Categories
Webinars

On-Demand Webinars

What’s the first thing you think of when you think of on-demand webinars? It’s likely that you think of a replay distributed by email. On-demand webinars are replays, but they can be a lot more than this.

The process to create a webinar is also extensive. You’re scheduling time with executives, developing and completing presentations, routing through compliance, scheduling invites and developing a follow up plan.

With all this work, why not elevate your final product for more than one webinar?

Maximize Your Webinar

The first thing to do when you’re thinking about a webinar is identify the topics. What do people want? What are you hearing in the field that advisors want to hear more about? Is it always about your product? Is it educational? Is it both?

Do they want a webinar series? Can you split one large webinar into three small webinars to make your content go further? And take a deep dive into what you’re doing? Maximize it since you put all that effort into creating the webinar and getting speakers lined up.

Develop Strong Visuals

When people are attending webinars, they want to be intrigued. You have to keep their attention. So, if you have a presentation up and it’s a bunch of words, everybody’s likely tuning out and nobody’s listening. They may read the words, but they may not. And they are likely doing something else as well while attending your webinar. You have to grab their attention with strong visuals, video and easy-to-understand wording.

Using Technology to Your Advantage

Finally, be sure you’re ready to use technology to your advantage to create your on-demand webinar. There are platforms where you can upload a webinar recording. You can then set a schedule, so it gives off the perception that it is a live webinar. You can send out an invitation with simple wording like, “Please sign up for our webinar. It’s next Wednesday at 2:00 p.m.” 

What your audience doesn’t know is that it’s every Wednesday at 2:00 p.m., and it looks like advisors have easy access to your management team.

You’re able to see if advisors register and if they attend. You can automate your follow up procedures and your sales team has a reason for a follow-up call with the advisor.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you maximize your webinars, please contact us today at info@marketingintent.com.

Categories
Marketing Management

Participating and Planning

How great does it feel to be asked to participate in a task force to plan an industry conference?

Pretty darn great.

Planning the Summit Conference

That’s how Cherie felt when Stacy Chitty from Blue Vault, asked her to participate in the task force to plan the upcoming Blue Vault Bowman Alts Summit 2023. This conference is focused on alternative investments.

We’ve been hearing for a long time that the 60/40 portfolio is no longer working. Alternative investments are the way to help the financial industry break out of that mold…although it’s been a bit slow moving to do it.

A Wide Range of Alternative Investments

What we’re doing on the Alts Summit task force is looking at the different types of content that advisors need to know to understand alternative investments. This includes making sure that a wide range of product sponsors are present at the conference. It also includes making sure that whether an advisor is new to alts or has been offering them for some time, there are educational opportunities for everyone.

In addition to product sponsors, we’ll be hearing from industry experts on topics like technology, compliance, and marketing in relation to alternatives, as well as advisor practice management. 

Register Today

If you haven’t registered yet, plan on joining us in Atlanta, March 6th through March 8th for the Blue Vault Bowman 2023 Alts Summit.

We look forward to seeing you there and helping you learn more about how you can incorporate alternative investments in your practice. Register now.

Categories
Websites

3 Ways to Improve Your Website

Does your website provide a compelling journey for financial advisors, or is it a confusing maze of information? If you haven’t positioned your website as the start of your client journey, you’re missing out on a key engagement tool.

Below we’ll discuss three ways to improve your website and engage financial advisors to a greater level.

First, we’ll talk about how to design your website for financial advisors. Second, we’ll cover the information that will help them stay on your site longer. And third, we’ll discuss what you want them to do next.

Customizing Your Website

Let’s talk about customizing your website to financial advisors. In our industry, there are a lot of facets of business that commercial real estate or asset managers are involved in. There are different types of businesses, lines of business and investment strategies and sometimes we try to do a one size fits all approach to websites.

That can end up being too much information for financial advisors. So, it’s important to develop a specific path you envision advisors going down or develop a site that is specific to advisors.

Website Stickiness

How do you keep advisors on your website for longer? As you’re thinking about developing a site, think about what advisors want to know, their frequently asked questions and how to engage them. It’s a balance of giving them the information they need without providing too much information. Think about how to keep them engaged and capturing more of their time, so they go further and further into your content.

Tell Them What to Do Next

Finally, tell the advisors what you want them to do next. Do you want them to contact you for more information or to set up a meeting with your sales team? Make sure your calls to action are clear on your site.

We Can Help Improve Your Website

If you need help improving your website to engage financial advisors, please reach out to us and we’d be happy to help.

Categories
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.

Categories
Social Media

Maximize Your LinkedIn Potential

What’s one of the first things people do when they meet you or see one of your posts on LinkedIn? They check out your LinkedIn profile.

Plan to use LinkedIn to its maximum potential to show your credibility and gain trust with prospects and clients.  

LinkedIn Newsletter 

A great way to do that is through the LinkedIn newsletter, which is a newer feature. It allows you to publish an article each week. And by doing that, you can stay in front of your prospects in a really easy way.  

First, think about what to talk to your prospects about. What’s a short and compelling topic? It doesn’t have to be a long white paper length piece of content. Next, think about your target audience and what they’re interested in learning about from you, what their pain points are or new information that might benefit them. 

Setting up Your Newsletter 

To set up your newsletter on LinkedIn, go to the same place you want to make a post.

  • Click on this prompt and there will be a section that says, “write article”.
  • Once you click on this function, if you have creator mode, you’ll have the option to create a newsletter.
  • A nice function with LinkedIn is when you create that first newsletter article, it sends a notification to all your first level contacts in LinkedIn and sends them an email to notify them you now have a newsletter and invite them to subscribe.
  • This is a great way to engage with every contact. Subscribers will be notified every time you publish a newsletter article. We suggest publishing a newsletter once a week.  

Using a Newsletter to Your Advantage 

How are we using the LinkedIn newsletter article? When we do the videos you see on LinkedIn, we’re turning them into our LinkedIn newsletter articles as well. It’s a great way to multipurpose content and use the LinkedIn newsletter articles to stay in front of your prospects.  

If you need help creating a LinkedIn newsletter article or want to explore it further, give us a call. 

Categories
Social Media

Embracing Social Media

Social media can be daunting. It might be one of those tasks that sits on the bottom of the list because you have a hard time embracing it.

In this post, I’ll share three ways to help you learn to love social media and ultimately help you with your career.

Plan and Create

Let’s go over how to plan and create your content time block. Sit down, block out a couple hours, a half hour, or whatever works best for you, but sit down and take a moment to plan.

  • What’s the content you want to put out there?
  • Are there special messages you’d like to share at certain times throughout the year?
  • What are the key points you want to put out?

You don’t necessarily have to put it all together at once, but if you time block your calendar, you’re going to make sure it gets done. Then you’ll start making progress towards what you’re trying to complete, which is to get your social media plan moving.

Reuse Your Content

The second social media best practice I’m going to discuss is reusing content. There’s so much content out there that asset managers have- reports, fact sheets, emails – dig into that content and reuse it.

Take simple topics out of a report and repurpose them as graphics. You can break that up and have multiple videos, or you can have multiple posts. You’ll really be amazed if you sit down and look at the content you already have available for social, how far you can take it – and that you’re not having to reinvent the wheel.

Find the Right Software

The third best social media practice is to find a software that you like. You’ve planned out your content, you have it written out because you’re reusing some existing content, and now you need to find a software that will upload your post automatically at the time you want it to publish.

The right software can make it appear that you’re participating day to day, showing up in your client’s and prospect’s feeds by using the scheduling function. This will put your social media plan into action, so you have the full package out there. With the right approach and tools, it’s no longer daunting, and you’re making yourself and your firm present out in the world.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you with your social media plan, contact Marketing Intent today.

Categories
Marketing Management

Your Marketing Strategy

According to a recent survey from LC Kirk & Company, twelve to eighteen months is the amount of time it takes an advisor to learn about your offering before they make an allocation to it. For some sponsors, especially new ones in the commercial real estate and alternative investment space, that can seem like a very long time.

How can we shorten that long sales cycle? The answer – sync up your sales and marketing.

Shortening the Cycle

A lot of times marketing operates in a vacuum, and they don’t understand what the sales team is seeing in the field, the objections they’re facing, and the questions they’re getting from advisors. So, it’s important to open the communication channels between marketing and sales to help shorten that sales cycle and bridge the gap between what sales actually needs and what marketing is delivering.

Brand Awareness

Next, you should focus on brand awareness. Make sure everything is synced up across the board from email, to what you’re doing at conferences and how you’re helping advisors understand what you’re doing. Some firms feel hesitant about emailing, but email is a great way to increase brand awareness about your firm and offering. Building a strong brand helps build trust and break down barriers for advisors in looking at and completing due diligence on your firm.

Boil Down Your Story

It also helps shorten the sales cycle when you communicate what you do and the details of your offering in a simple way. Get away from complicated jargon. Advisors are not going to dig into what you’re doing if they don’t understand it immediately. Make sure you’re boiling down your story into digestible chunks, so it’s easily understood. That could be anything from the demand drivers behind your commercial real estate assets or lifestyle trends that are driving demand, and what supply looks like.

If you need help syncing marketing and sales, raising brand awareness, and boiling your story down into something that’s easily understandable, contact us at Marketing Intent. We’d be happy to help you shorten your sales cycle.

Categories
Social Media

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile

You may have noticed that we at Marketing Intent have been using LinkedIn a lot more to stay in front of our target audiences, as well as our clients. LinkedIn can be a really powerful connection tool.

How do you optimize your LinkedIn profile to connect with both your prospects and your clients?  

Use the Tagline

There’s an area underneath the name on your LinkedIn profile, and a lot of people use that for their job title, but we think there might be better ways to use that real estate.

One great thing you can use is a tagline. It can be a tagline on what your company does but stay away from any jargon or messaging that may be confusing. It should be quick and to the point. It’s a great way to advertise exactly who you are. And a tagline can allude to your title and what you do, so you don’t need to have a title featured.

There is another place, as well, that a lot of people don’t use and that’s the banner. You can do the same thing there and include your tagline or feature another point about what your firm does or what you focus on.

Include Your Target Audience

We suggest making sure you include your target audience in the two areas outlined above and highlight who they are. For example, “We help single women better prepare for retirement.” That way prospects clearly understand who you serve.

Something we want to point out is that it is okay to be repetitive, because we all know that everyone skims. The key is ensuring your target audience is highlighted – it will quickly grab their attention.

Building Trust

How can advisors help build trust with prospects and clients on their LinkedIn profile? Trust is huge, especially for advisors. There is so much going on these days and during rapidly changing market conditions, building trust is very valuable. We think it serves advisors further than most people realize.

One thing you can do to earn trust is to feature content you create. Don’t just repost other people’s content. Feature content you create. It shows your personality, how you communicate and who you are.

It also gives people a glimpse of what it’s like to work with you because they can see your perspective and what you’re trying to get across to your audience.

If you need help optimizing your LinkedIn profile and making sure that it speaks to your target audience, reach out to Marketing Intent, we’d be happy to help you.

Categories
Communication

The Importance of Communication

Everybody understands the importance of communication in projects, in your day-to-day, in work life and in everything that you do. But sometimes the effectiveness of our communication gets lost in the shuffle.

Let’s talk about how to emphasize open communication with clients.

Focusing on Communication

As a marketing firm with multiple clients, we have to focus on our communication. It has to be at the forefront of every morning, every evening and every week of what we do. Let’s go over some of the things that we do at Marketing Intent and review some options on how you can help improve your communication.

One of the first things that we do is hold weekly status updates. Every Monday we get together with our internal team and go over every single project, even if we’re not involved, that way we understand what’s going on. If one of us needs to be pulled in, or if we can offer some insight, we do.

Providing Weekly Email Updates

The other thing that we do is provide weekly email updates. If something’s changing throughout the week and we don’t have a meeting on the books, a quick way to update everybody is through an email. We really focus on making sure that we’re keeping everybody included and aware of what’s going on, even if it’s not time for a meeting.

The Best Way our Clients Receive Communication

When we bring on clients, we follow our onboard process and start off every client the same. Each client starts with a weekly project meeting and then we will also provide weekly status emails, but that doesn’t always work for everybody.

We tune into how clients best receive communication. We may have a client that likes to text, we may have a client that prefers phone calls, or we may have a client that loves emails. As we’re onboarding, we analyze the way that they are receiving our information and we adjust and tailor our communication specific to them. 

We are providing them with the most effective communication that is shareable with key stakeholders that is effective and easily digestible. This is a great way to help smooth out their process for projects and keep everybody in the know, so that there are no surprises that come up.

If you would like our communication experts to make sure your next project runs smoothly, please reach out to us at Marketing Intent.

Categories
Marketing Management

Planning your 2023 Budget

Our team likes annual budget time – that special time! We know that’s not the case for everybody.

Taking time to create your budget for the next year helps you decide what you’re going to focus on and how to help your company reach its goals.

Let Us Help You Plan Your Budget

One of the most time-consuming parts of budgeting is figuring out how much these great ideas are going to cost. At Marketing Intent, whether you’re our client or you’re not our client yet, we are happy to help you plan for your budgeting for 2023.

Understanding our Packages

We have several programs that are off the shelf. If you are launching a fund, we can look at it and explain some of the small, medium, and large packages for how you want to market. You can then understand what those costs are, going into 2023.

How Long is This Going to Take to Execute?

If you have a new idea that you want to explore, like geotargeting, or even bringing direct mail back to your marketing plan, we can help with that.  We can give you a sense for how long it takes to plan and execute a program, and how much it might cost you.

Please reach out to us and we’d be happy to help you with your marketing plans and budgeting for 2023.