Asset management marketing is built on solid foundations. Get the foundations right, and over time, your inbound marketing will grow at scale. Investors will come to you.
We used to call that ‘word of mouth’, but in this day and age it’s the result of consistent, high-quality, inbound marketing efforts.
Making that happen starts with establishing the 5 pillars of alternative asset marketing:
- Building a brand
- Website, social, and SEO presence
- Content marketing, newsletters, and social media
- Data-backed reports for lead generation
- Events, PR, and video
The goal of establishing these 5 marketing pillars and implementing an effective campaign is to let your potential clients know:
1) You exist;
2) You can solve their problems, and
3) You are trustworthy, likable, and capable
The trust element here is huge for alternative asset management firms because investors are considering putting a great deal of their capital into your offer.
Before launching any marketing activities, make sure your firm is legally able to do marketing.
There’s a detailed section in this article outlining what types of firms and funds can market themselves.
Always check with your regulator and lawyers.
For more information on the UK’s regulatory landscape, this article from The Hedge Fund Journal is worth reading.
For more information about U.S. regulations governing financial services marketing, this article is worth reading.
It’s always important to make it very clear that there are risks involved in investing and you are only offering information, not advice.
Your legal boilerplate is your friend and should sit in your website’s footer, and at the end of any marketing asset.
Now, let’s look at the 5 pillars of asset management marketing that will have investors making a long-term commitment to your firm.
5 Pillars of Asset Management Marketing
With these 5 pillars, we are offering insights from our own best practice based on what we know works for our clients; companies like The Peachtree Group, Supervest, LifeCents, Docker, and Mastercard.
- Building a Brand
There’s marketing, and we’re all for that, and then there is having a brand and using marketing to build that brand.
Having a brand strategy makes it easier for you to stand out and get noticed because it gives you a clear, logical framework for all of your marketing activities. It’s good for your sanity.
The value of having a “brand” compared to simply marketing your company is financially quantifiable.
For 25 years, Interbrand has published a ranking of the top 100 global brands in the world, and one of the most interesting findings is that:
“A focus on operational efficiencies and short-term gains has cost the world’s most valuable brands $US 3.5 trillion in cumulative brand value since we started our study [the year 2000]. This equates to approximately $200bn of lost revenue opportunity over the past 12 months.”
Brand building is a long-term investment. Over time, building a strong, clear, positive brand far outweighs the initial and ongoing investment.
For asset management firms, this means every interaction with investors are crucial building blocks in brand perception.
In this article, we show you how Monzo, a UK-based challenger bank, built a brand presence that speaks directly to their target audience and has made them the best (by service quality) new bank in the last 10 years.
Everything from the visuals Monzo uses on their website and social media, to the app user experience and the coral pink cards makes them stand out in a sea of sameness.
An example of Monzo’s visuals that are part of their brand. A brand that’s helped them go from a startup challenger bank to scaleup with 11 million customers and turning a profit as of 2023.
Monzo uses storytelling and Tone of Voice (ToV) well, based on their origins and understanding their customer pain points. Take a look at this messaging from their About page:
“We’re doing things differently. For too long, banking has been obtuse, complex and opaque. We want to change that and build a bank with everyone, for everyone.”
Monzo set the tone from day one, engaging a millennial audience who were naturally distrustful of traditional banking after the Financial Crisis in 2008.
Monzo’s target customers were also tired of banks not fitting around their busy lifestyles (apps are more convenient than going into a branch or waiting to speak to a call centre agent), and this quickly helped to build trust.
Speaking your customer’s language, engaging them in ways that build trust is a form of psychological mirroring, and it works: “Mirroring led to a 67% deal success rate, while not using it resulted in only a 12.5% success rate,” based on Stanford and Northwestern studies.
The advantage is that everything you do for your brand filters into your marketing, and your marketing activities drive brand building and awareness.
- Website, Social, and SEO Presence
Your website is your firm’s most important online asset. It’s the hub at the center of your marketing strategy, and your content is the flywheel that keeps the whole process working.
Because of its central role in your marketing campaigns, your website wants to reflect the strengths and capabilities of your firm, team, expertise, and funds you manage.
A website needs to:
- Look good, professional, and polished;
- Perform fast (loading speeds impact search results: slow websites get penalised);
- Be mobile-friendly (as of July 2024, Google stopped ranking websites that weren’t as responsive on a mobile device as a desktop).
The good news is that you can see how your website performs in search engines with an SEO audit.
An SEO audit will show you:
- What technical fixes need implementing across your website, like fixing broken links, improving loading speeds, or making your website mobile-friendly.
- Where your website currently ranks for any relevant keywords.
- Keywords your website and competitors rank for: this is a foundational part of a marketing strategy.
- If you’ve got any backlinks going to your website.
- How “authoritative” your website is, ranked using domain authority (DA), and page authority (PA). These are ranked out of 100, so the higher the better.
- How accessible your website is for people with disabilities and visual impairments.
It’s also sensible to compare how your brand performs alongside competitors. Compare follower numbers across social platforms, especially LinkedIn, as that’s the most useful platform for financial service professionals.
Armed with this information, you or a specialist alternative asset marketing studio can create and implement a marketing strategy that aligns with your short, mid- and long-term growth goals.
Kurtosys, a software solution for asset managers, reviews the top 25 investment and asset management websites against several criteria:
- Load speeds;
- Site design and user experience (UX);
- Useful information on the home page;
- Location-specific filtering;
- Role-specific filtering;
- Ease of finding Fund Factsheets (FS);
- Use of cookies, T&Cs, and financial disclaimers.
Data from Kurtosys assessment review shows that Carmignac performs highly. The report clarifies: “Carmignac’s site has many strong features, including the thoughtful approach of asking the user’s role before directing them to the homepage, which helps to personalize their journey.”
“To add to this, while the website navigation is efficient, reducing the number of clicks required to find the desired fund factsheet information could further enhance the user experience.”
Carmignac ⏤ a boutique European firm with €33 billion AuM ⏤ also has a fast website, scoring 96/100 for speed, and is accessible for people with disabilities and visual impairments, scoring 100/100.
Speed and accessibility are core to excellent modern web design. Alternative asset firms would benefit from incorporating these considerations into how they present and market themselves online.
An example of a leading investor website: Carmignac.
- Content Marketing, Newsletters, and Social Media
Now it’s time to put that plan into action.
Marketing and brand building across multiple channels takes time. Be prepared to stay the course and implement your strategy for long enough that results have time to accumulate and start showing up for you.
Look at marketing as a fund that will generate compound returns: the longer you invest and the more you put in, the more you are likely to get out, over time.
The minimum we recommend is:
- 2 thought-leadership articles that are SEO-infused: Show your expertise, just make sure to include keywords that will help you rank higher in search and AI summary – this will help you bring more traffic in.
- 12 LinkedIn posts: For the leadership team’s profiles, anyone who interacts with clients, and the company page. (For all B2B social media marketing, LinkedIn is the one we’d recommend. However, for B2C brands or financial institutions looking to engage new audiences, there are other channels).
- Custom-made graphics and visual assets to support the content.
- A client-facing newsletter to further support these activities.
- You could also do a separate newsletter for sales leads in your pipeline: Give them value that will interest them, keeping your firm in their minds and inboxes.
Unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands ⏤ (we know, not very likely!) ⏤ we’d recommend a specialist alternative asset marketing studio handle 95% of this. The other 5% is the small time investment required from you to check title ideas, provide any expert insights, and give feedback before final edits and articles are published.
What if you are a financial institution that’s trying to engage a completely different audience?
Central banks are currently facing this challenge, and are taking a creative approach to solving it.
Following recent inflationary issues across the US and Europe, central banks — the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England — are turning to social media and quizzes with prizes in youth-focused media to regain public trust.
In particular, these marketing activities are aimed at Gen Z and Millennials audiences. According to Bloomberg and the Central Bank Directory, over 100 central banks are now active on Instagram, and others are embracing YouTube, and TikTok.
Will this approach work?
It’s a unique solution to a specific problem, and it depends on how well central banks can get younger audiences to engage with their brands.
An example of social media brand-building in action: The Bank of England promoting quizzes to a Gen Z audience using LAD Bible, a media outlet popular amongst Gen Z.
- Data-backed Reports as Lead Generation Assets
Have in-depth, data-backed reports created that you can use as lead generation assets.
The majority of alternative asset firms are sitting on a pile of data, insights, and expertise. Work with a specialist marketing studio to transform this knowledge into in-depth reports that show your audience something unique: Insights and expertise they can’t get anywhere else.
Once the report is ready, it’s an asset that keeps on giving because you can use in so many ways:
- Publish articles that drive traffic to the lead generation landing page, where people can download the report in exchange for giving you their email address (add those to your lead gen outreach database);
- Use LinkedIn posts the same way, publish content to encourage people to download the report;
- Do this several times a month, so the report doesn’t get forgotten;
- You can share your report with journalists, turning it into a PR and backlink-generating asset too.
- Share with current clients via your newsletter.
- Share with sales leads that are already in your pipeline via a separate newsletter.
- Have videos created about the report too, amplifying its impact even further.
Rinse and repeat.
Having reports produced takes time and work. It will need to be visually eye-catching, professional, and polished.
One of many examples of this is McKinsey’s annual report into the health of the global financial sector. This is the most recent, 2024 report: Global Banking Annual Review 2024: Attaining escape velocity.
The report answers the question: “Will the liftoff in overall industry results achieved in 2023 give way to the gravitational pull of the industry’s recent history, as questions about banking fundamentals persist?”
McKinsey does a great job making this report as shareable as possible. It was published with a long-form article with graphs that make you want to download the whole thing.
If you don’t have time to read it, you can listen to the report on SoundCloud.
Because it’s a report containing dozens of insightful facts and figures you can’t find anywhere else, McKinsey leverages it for maximum PR and social media exposure.
One example of a lead generation asset: McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review 2024.
- Events, PR, and Video
The fifth pillar builds on everything you have been doing so far.
Elevate your brand and amplify your marketing presence with events, PR, and videos.
One reason these activities are more important than is that online trust is eroding in this age of information chaos. According to the Accenture Song report: “62% of respondents say trust is an important factor to them when choosing to engage with a brand, (up from 56% last year).”
If the last 10 years have pushed us into hyper-digital-connectivity and hyper-digitalisation, then the next 10 years could see an unbundling of that.
One of the reasons for this tanking of online trust is the fact that 50% of web traffic in 2024 was AI/bots, according to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report.
Events and networking: Hosting and attending
With that in mind, attending events is an even more powerful marketing, sales, and customer experience strategy than sticking to 100% online content.
Taking part in anything in-person could stretch from having clients visit the office, doing investor office hours, through to attending or hosting events. In-person networking is making a comeback.
However, as we live in an increasingly hyper-connected world, you will also benefit from leveraging online content to get people to your in-person events. Being authentic with video content, social media, and PR to amplify marketing efforts will help with that.
Your customers, stakeholders, and potential customers want human, real-life, in-person events and high-quality (clearly real, authentic) content, like video interviews and reports A LOT more than cheap, AI-generated social media posts, articles, or videos.
Produce high-quality videos
Video is a powerful marketing tool. Data shows “93% of marketers say video marketing has given them a good ROI”, with 30% of them measuring an ROI through increased revenues, according to Wyzowl.
Goldman Sachs needs no introduction, but it’s always positive when even the most established brands focus their efforts on new channels and mediums, like Goldman Sachs Exchanges Podcast.
You can watch on YouTube or listen via popular podcast channels. It brings Goldman Sachs content to a wider audience, increasing their marketing footprint and channels.
An example of high-quality video and podcasts in action: Goldman Sachs Exchanges Podcast.
PR: Digital and print
At the same time, PR and getting thought-leadership guest articles published in respected finance media outlets is a powerful marketing tactic for a few reasons:
- PR and guest articles amplify your digital marketing efforts;
- Most articles include backlinks, and these are good for SEO;
- Articles also bring in direct and indirect web traffic, and a percentage of those could be investor sales leads.
Asset Management Marketing: Key Takeaways
Building a brand, gaining traction and trust through marketing activities takes time.
But the investment is worth it when you’ve got new inbound leads every week, more investors committed to your fund, and a brand profile that does the heavy lifting.
Do you have a marketing or branding problem that needs solving?
Want to put your value proposition across more clearly?
Get in touch. We can help you.
Take a closer look at our case studies.
We have partnered with Mastercard to create an in-depth, research-backed report about BIN number lookup providers, and with The Peachtree Group to communicate how EB5 visa investment works in the context of hospitality retail developments.