Effective marketing requires repetition
It doesn’t matter how brilliant your story is if investors don’t hear it often enough. Repetition is the essence of effective marketing. Big brands know it. They spend millions of dollars on it. Hearing the name or seeing the logo triggers recall of their messaging: Nike: Just do it Capital One: What’s in your wallet? …
The difference between marketing & investor relations
In the asset management industry, marketing and investor relations are frequently lumped into the same bucket. Frankly, this is a mistake. They are very different things, and it is best to treat them as such. One of the most dangerous traps an asset manager can fall into is being very good at investor relations, yet…
Marketing communications: keep it simple
The urge to overcomplicate things in your marketing communications can be irresistible. When it comes to writing your marketing deck, the intention, of course, is always to clarify, rather than overcomplicate. You want to provide detail so investors can properly understand your strategy. Your strategy is complicated – if it wasn’t, anyone could do it,…
Stop marketing performance
Not marketing performance is a very hard concept for the industry to grasp. Some people just can’t get there, regardless of the logic. And the logic is hard to refute. Can anyone out there guarantee returns? The answer, a resounding no. Should you build messaging and brand around something you can’t guarantee? The answer, a…
Your marketing strategy must align with your investment strategy
And before you jump to conclusions, I am not saying what you think I am saying. We are very fortunate to work with some of the most adept investors on the planet. The strategies they deploy are sophisticated, deeply thought-out, technical, and innovative. Although the manner in which they present themselves is often elementary, unrefined,…
The marketing continuum
Marketing doesn’t need to be overwhelming. Although the subtleties and intricacies of each stage of the continuum below can become involved, the general path to follow is straightforward. First, you strategize and determine what you want to say. Second, you need to build tools that clearly represent your value proposition. Lastly, you need to implement…
Ten “do’s” and “don’ts” to using your marketing deck more effectively
As my colleague, Kyle Dunn, always says, “there’s a reason you don’t see paragraphs on freeway signs.” It’s too much information for anyone to read and retain when they’re zipping by at 75mph. Hence, the need to sequence your message throughout your marketing deck and process at a pace that aligns with the actual process…
And all this time, you’ve been using your marketing deck wrong…
“Interesting. Send me something…” Probably the four best words you can hope to hear after an initial random conversation with a prospective investor. OK – it’s not as good as being asked for subscription documents or anything – but it’s an encouraging start to a dialogue nonetheless. So, the obvious question is, what do you…
How to convert a complicated investment strategy into an interesting story
It is no fault of anybody’s, however, a lot of the asset managers we work with represent investment strategies that are extremely complex. This translates into a long-winded story that is more often than not hard to sit through. For much of the industry, this is the core reason why so many are unsuccessful in…
A pitfall to avoid when marketing alternatives
Most marketers of alternatives push hard to build a foundation that is both conservative and credible. They believe conservative materials are analogous to their perspective on risk. There is logic to the thinking. On the latter, no one is going to give $100m to anyone that doesn’t come across as credible or professional. Often times,…