Category: Marketing Team

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Marketing Team

Assembling the Right Marketing Team 

The success of a marketing campaign often hinges on the expertise and skill set of the team behind it. Especially in the alternative investments industry, assembling the right team becomes not just beneficial but essential. However, navigating the nuances and intricacies of doing this is a challenge that every marketer, including myself, has grappled with over the years. 

Finding the Right Blend of Creativity and Analytical Skills 

In the world of alternative investments, it’s not just about promoting a product. It’s about understanding the intricacies, the audience’s mindset, and presenting information in an easily digestible manner. Given today’s fleeting attention spans, the task becomes even more challenging. Your marketing team must be both creative and analytical. They need to understand complex product structures and investment philosophies, anticipate sales objections and address potential questions. The aim? To simplify complex offerings, making them comprehensible and attractive to advisors. 

Patience in Compliance-Centric Marketing 

Another key trait for marketers in this domain is patience. With a slew of compliance requirements, it’s imperative to ensure every campaign is both compelling and compliant. Instead of clashing with compliance, embrace it. Understand the stipulations and creatively craft your message within those bounds. Shortcuts or non-compliant methods will not only jeopardize your reputation but also diminish the integrity of your brand. 

Elevate Your Design and Content 

In a saturated market, your materials need to stand out. Too often, asset managers overlook the aesthetic appeal and usability of their content, resulting in crowded fact sheets or reports that are not easy to read. Your materials are a reflection of your brand. Low-quality materials give a low-quality impression of your firm. Check your brand vs. your competitors. Set your materials side by side with that of competitors. If your materials look hard to read, are designed poorly or don’t call out your competitive advantages, you risk being perceived as a lower-quality firm in the eyes of advisors. And remember, even if you’re a small firm, your competitors are also large firms with strong brands. 

Seeking External Expertise? We’re Here to Help 

Building a marketing team doesn’t necessarily mean hiring in-house for every role. Sometimes, external partners, like Marketing Intent, can offer specialized expertise to bridge the gaps in your team. If you’re considering an evaluation of your current team or are looking to integrate external expertise, we’re here to help. Contact us to learn more. 

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Marketing Management Marketing Team

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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Marketing Management Marketing Team

Is It Time to Outsource Your Marketing?

Marketing can be a pain point for many asset managers because there’s a lack of understanding, time, and resources. As a result, marketing is commonly one of the first things to get pushed to the end of the list or to cobble together.

In this article, we’ll discuss a few key indicators that it’s time to outsource marketing.

#1 – You Don’t Thoroughly Understand Your Audience

The first sign is that your marketing team doesn’t have a good grasp of your target audience. Maybe they are new to the industry, new to the distribution channel or don’t understand what your audience needs in terms of information. If you are not able to understand your target, you can’t produce the marketing needed to help you raise capital efficiently. A deep knowledge of who you’re speaking to and how to communicate with them is essential to effective marketing.

#2 – Your Marketing Team Doesn’t Understand the Sales Process

The second sign that it’s time to outsource marketing is when your marketing team doesn’t understand the sales process. Maybe it’s because they don’t have relevant experience or maybe you have a junior marketing team. You may have people that have come from outside the industry, and they don’t understand what goes into the day-to-day of the sales process.

A lack of understanding of the sales process leads to marketing not asking the right questions of the sales team to make the sales job easier. If you’re not fostering a feedback loop with your sales team and understanding the reception of the marketing materials out in the field, you’re missing the opportunity to facilitate conversations with advisors for your sales team.

For optimal capital raising, sales and marketing should be aligned. And that responsibility often falls heavier on marketing teams to accomplish.

At Marketing Intent, we help you align your marketing and sales teams for a unified capital raising effort and a relationship that benefits both departments. Contact us today.

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Marketing Management Marketing Team

Marketing Teams Aren’t Immune to Inflation

Inflation – it’s all across our economy and affecting almost every part of our lives, including our marketing teams. If you’ve been searching for marketing candidates, you’ve probably noticed a demand for increased salaries, but you may not be getting qualified candidates applying for your positions or the hiring process is draining your team resources.

Let’s talk about how an outside marketing firm can help take work off your shoulders by tackling shorter and longer-range marketing projects.

The Sprint Project

The “sprint” marketing project is a short project where you might already have content developed and you just need it developed into an email, flier or a social media campaign. That’s where an outside marketing firm can step in quickly, especially one who knows your industry. They will help you push the project to the finish line.

The Half Marathon Project

Next, let’s talk about the “half marathon.” This is a project you may already have started and know it’s going to take some time to complete. You may need help with strategy, planning, writing or designing some deliverables. Again, an outside marketing firm can step in, accelerate the project and see it through to completion.

The Marathon Project

Then there’s the “marathon.” These projects can last multiple months. We often see these projects as the ones that firms have started, but don’t have the time to dedicate to them. An outside marketing firm can help you with planning, making sure everything stays on track over the months, as well as creating the deliverables. Examples of marathon projects are fund launches, series of videos, and automating email marketing.

Reallocating FTE Dollars to Outside Resources

Regardless of how in-depth your marketing project is, from that short sprint to a long marathon, taking the dollars you have earmarked for full-time employees (FTE) when you just can’t fill those roles, and dedicating them to an outside marketing resource can go a long way in helping you reach your marketing goals.

Contact Us to Fill in the Gaps

If you need help, as you’re looking to fill marketing roles and just aren’t finding the right candidates, reach out to us and we’d be happy to fill the gaps.

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Marketing Team

Why a Marketing Firm Can Help Bolster Your Marketing Team

Is your marketing team underwater? Have you been struggling to find quality candidates to fill positions?

An outside marketing firm can help bolster your marketing team in three key areas: strategy, execution, and training junior or new employees.

Strategy and the Planning Process

Let’s start with strategy. The strategy and planning process is the foundation of your marketing activities. We see our clients struggle with putting plans in place, having the time and energy to dedicate to developing their strategy and understanding how to effectively move forward.

In thinking about how an outside firm can help, a qualified marketing firm that’s familiar with your industry is going to be able to come in, look at what you’re doing and understand it quickly. They will get up to speed on what you offer, who you’re targeting, and identify ways to help you fill the gaps in your strategy.

Those gaps can either be the communication between sales and marketing – which is pretty common in our industry – gaps in your story, or even gaps in the materials that you are putting together to help educate advisors on your offerings. An outside marketing firm can help you develop a strategy to better tackle that communication.

Put a Plan in Place

Next, let’s talk about execution. A strategy is worthless unless there’s a plan in place to make it a reality. Once you have a strategy in place, a qualified marketing firm can manage all the pieces, moving tactical marketing and deliverables forward. They will ensure everything’s happening on time and in the correct sequence to make your marketing successful.

Training Junior and New Employees

Let’s talk about an area that a lot of people overlook as far as where a qualified marketing firm can be beneficial to your team – training junior or new employees. We all know in the financial services industry how complicated marketing is – SEC regulations, FINRA requirements, what compliance is looking for, how selling agreements work or the numerous audiences we’re targeting. An outside marketing firm can be key to helping new or junior employees understand the industry, shorten their learning curve, as well as build their confidence.

We’ve talked about how an outside marketing firm can help with strategy, making that strategy a reality through solid planning and project management, as well as help you educate junior or new employees on the financial services industry and how it works.

CONTACT US FOR MARKETING HELP

If you need any help with bolstering your marketing team, contact Marketing Intent. We’d be happy to help in any of these areas.

Let's start your marketing with intent.

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