making a direct purchase on your website, this is exactly how you’ll make them feel if your website is clunky and cumbersome to navigate or doesn’t provide enough information to engage them. They will “tap out” and discard your firm from consideration for an investment allocation for their clients.

Clear and Concise Websites

Sometimes asset managers are too content sparse on their websites. Their homepage has little wording – it looks like a temporary page. It appears a bit boring so advisors don’t engage.

Or, there is too much information or jargon language that doesn’t immediately indicate what they do, what they invest in and what their offering is. Advisors aren’t going to spend the time to stick with this and sort through it to find the information they need.

Think about your homepage as an advertisement. You need to give enough information to gain interest, but don’t have to include detailed information on what you do, your firm and your offering here. Your goal is to tease the content, so advisors click through to additional pages to learn more. Tease your track record, your property portfolio, demand drivers and get advisors further into your site.

The Journey is The Key

After you engage advisors on your homepage, continue to lead them through your site.

Why should they invest client assets with your firm?

Why should they trust you?

Why is your asset class superior?

Tell them what to do next, where to go on the site, how to learn more. What do you want them to do next? Do you want them to contact you for more information? Do you want them to inquire about what types of properties and or investments you have to offer? Make it clear. We need to tell people what to do or else they won’t take action.

Lead them through the answers to their questions. The alts industry continues to grow, so advisors will move on from your site if you’re not answering their questions and developing trust. Build their confidence so they follow your call to action, follow the journey and ultimately engage with your sales team.

If you need help making your website clear, concise and with a clear journey for advisors – and keeping it out of the “not great” category – contact us today.

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