Developing an effective private equity marketing strategy takes time and effort. It’s more than simply throwing together a few LinkedIn posts and hoping for the best.
Don’t feel bad if this is what you’re currently doing. We all have to start somewhere.
In this article, we outline how to go about creating and implementing an effective marketing strategy for Private Equity (PE) firms and funds.
TL;DR:
- Before your firm does any marketing: Make sure you are legally allowed.
- In the U.S., UK, and other countries some regulations prevent certain types of funds from doing any kind of marketing.
- Providing you are allowed, then make sure you’ve got legal text ready that makes it clear who you are speaking to; retail investors, accredited investors only, etc. Your legal T’s&C’s will also need to make it clear your marketing materials do not constitute investment advice.
- Weigh the pros and cons of doing marketing in-house or working with external providers. A lot of PE firms choose a hybrid mix.
In this article we’ll walk you through how to do these 10 specific things:
- Brand audit
- SEO audit
- Competitor analysis
- Create brand guidelines
- Designate subject matter experts (SMEs)
- Develop the marketing strategy
- Create the content strategy and calendar
- Newsletter strategy and calendar
- Invest in videos
- Invest in in-person events and networking
The reason we suggest doing these 10 things in this order is because this is how we approach building an effective marketing strategy from the ground up for a new client at Uncommon.
We are offering insights from our own best practice here based on what we know works for our own clients; companies like The Peachtree Group, Supervest, LifeCents, Docker, and Mastercard.
Because Uncommon is founded on academic principles of research integrity and analytical rigour, we’ll also look at the overall state of the PE market in 2025.
State of Private Equity (PE) in 2025
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) predicts a mixed outlook for PE in 2025: “The global business landscape will continue to face uncertainty in 2025, with geopolitical conflicts, climate risks and regulatory pressures. Economic growth will be modest as the US and China slow down, but strong investment in technology, renewable energy and healthcare will present opportunities.”
PwC takes a more favourable view of things describing PE as the “‘asset class of the moment’”. They go on to describe how “openings for acquisition and corporate turnaround increase” leading to “growth opportunities for real estate, infrastructure and private credit.”
PwC estimates that PE “Assets under management (AuM) will expand by between $4.2 trillion and $5.5 trillion in the years up to 2025”, accounting for 10% of global AuM.
If we include private credit, debt, and other forms of private capital, an analysis by Pitchbook notes that we are now at “$14.7 trillion in AUM.”
However, the market is not without its challenges, such as “high interest rates and an exit drought.” These conditions have persisted for a few years now.
Today, over $8.2 trillion of private finance AuM is managed by 50 of the world’s largest PE firms. Blackstone, KKR, EQT, and The Carlyle Group are amongst the largest and best-performing worldwide.
Side note, Allen Plummer is the head of Content at Carlyle and also a friend of mine. Allen is doing some Brilliant things with video content right now – you can check that out here. He is also a very skilled and thoughtful writer himself, you can see his Substack here. I really enjoyed his piece on the things we collect and how our possessions interweave with our identity. I DIGRESS.
There are many ways a PE firm can ascend that list.
Product market fit is at the core of what makes a business successful. Whether or not your firm is actually any good at managing both money and relationships will make the biggest difference as to how high up that list you go. You could probably have great marketing and a horrible product and make money for a while, but not for long.
Marketing is another important supporting mechanism for your firm’s success. The goal of marketing for your PE firm is to let LPs and GPs know:
1) that you exist;
2) that you can solve their problems, and
3) that you are trustworthy, likable, and capable enough to do so.
The trust element here is huge for PE firms because LPs and GPs are considering putting a great deal of their capital, time, and energy into your offer.
How do you prove to them that your firm is trustworthy? This has always been important in marketing and communications, but it is even more important today than ever before.
State of Online Trust in 2025
Online trust has taken a beating these last few years.
The erosion of online trust impacts every business that uses marketing to win new customers online.
As we covered in more detail here, Accenture Song’s Life Trends 2025 report should make everyone doing marketing in every sector sit up and take notice.
Here is a quick summary of the key findings and what this means for the PE sector:
- 59.9% of people are questioning the authenticity of online content more than before. People don’t trust or like AI-generated content.
- 52% of people have seen fake news or articles.
- Over 50% of web traffic is now AI bots (2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report).
- 52.8% often or always question the authenticity of product reviews when they see them.
- In 2022, TripAdvisor identified 1.3 million fake reviews, and in 2021, TrustPilot removed 2.7 million. This trend is only getting worse thanks to generative AI.
- A Getty Images report found that 87% of people value image authenticity, and prefer them to AI-generated images.
- 52% have experienced deep-fake attacks or scams for personal information and/or money.
Your customers and stakeholders want the following, now more than ever:
- An easy way to verify that anything online using your name/logo is genuine
- A reason to trust and keep trusting your brand
- In-person events and high levels of customer service
- Video interviews and more in-depth content.
- Humanity not AI-generated images, videos, or content.
With this in mind, let’s first make sure your PE firm can do marketing activities, and then cover the ways you can implement or improve your marketing activities.
As a PE Firm, Can We Do Any Marketing?
Whether your firm can do marketing depends on several factors including where you’re based. Because we predominantly work with UK and U.S. clients, we will focus our analysis on those countries.
UK PE Firm Marketing Regulations
PE and Investment Management & Advisory Services (IMAS) firms can market their funds in the UK, but there are regulations that need to be understood first.
The most important that impacts any kind of marketing activity is the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA), which restricts marketing activities at a firm and fund level, and this includes collective investment schemes (CIS).
- Financial Promotion Restriction (Section 21 of FSMA):
This prohibits any person from communicating a financial promotion unless it is either:
- Approved by an authorized person under FSMA.
- Directed at categories of exempt investors or circumstances specified under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (FPO).
- Exemptions under the FPO include communications to:
- Investment professionals, like managers of other funds.
- High-net-worth and certified investors, like family offices and pension funds.
- One-off communications, like an email, or marketing directly to former investors who were overseas but are now in the UK.
- Promotion of Collective Investment Schemes (Section 238 of FSMA):
- Investors and fund managers are restricted from promoting unregulated CIS ⏤ which includes most PE funds ⏤ to the general public.
- Promotion is permitted only to investors who fall within specific exempted categories defined by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) rules or the CIS Promotions Order.
- Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD):
- AIFMD applies to the marketing of Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) to high-net-worth/certified investors who have residency or a registered office in the UK.
- Under the AIFMD, marketing is defined as a direct or indirect offering or placement of units or shares of an AIF to investors at the initiative of the AIFM or on its behalf.
- The AIFMD imposes transparency requirements, including:
- Annual reports.
- Disclosures to investors.
- Reporting obligations to regulators.
If you are an international fund and want to market to UK investors, then this is allowed under the Overseas Funds Regime or Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, Section 272.
It’s important to note that the British financial and regulatory landscape can be complex.
However, it’s also worth noting that as long as you aren’t marketing to the general public, your activities are purely aimed at high-net-worth/certified investors then the associated regulatory risk factors are reduced.
If in doubt, check with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), or talk with a lawyer first.
For more information on the UK’s regulatory landscape, this article from The Hedge Fund Journal is worth reading.
U.S. PE Firm Marketing Regulations
PE firms can market their funds to U.S. investors. Larger funds have more regulatory obligations, but there’s nothing prohibiting fund managers from implementing marketing activities.
A key consideration is the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, which requires fund managers engaging in investment advisory activities within the U.S. to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unless an exemption applies. Notable exemptions include:
- Foreign Private Adviser Exemption: Applicable to managers who:
- Have no place of business or residence in the U.S.
- Have fewer than 15 U.S. clients and investors.
- Manage less than $25 million in U.S. investor AuM.
- Make it clear that they are overseas while still soliciting funds from U.S. investors, like marketing to pension plan investors; a massive source of funding for PE firms.
- Private Fund Adviser Exemption: Applicable to managers who:
- Manage solely private funds.
- Manage less than $25 million in U.S. investor AuM.
3. Exempt under the SECs Reg D:
Your firm could be exempt under Reg D (unlike Reg A, whereby no marketing is allowed), in either of these scenarios:
Rule 506 (b)
A “non-exclusive safe harbor” for selling an unlimited amount of securities, could be one way to raise funds for a PE firm. You can only market to accredited investors. The upper limit is raising $10 million in a 12-month period.
Rule 506 (c)
Is less restrictive, with no limitations on the amount you can raise, or timescales. The only criteria is that you can only market to accredited investors.
However, make sure you aren’t covered under Rule 504, which doesn’t permit “general solicitation or advertising to market the securities.”
U.S. fund managers who aren’t exempt from the above usually have to register with the SEC as an investment advisor. However, this doesn’t prevent you from undertaking marketing activities.
As your assets under management increase, there are more things to consider, like the need to structure offerings as “private placements” (i.e., non-public offerings to specifically identified investors) in order to avoid the requirement to register their fund interests under the U.S. Securities Act and register the fund itself as an investment company under the U.S. Investment Company Act.
If you’re soliciting funds from pension plan investors and have exceeded $200 million AuM, then you will probably also become subject to the U.S. Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”).
The key to any PE marketing is to make it clear that you are only offering “private placements” to accredited investors. Your doors and funds are not open to the general public.
Legal boilerplate disclaimers that have been gone over in excruciating detail by your lawyers are your friend in this scenario!
For more information about U.S. regulations governing PE funds, this article is worth reading.
So, if your company can do marketing, then here is what we recommend . .
Marketing Strategy Blueprint for Private Equity
Here is our 10-point step-by-step blueprint for PE firm marketing activities.
- Brand Audit
Before you can start marketing, you need to understand where your brand sits in the PE market. You’ll have a much stronger starting position if you get answers to the following questions:
- How is your firm perceived? E.g., Old school or a disruptor?
- How do you compare to competitors? E.g., Market-leader or scrappy but impressive underdog?
- Do enough of your target audience know about your firm? E.g., Barely on their radar or being seriously considered for the next funding placement.
Answering these questions will help you identify strengths to capitalise on and weaknesses to address.
Tools you can use to conduct this market research include:
- Nielsen, Kantar, or Gartner to gather data on your market position relative to competitors.
- SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics to conduct surveys with current clients, potential investors, and industry experts.
- Social media and SEO analytics tools ⏤ like Hootsuite Insights or Google Analytics ⏤ to assess the reach and engagement of your marketing efforts.
- Do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to get a comprehensive view of your brand’s position.
- If you’ve done marketing in the past, it’s worth using a tool like BuzzSumo to review your past content, including white papers, blogs, reports, any PR, and social media posts.
It’s up to you whether this is something you can do internally, or whether it’s better to get external support to bring specific expertise or a fresh perspective to your market position, brand assets, and help you to create a strategy for the future.
- SEO Audit
SEO is how you get more traffic to your website.
SEO covers a multitude of marketing activities, including creating thought-leadership content, new web pages, publishing articles consistently, and securing PR-based backlinks (more about that later).
An important task before launching any new marketing strategy is to conduct an SEO audit.
This will show you:
- What ⏤ if any ⏤ technical fixes need implementing across your website. You might find there are reasons you haven’t been ranking in Google and other search engines, such as broken links, slow loading speeds, or your website not being mobile-friendly.
- Where your website currently ranks for any relevant keywords.
- If you’ve got any backlinks going to your website (which is usually a positive thing; and the more you’ve got the better it is for bringing in web traffic)?
- How search engines perceive your website, known as a domain authority (DA), and page authority (PA). These are ranked out of 100, so generally speaking, the higher the better.
Once you’ve got this and any other insights that an SEO audit will uncover, these findings can be turned into actionable steps as part of your marketing strategy.
- Competitor Analysis
As part of the brand audit, no strategy is complete without a competitor analysis.
Tools like Nielsen, Kantar, or Gartner can be used to gather data on your market position relative to competitors. You can also get a brand or marketing consultant to conduct this research.
It’s important to understand what marketing they’re doing, and this should include:
- Where competitor websites rank in search results;
- What keywords are competitors ranking for?
- Are they doing any paid advertising?
- Are they doing any PR activities or social media?
- What is their content like (looking and quality and quantity, and the types of content they’re publishing)?
- How many followers do they have on social media, especially LinkedIn?
Once you understand your competitor positions and marketing activities then you can integrate that into your marketing strategy.
- Create Brand Marketing Guidelines
Having brand marketing guidelines is especially useful if several people are involved in creating content, which is usually the case
Whether it’s several people in-house or a mixture of agency and specialist support, everyone involved with content marketing will benefit from being on the same page. The best way to do that is with guidelines.
These guidelines don’t need to be complicated. The simpler the better. Your guidelines need to explain what your brand should sound like, what words you do and do not use in your communications, and what colours, fonts, and graphic personality your firm has.
- Designate Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Your content marketing and communications will be much stronger if they are designed and created by professional writers who also have a strong knowledge of the PE space. Building a bank of trusted subject matter experts who you can call on for pull quotes and interviews will make your content even stronger.
We like to collect data from subject matter experts using questionnaires and recorded video calls. You can also invite your SME to record a video using a tool like Loom, and then send it to the marketing team to support the relevant content pieces.
- Develop the Marketing Strategy
Now you’ve pulled together the relevant competitor analysis, brand guidelines, and SEO audits, it’s time to create the marketing strategy.
This might include:
- Any changes required to the website, branding, and other communication channels and assets.
- A content strategy and calendar;
- A social media strategy and calendar;
- A Newsletter content strategy and calendar;
- A PR strategy and calendar;
- A strategy for in-person events, networking, and videos (if applicable).
Make sure it’s an actionable strategy so that you know:
- Who’s responsible
- Who’s overseeing/managing the strategy
- When action items are being done
- What’s being done to promote every piece of content
- What your measures of success are: Increased web traffic, investor inquiries, and brand awareness
- How you are measuring your marketing key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Are your expectations reasonable
- Create a Content Calendar
The content calendar is an integral part of the overall marketing strategy.
Within this, should be the plan for:
- What you publish, e.g., blogs, articles, thought-leadership pieces, eBooks, guides, white papers, infographics, and videos
- How often you are publishing? You might do 8 articles a month, and one in-depth guide every quarter.
- Content lifecycle, from ideas through to writing, editing, and publishing
- Who’s responsible for every aspect of the content plan, including internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), an editor, and who is publishing the content
- How is a piece of content promoted, e.g., using social media, newsletters, and an internal newsletter to ensure the whole team gets behind the plan
- Newsletter Content Strategy & Calendar
A specific Newsletter content strategy and calendar might also be a good idea for your firm.
It’s worth dividing any newsletter database into two lists: one for Current investors and one for potential investors.
Separating your lists helps you to keep current investors engaged and feeling well looked after. You can send them market trends, fund updates, and exclusive insights.
For potential investors, you can send the most interesting articles you’ve been publishing ⏤ think of it as a highlight reel A gentle monthly touch sharing your best news can help keep them engaged without being overly sales-y. That way, you can stay top of mind so that when these good folks are ready to invest in the future, you are in with the best possible chance of securing their investment.
- In-person Events: Worth investing in?
In my perspective, yes, in-person events and networking are worth doing. Providing you plan and market them well beforehand, have clear goals, and ensure enough of the people you want there will attend.
In this hyper-digital age, people want more in-person experiences. Our attitudes to digital experiences are changing and our desire to connect in the real world is increasing.
Accenture calls this “social rewilding”, with an emphasis on “depth, authenticity, and sensory richness in their experiences.”
The data suggests that putting on in-person events is going to be appreciated by the people you’re trying to connect with. Accenture found that: “41.9% of respondents said their most enjoyable experience in the previous week was a physical one.”
- Video: Worth investing in?
Video is going to become a bigger and bigger focus for finance brands going forward because it’s a much more personal way to build connections with people in a low-trust, bot-infested online environment.
Take a look at this excellent series by the global investment firm, The Carlyle Group: “‘Navigating Leadership,’ a limited-edition series of articles and videos by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret), Vice Chair of Global Affairs at Carlyle.
In the first edition, the Admiral shares his “4 R’s” of leadership, as well as some of his favorite novels that offer leadership lessons.
You can see more of their eight-part series here: https://lnkd.in/ejJdf3Hu.
Like the example above, if you’re going to invest in video content in 2025, you will benefit from:
- Decent production value.
- A real person, not an AI or a voiceover, but a real person talking authentically to a brand’s audience.
- Branding within the video or other ways to authenticate it being a genuine video (to combat deep-fakes and AI-generated erosion of trust).
Key Takeaways for Private Equity Marketing in 2025
Marketing does take time. It’s not an immediate win. But with consistency, a commitment to quality, and a focused effort to create excellent content, your PE firm will have the best possible chance to stand out in a crowded and competitive market.
We partnered with Mastercard to create an in-depth, research-backed report about BIN number lookup providers, and Peachtree Group to communicate their unique value proposition to a hyper-niche demographic.
Get in touch if we can help your PE firm with your content needs.