Why Brand Awareness is So Important for Fund Managers

At face value, fund marketing is all about promoting and offering investment products to budding investors. But any fund marketer will know that the behind-the-scenes work goes far deeper than this, especially when building a brand identity from the ground-up. How can you sell a fund without potentially investors knowing exactly who you are?

In the fund space, the big names like Vanguard or Blackrock are established with large budgets to play with to execute creative outreach strategies. Smaller boutique funds cannot ‘outmarket’ them, but digital tools are at hand to help establish a solid brand identity that can bring them to broader prominence online. Doing so is also incredibly important in attracting the leads that suit the fund, establishing credibility, and kicking-off longer term investment success.

So effectively, brand awareness is the foundational cornerstone that can drive any go-to market strategy.

What is Brand Awareness?

A simple definition is that brand awareness is the extent to which consumers are familiar with a brand. This encompasses both recognition – knowing that the brand exists – and recall, essentially remembering that brand whenever they need their services.

Brand awareness serves a purpose for both new and existing investors, and is important for the following reasons:

1.???? Attracting Investors: establishing an investment philosophy that investors can get behind, that suits their financial needs at the time.

2.???? Differentiation: brand recognition can immediately help a fund stand out in a crowded field to then showcase their unique product offerings.

3.???? Credibility and Trust: especially in fund management where investors may be placing large sums of money, brand awareness translates to trust whereby a fund? is compliant and knowledgeable.

4.???? Pricing Power: building a reputation can ensure a fund can set higher, more competitive rates while keeping up customer demand.

5.???? Investor Loyalty: like any of our personal favoured brands, when they are recognised for great service over and over again, investors will be more likely to return.

Strategies for Building Brand Awareness

Establishing brand awareness takes consistency. Not just in messaging, but also how your tone, philosophy and values get showcased across every digital channel that an investor may use. This includes displaying your brand across a website, social media channels, investor portals, factsheet templates, or in any branded materials you may use for networking events. Speaking of, getting your brand out there may still involve the old-but-gold ways of meeting investors through industry meetings, sponsoring events and creating partnerships through public relations efforts.

One of the best ways to consistently showcase your brand is through creating and sharing valuable, insight-driven content – a powerful and repeatable way to establish yourself and your fund as a trusted authority in the industry to attract a loyal following of potential investors.

Here’s what a branded content marketing strategy could look like:

●????? Identify Your Target Audience: build a profile of who you’d like your investors to be: what’s their demographic, their financial needs, or budgets?

●????? Develop a content strategy: think about themes that resonate with your audience and plan blogs, videos, webinars, and events that feed into those value drivers.

●????? Create high-quality content: get creative! You can write, film, or set up online events far quicker with digital tools, and repurpose them in different formats to suit various investors.

●????? Promote your content: paste content on every possible digital channel, with thought to which is most appropriate for different content (for example, an infographic may capture attention better on LinkedIn feeds).

●????? Optimise for SEO: with some keyword research, you can boost your credibility by appearing higher on search engine results.

Another key component of brand awareness is measuring and analysing the effectiveness of your strategy. This can be shown through metrics in your CRM (such as website traffic or email open rates), the percentage of people that recognise and recall your brand name logo when prompted with an industry category, and also by tracking social media metrics – although it’s best not to get hung up on them, as they’re less likely to get the highest quality leads, unless you’re lucky!

Investing in a brand awareness strategy takes time and significant senior management buy-in. To get even more customer loyalty and retention, you need more budget, which means demonstrating marketing ROI, and that’s where the skill of a fund marketing team comes in to come up with inventive ways to build strong brand awareness.

It’s an ongoing process that requires consistent effort, planning and reiteration to perfect the art of engaging investors, but it’s something that goes a long way in streamlining data-driven efforts of any future campaigns.