Tag: Financial Advisors

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506(b) 506(c) Private placement

Why Hire a Marketing Firm for a 506(b)? 

Some firms offering 506(b) private placements wonder why they would hire a marketing firm. While a 506(b) can be very limited on how you can market the offering, there are a number of ways you can stay in front of financial advisors with compliant marketing, and market your firm and expertise. 

We Collaborate with Compliance and Legal Teams  

At Marketing Intent, we collaborate with your compliance and legal teams to understand what they are comfortable with in marketing your 506(b). While there are (many!) rules to guide us, comfort levels range as do the “whys” behind a compliance or legal team’s stance on a marketing approach or messaging. Understanding the compliance/legal perspective and any sticking points helps us set the stage for a marketing campaign or materials that are going to make it through the compliance review process and become a reality.  

Start from the Ground Up 

While there are many limitations on marketing a 506(b) itself, you still have much to market and talk about with advisors. Many firms offering private placements are smaller and may not have brand recognition within financial advisors. That is priority #1. You must build trust with advisors. Raise brand awareness by attending conferences and sending pre- and post-conference emails and sharing posts on social media. No mention of your offering – just your firm, your asset class and key differentiators. 

Asset Class and Offering Type 

Next up is your asset class. How can you make sure advisors know what you invest in? You want them to think Firm Name = Asset Class. Describe your asset class in terms that are easy to understand and grasp. What lifestyle trends affect demand for your asset class – bring those to light. Then think about your offering type…what education can you provide advisors on how that structure works and how it benefits clients? While advisors are analytical, they still need education – and they still have the same 8-second attention span as the rest of us…so keep it jargon-free and short.

Marketing Intent is skilled at helping firms offering 506(b) offerings market in collaboration with compliance and legal teams…and helping asset managers gain the brand awareness that starts sales conversations. Contact us to learn more about how we can help your firm.  

Categories
Events

Due Diligence Events

Let’s talk about due diligence events. The majority of asset managers are holding them – especially now that in-person events are back in full swing. But not all firms are delivering a high-class experience to advisors.

Read on for tips on designing an event advisors will want to attend.

Create a Compelling Event

We’ve seen a number of sponsors putting together due diligence for the first time. A key aspect to remember is that you’re asking advisors to leave their offices for one to two days to attend. You must make it worth their while and provide them the avenue to learn something new about your firm so they don’t feel it was a waste of their time to be away from their office and clients. A key way to do this is to provide advisors with access to your management team, including members of the property team. They are the source of the nitty gritty details advisors want to know. And if you prep them well for the event also the source of the stories, advisors will remember and share with their clients.

Make it Convenient for Advisors

Another key consideration is the travel you’re asking advisors to take. Put yourself in the advisors’ shoes. Do you want to travel to a location that’s hard to get to? This will be a barrier to attendance. Is your agenda robust enough to attract advisor attention, but not so heavy that three days out of the office are required?

Are you asking them to travel midweek vs. at the beginning or end of week? The start or end of a week allows advisors to easily tack a weekend onto their trip. Focus on event days of Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday.

What’s the registration process for the event? Have you streamlined it as much as possible? Are you providing ground transportation to the hotel? How can you make is as user friendly as possible? When they get to the hotel, is it easy to check in at the hotel and for your event? What’s the meeting room like? Is it set up comfortably? Are you providing snacks? Snacks are critical to keep people fueled and engaged. Planned breaks are equally as important so people know when they can check in at work, return calls, etc. And don’t forget to provide Wifi access during your event for consistent email service.

It sounds like a lot – and it is. And in-person due diligence events are not cheap. Make sure you maximize the advisor experience by creating a checklist of all the key elements that should be covered well in advance of the event so you have them top of mind while you’re in the thick of making your event come to life.

Maximizing Event ROI

Every due diligence event should have a solid follow-up plan to ensure you’re positioning it to maximize ROI. Think about it in terms of the time commitment you’ve just asked your firm’s management team, sales team and marketing team to make. Not to mention the advisors’ time spent to get to and from, and attend your event.

Think about what your sales team needs from marketing for a solid follow up. How can you help them continue conversations with the advisors who attended? How can you help advisors learn more, overcome objections and start investing their clients in your fund?

Also, be sure to ask advisors to complete a survey about the event so you can gauge how the event was received and ask for referrals of other advisors they suggest attend a future event and ask advisors if they’d like a meeting with your sales team.

Finally, ask your sales team to pull capital raising results by advisor before and after the event. Positive results indicate your events are on par. Negative and they need improvement.

If you need help with a due diligence event, we have almost 20 years of experience designing successful, impactful events – organizing, planning and marketing them. We would love to help you maximize your event’s ROI.

About Marketing Intent

We are a sales-focused marketing group specializing in alternative investments with a track record in marketing that helps drive sales. We live by the mantra, “nothing happens until something is sold.” Our marketing serves as the backbone of sales. Our work makes your prospects and clients take notice, ask questions and listen to your story.

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

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Email

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
Brand Trust

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
Email Segmentation

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
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.

Categories
Client Value

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
Client Value

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.

Let's start your marketing with intent.

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