This guest post was written by Shane Stiles, president of Gate 39 Media.
Whether you’re a fund manager, investment advisor or broker, selling retail or institutional trading, or raising assets for a fund—marketing starts with a process. The goal of a well-defined marketing process is to generate leads that can then be converted to clients through the efforts of automated marketing and sales tactics.
Marketing Infrastructure
Before you begin to define your offers and campaigns, your marketing infrastructure – the engine for your marketing fuel – must be defined.
Your infrastructure is the engine through which you will feed content that informs, educates, and engages your audience. This infrastructure must also be able to report on how well your content is being received.
The leads generated by your offers are best managed within a customer relationship management (CRM) software. A good CRM allows businesses to not only store client info and track a sales process, but to gain insight into customer and lead behaviors to create a custom marketing plan.
Better CRM systems integrate data from your website, providing measurable stats, segmenting interested contacts who have completed an offer form, attended an event or downloaded an eBook. From there, the CRM can be customized to trigger additional actions, such as automated drip emails, that continue to nurture leads in the days and weeks to follow.
Combining a defined CRM strategy with your marketing plan, you can increase revenues by providing services and products tailored to the customer, offer better customer service, cross-sell more effectively, help sales staff close deals faster, retain existing customers and discover new ones, and simplify marketing and sales processes.
Depending on your specific CRM, part of defining the strategy will include what information you want to collect from them and what tags or lists can be added so you understand which offer or event brought them to your site. Each stage of your sales and marketing process should be defined by validated actions on behalf of your target client. This ensures you are receiving accurate data about the lead and affords you the ability to market directly to them.
Market Opportunity: Define Your Offer, Your Audience
After establishing your marketing infrastructure, you’ll want to define the market opportunity (content that informs, educates, and engages) that will be the virtual fuel in your CRM engine.
You will need a clear offer that provides a clear value. Does your specific offer solve a problem or provide unique educational or informational insight on a trending topic appealing to your target audience?
For example, if you’re a fund manager or investment advisor who has compiled a great in-depth report with key findings on the trending outlook of a financial sector or strategy for the year ahead, you’ll want to make this report available to as many qualified investors as possible. Other types of popular downloadable content are tips and lists, such as a Top 10 Questions to Ask a New Money Manager, or 5 Key Actions in Preparing for Retirement.
A desirable offer is a prime tool to leverage in exchange for a prospect’s contact information to build up new leads, bring existing leads back into consideration, and provide information for existing clients.
Marketing Mix & Drip Campaigns
Mix and drip? Sounds messy, right? In reality this is where much of your neatly-defined marketing plan comes into play.
Once you’ve defined your offer and target audience, you can define the campaign around the offer: where and how you will present your offer to your audience—the marketing mix; plus the email communications follow-up after the offer—the drip.
To successfully market your offer you’ll want to ensure that the offer is attractively presented across multiple channels and media: email, website, landing page, social media, ads, blog, etc.
Using the report offer example, an effective marketing mix might consist of a landing page with a form, in conjunction with website banner ads and a series of Tweets linking back to the landing page. When a prospect completes the form to gain access to your content, they can enter into a drip campaign sequence, receiving reinforcing emails such as tips, relevant videos, Q&A interviews, money manager profiles, and additional offers – often over a 30-60-90-day span.
Additionally, creating a few blog posts around different sections of the report and sharing it on social media, can bring in additional prospects to your site.
Determining the right marketing mix increases the chances of a lead completing your offer form. This form can trigger a drip email campaign spanning a certain amount of time. The emails in the drip campaign should be carefully crafted keeping in mind the goals of your offer.
Drip campaigns are usually comprised of several email communications. In addition to an automatic thank you email, we recommend planning a series of automated drip emails designed to nurture the lead. For example, an email two days later that presents a checklist as a useful add-on to your offer, another three days later, an email with a related blog post, and so forth.
Ongoing Marketing Management
Marketing is a constant journey that requires commitment, analysis, and modification of the creation of content as well as adjusting the marketing infrastructure for optimal performance.
With your defined infrastructure, offers, and audience, the marketing plan you’ve set in motion will begin to yield results that require ongoing management.
Just as your business evolves or as your product or service offerings change, you’ll need to add or make adjustments to your marketing. This often involves re-defining a process based on new goals, segmenting customers differently, or updating your communications.
Measurement, as part of ongoing marketing management, is where your CRM software will play a crucial role. Your CRM will deliver metrics and reports to show how your marketing performs, based on parameters you set
Ongoing marketing management includes monitoring your existing offers. Eventually, offers go stale. When an offer that you’ve run for a while begins to generate fewer leads, take steps to re-assess and refresh the campaign, perhaps making changes to design or messaging.
You should never view a marketing process as set in stone, but rather you should be constantly validating your defined plan and tweaking as necessary. Even the most well-defined marketing plans require ongoing management and fine tuning for maximum impact.
Remember, successful companies never stop marketing.
The Financial Marketing Process
Defining an effective marketing process provides a path and clarifies the various pieces you’ll need to create a fully-functioning plan—from lead generation to post sale. Defining the tools, offerings, and strategies, which form the basis for the campaigns you’ll execute, and managing and modifying them going forward will establish a plan that will build a database of leads and nurture them to become clients.
About the Author
Shane Stiles is President of Gate 39 Media, a financial services marketing firm providing online marketing and application development for financial services across futures, equities, alternative investments, and insurance.