Tag: Financial Advisors

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
Asset Managers General

One-Hit Wonders

What does this list have in common: Carl Douglas, Los del Rio, Soft Cell, Vanilla Ice and Wild Cherry?

They’re all “one-hit wonders”. They all have a song that we know, like Kung Fu Fighting, The Macarena, Tainted Love, Ice Ice Baby and Play That Funky Music. Those were their big hits – and they never had another one.

So what’s that have to do with alternative investments and asset managers?

One-hit wonders are advisors who do one trade with your product, and they never do another one. We know they have done a lot of research on your company and your product, they’ve completed the paperwork, and they found enough value to invest a client’s assets. So, why would they go through that entire process and do one trade and not another? The reason isn’t always clear, but the good news is we can do something about it.

Let’s talk about ways we can turn a one-hit wonder into a loyal producer for your firm.

Have a System in Place

When an advisor makes a trade, make sure you have a system set up where you thank them. Send them an email, thank them for their trade, and also highlight why they invested in your product. Give them your value add and what you plan to deliver to investors.

You also need to regularly check in with advisors. Set up a schedule after the first sale to check in with advisors at 30, 60 and 90 days or every quarter. A streamlined way to manage this is through marketing automation.

Have a Conversation

Even after – or especially after – an advisor has allocated a portion of a client’s assets with your firm, your sales team should continue to have conversations with them to understand their latest thinking about your company and product. And make sure you arm your sales team with a list of who is a one-hit wonder, so they understand where an advisor stands and that they may need additional support telling your investment story.

Always keep that dialogue open, that’s where you’ll learn why a second trade hasn’t been made. If your sales team is having that conversation, they will be able to better understand why an advisor only did that one trade and it will help you fill in the gaps.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you convert one-hit wonders into loyal producers, contact us at info@marketingintent.com.

Categories
Asset Managers

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
Asset Managers

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
Asset Managers

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.

Categories
Asset Managers

Serving Our Clients and Each Other

Does anyone remember the NBC public service announcements from the late eighties of “The More You Know?” This is the one with the shooting star and the rainbow across the screen. For some reason, that’s always stuck in my head. It reminds me of how much better we can serve our clients and each other, when we know more information.

A major tenet of how we operate with our clients is knowing about the background and backdrop of their projects and their company, so we can serve them well. Communication is the center point between how we work and collaborate well with each other.

Three Types of Information We Need from Our Clients

Let’s discuss the three areas we focus on as we work with our clients to make sure we are getting the information we need. With more information, we can do a better job. The backdrop, the key players, and the expectations.

Backdrop

The backdrop can be anything from a challenge the company has been facing, to a goal the company is trying to reach or even something a company has been trying to do and hasn’t been able to achieve – and initiatives the company has found challenging.

Sometimes there are different priorities within a firm, for different departments, and maybe things aren’t getting done. Progress may have stalled out because there haven’t been resources. It helps us to understand the backdrop, so we understand how much time to put into a project, and how to structure it to be completed in an appropriate time frame.

Key Players

The next key area for us to clearly understand is if there are key players involved in a project.  Is this something the CEO requested that we should put a high priority on? Or is it more of an operational piece that is important, but maybe not as high of a priority or a project that can be on a longer timeframe? When are people expecting this piece to be done or this marketing program to launch?

We need to understand how to prioritize it among our projects for a client, as well as how aggressively we should project manage it through to the end.

Expectations

The third area we need to understand is the expectations. Any good marketing project should have a concrete goal in mind. We like to know what that is, whether it’s brand awareness, or generating additional conversations with clients or investment advisors.

We don’t assume we know the goal of a project. Instead, we ask our clients exactly what they’re trying to get out of each marketing program. We can then deliver the correct project and program for them.

Communication is important. And the more we know, the further we can go with our clients. This includes knowing the backdrop, the key players involved in a project, as well as the expectations.

If you’d like more information about how Marketing Intent can help your firm with marketing, please reach out to us.

Categories
Asset Managers

Marketing Intent and the Resources We Have Built

Let’s talk about how Marketing Intent is structured and the network of resources the firm has built.

Cherie Fournier, our CEO, has been in the financial services marketing arena for 25 plus years. After working in corporate environments for most of that time, she decided at the beginning of 2020 to start her own marketing firm.

Marketing Intent focuses efforts on helping asset managers market to their target audiences. We also help streamline their marketing operations and develop plans and strategies.

The Thinking Behind Marketing Intent

The reason we started Marketing Intent in 2020 is because we wanted to tap into our financial industry experience to serve a wide range of companies. But we knew we weren’t experts in all facets of marketing. We’re not graphic designers or web developers, and we know our clients have a broad range of marketing needs. We felt it was an ideal time to tap into the gig economy, which has gotten even more attention after COVID. People started working from home and seeking better work life balance.

We found ourselves with a lot of great talent available to us to build out a network of professional marketers who could help our clients. For example, Cherie’s background is marketing management, strategy and copywriting, and Alise’s is marketing strategy and project management. Obviously, marketing goes far beyond that. Our professional marketing network helps us offer our clients a much greater bench depth of professionals to help with their projects and make them successful.

Our Network of Professionals

We structured Marketing Intent around these networks of professionals. Cherie and Alise are front and center with each of our clients. We look at our network and choose the right professionals for each project, and each client.

If we have somebody who’s looking at rebranding and doing a website, we may pick a design resource that might be different than a firm that is just redoing a brochure or wants to freshen up something that’s existing. We look at who is going to be the best match for each project and we deliberately select the best team.

How We Developed Our Network

Throughout Cherie’s career, she has had many relationships on the client side of working with different professionals. Marketing Intent has tapped into those cultivated relationships. Some are are decades long and other resources are newer.  We continually look at contacts and see who we can get connected with to grow our base of professional marketers. We are never static. We’re constantly growing and constantly looking for new people to add to our roster of contract resources.

The Ever-Changing Market

Sometimes we have a client that needs a resource that we don’t have. Marketing is ever changing as we know, and we don’t always know what is going to come our way or what type of requests are made. Often, if we have a request come up on something that we haven’t yet done, we tap into our current contacts to see if they have a trusted resource that we can use for a project. If not, we do research and vet different companies to see which ones are going to work well with us and who is going to serve our clients to our standards. We then bring that firm or individual on board as a contractor to help us with a certain project.

If you would like to learn more about how Marketing Intent can help your business grow by tapping into our network of professionals, please reach out to us.

Categories
Asset Managers

Overcoming Obstacles When Managing Marketing and Delegating

You’re short staffed, buried in work and you know you should delegate to get out from underneath it and get caught up on your marketing tasks, but you’re not. Why aren’t you delegating? Even seasoned marketing managers fall victim to the “I can do everything myself” or “I can do it better myself” mentality.

Let’s discuss ways to overcome some of the obstacles we feel when managing marketing and delegating – as well as opportunities to potentially outsource delegation to an outside marketing firm.

Some managers fear delegation because it hasn’t worked out well for them in the past. In my 25+ years of managing marketing teams, I have found that it comes down to delegating to the right people.

There are four different personality traits that I found are critical when you’re choosing who you’re delegating to. 

Strong Sense of Responsibility

First is a strong sense of responsibility and a commitment to the company. You want somebody who is dedicated and interested in their career growth, as well as the mission of the company and feels excited about it. That energy then translates into wanting to accept the additional responsibility of delegation.

Intuitive Communication Skills

Next is intuitive communication skills. I always think of this as understanding the communication needs of the target audience, which in this case is myself, or you, if you’re the manager. You want to make sure that the person you’re delegating to understands what you need to know and when you need to know it. They need to give you updates that make you feel comfortable, without feeling like you have to pry for information, or that you aren’t getting what you need.

Strong Project Management Skills

The next is really strong project management skills. It’s important for whoever you’re delegating to, to understand the overall project and how to move it along. I like to know that the person understands “Plan A,” but that they also have a “Plan B” and even a “Plan C” at times, in their back pocket. They can then keep the project going and moving along if they encounter any obstacles.

Confident Individuals

Next are individuals who are confident in themselves. You want to make sure that you have a team or a person you’re delegating to that is solutions oriented. They need to be trying to solve a problem that comes up versus coming to you as a safety net when things get hard.  They figure out how to address red flags and put projects back on track. This is somebody who feels comfortable and confident in challenging situations, but also makes solutions a reality.

Self Reflection

Let’s move on to our next topic – which can be harder because it requires self-reflection. Oftentimes managers want to take credit for everything the team does, and they feel like in order to do that, they have to do all of the work. They take more of an “I” approach to managing marketing than a “WE” approach.

What I found in my career is that a “WE” approach is much more effective in motivating a team, as well as lightening your own workload, so you can dedicate your time to the tasks and projects that require your attention. If you think about how to motivate your team and elevate each member to work to their maximum potential, there’s much more that a marketing team can accomplish, than if everyone is working on their own.

Delegation to an Outside Firm

When it comes to delegation, marketing managers don’t often think about using an outside marketing resource. Consider projects you just aren’t getting to, or projects that you need help with to push them across the finish line. These are great areas where an outside marketing resource can help. 

An outside marketing firm can also help fill in areas that aren’t your strong suit.

If you’re not an organized person, try to find a marketing firm that is. If you’re looking for a little bit more creativity, then make it criteria to select a firm. Once you have that alignment, you can start out with a small project to make sure you’re developing trust, and then you can move on to delegating out bigger projects.

If you’re finding yourself underwater and need help managing your marketing load, we at Marketing Intent would be happy to explore delegation to us, with you.

Let’s have a conversation.

Categories
Asset Managers

Your Success is Our Success

What does client success look like for us here at Marketing Intent?

Our philosophy is “Your Success Is Our Success.”

We start off by setting expectations and then delivering on those expectations, which in turn results in a meaningful experience for the client and building trust. We can then develop long-term relationships.

We Make Sure You Reach Your Goals

We make sure that our clients’ success is aligned with their goals, and we make sure they’re reaching those goals. A big part of that is communication and planning. While communication in or work lives is common, we have a keen focus on ensuring high-quality communication and strategy planning.

Communication = Success

We lay out when we are going to communicate, our plan for a client’s projects and the deliverables – and then we make sure we meet those deliverables. We also strive to go above and beyond those deliverables. If we can add value to a project or take it a step further to help clients reach their goals, we will.

But first and foremost, we make sure we provide the deliverables promised. We communicate and keep the client apprised of everything going on. There’s never a question in their mind of where their projects are.

What Can You Do?

Here are a few things that a client can do, either working with us or other marketing firms, to be successful on their end.

Don’t stop being curious. We’re in an ever-evolving industry and since the pandemic it’s even evolved quicker, so stay on top of what is going on and what is available out there. Doing research on how to solve some problems or get around roadblocks is going to help people advance and be leaders in the industry.

If you would like help with your marketing and you want us to help guide you along the way to reaching your goals, we’d be happy to help. Reach out to us today and let’s have a conversation.

Let's start your marketing with intent.

CONTACT US
Linkedin Youtube Envelope

Subscribe to Our Insights:

* indicates required
Email Address

© 2022 Marketing Intent. All Rights Reserved.

Privacy Policy | Terms of Use