Tag: Prospects

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Asset Managers General

How to Make Your Firm Easy for Advisors to Work With

You’ve probably heard of CX, which is customer experience. But in the asset management world, it’s also important to think about the AX, which is the advisor experience. As you launch an offering or you continue to try to appeal to advisors, the easier you make it to work with your firm, the better.

Here are a few ways to make sure that your firm is being accessible and easy for advisors to work with.

Access to Your Materials

First of all, it’s important to make sure advisors can access your material easily, whether that’s on your website or through contacting your sales team. Same holds true for obtaining information about your firm. You don’t want advisors to have to go to your website and search around trying to find key pieces of information. It should be front center, clear and easy to find.

Access to People

Advisors are looking for access to people. Whether that’s that sales team and being able to talk to them on demand, or the management team – accessing them through events or even one-on-one meetings. Access to the humans behind the firm and the investment can be critical and important for creating a positive experience for advisors.

Updated Materials

Advisors need the asset managers they work with to be consistent in updating their materials. No one wants to invest a client in a product and then have only outdated information to provide status updates and answer questions. That is the signature of a bad advisor experience.

For example, the latest property acquisition should be front and center, easy to find, and current. This also helps create trust with advisors by showing them you are following through on your investment philosophy

Clear Communication

Finally, clear communication is essential both before and after an advisor makes an investment in your firm. Advisors need to know and understand:

  • Your story and your investment philosophy
  • How you approach doing business
  • How you operate
  • How you communicate with advisors and investors
  • What your statements look like (are they easily understandable)
  • What types of updates are you providing on an ongoing basis

All these things can help develop trust on both the front end, as well as after advisors and investors are invested in your product, which can then help perpetuate additional investments.

If you need help evaluating your strategy and the type of experience you’re creating for advisors, contact Marketing Intent today.

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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.

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Asset Managers

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.

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Asset Managers Featured

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
Asset Managers

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.

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Asset Managers Featured

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
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

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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