How to Nurture Top-Of-Funnel Investors For The Asset-Raising Sales Effort
When sales heads demand leads, they cannot be conjured out of thin air. There may be investors sitting within the multi-stage funnel, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll all eventually become a new customer. With that, feeding the ‘top-of-funnel’ (TOF) needs to be a regular practice to keep opportunities alive and kicking.
Even though that buyer funnel is a notoriously long-winded affair within the fund world, it does act as a brilliant bedrock that unites the marketing and sales teams in their joint asset raising mission. It’s a visual reminder, so long as the investors within are tracked from entry to completion, proving both awareness and conversion success the intended go-to market campaigns have worked toward.
The great thing about the TOF stage is it can be an open ‘hook’ for investor audiences that marketing and sales may not have foreseen. Ignoring them after this first level is not a good look – that’s the time when prospects are primed for a fund’s extensive knowledge, educational material, product suite introductions and more, which can be nurtured using tricks from the digital marketing handbook.
TOF vs BOF
The bottom-of-funnel (BOF) is the salesperson’s pot of gold: the leads that are aware of what a firm does, its philosophy and fund range. They may need an incentive to make that final leap over the finish line, which could be through a call with a distribution team, content built around personalised fund benefits or, ideally, a mixture of both.
No BOF is possible without an investor being drawn in in the first place, then fed emails, invitations, downloadables via landing pages or newsletters to build on their potential to convert. The TOF exists as that initial clincher; the opening gambit that piques interest enough to explore digital marketing collateral in their own time. The usual path for today’s online customers could be up to 11 touchpoints before landing in the salesperson’s ‘to call’ list.
Common TOF Channels
TOF is about putting ‘the feelers’ out there, in a non-intrusive way which sees investors buying into what a fund does without much persuasion. By no means does that mean TOF efforts should be throwaway or ad-hoc. On the contrary, they’re a defined part of a multi-channel campaign that covers many formats to appeal to investors’ tastes, and bring in traffic from as many sources as possible:
Outbound calling: having dedicated cold calling professionals and researchers can build brand awareness, set meetings, and drive further nurturing.
Email: a useful tool for reaching inboxes quickly and consistently with various content formats.
Digital ads: sponsored placements can reach specific audiences and create a buzz on social media alongside organic posts.
PR/Industry coverage: written pieces, comments, and advertising in trusted publications boost credibility in the financial space.
Thought leadership: opinions, market expertise and video interviews exist to educate first-time and existing investors.
Events: hosting roundtables and webinars can put faces to a fund and address specific painpoints, even more so through in-person conferences which funds can sponsor for greater awareness.
Word of mouth: recommendations are the ultimate form of marketing, where one great experience can have brilliant knock-on effects.
Using TOF Tactics to Fuel Discovery
As well as the above, the website is often an investor’s first TOF experience with a fund which must be designed well with UX consideration in mind: performant with quick page-loads, seamless to surf and optimised to inspire potential buyers to take actions that capture their data. Applying SEO strategies means you can be found through commonly searched keywords, and should be re-done every couple of years to stay on the Google homepage.
Through the website and other outreach channels, TOF methods are purposely non-salesy and conducted in a humanistic way to appeal to investors through brand psychology to create trust:
Be educational: people buy from people, and a fund’s portfolio managers are knowledgeable experts there to assist others’ financial goals. TOF is there to introduce investment trends, themes and concepts in clear ways that appeal to customers through a conversational ‘friendly face’. This could be guest blogs, or commentary videos.
Be memorable: by sending consistent messaging on accessible marketing platforms such as a website, social media profiles or a YouTube channel, your brand cuts through the noise of feeds and becomes ingrained over time effectively.
Address pain points: at this TOF stage, common investment challenges should be raised in order to cover how a fund could potentially help.
Tell stories: rather than hearing stone-cold facts and the hard sell, investors will connect with a fund that makes content that’s relatable to an investors’ own real life.
The Next Stages: The Marketing to Sales Hand-Off
TOF is ongoing. After all, every content piece that you distribute has the potential to grab eyes online and lead to investor research. But for those that do take that next step, it’s up to the marketing and sales tag-team to capitalise on the awareness effort TOF creates.
That means identifying the highest-quality leads through building consistent interactions. Being able to spot them amongst potentially thousands of ‘peripheral’ interests is all about delving into the metrics, with data that’s powerful to demonstrate where a marketer should concentrate their nurturing efforts.
The CRM is the perfect way to visualise those furthest along the sales funnel. By applying automation to segment their behaviours according by lead scores (points attributed to certain actions, including an event sign-up or filling in a form to download a report), demographics or geographies, this information informs which investment themes marketers can send next, or whether the ‘low hanging fruit’ contacts are already ready to be called up by investor relations.
Even the ‘cold leads’ – of which there may be many that cool off after the initial TOF stage – can be re-entered into stages of a GTM to see if they pick up renewed interest. Any new content that they have not seen (or not remembered seeing) could be the trick to get them back into the funnel. Not everyone will be active all the time, but that does not mean they should not be in the fund’s sights for an upsell.
When there’s been a closed deal, the tracked metrics to get there should be shared between marketers and salespeople. This closed-loop reporting examines the outreach team’s collective strong points. When that’s reiterated across different investor bases, it can achieve the same outcome and be ‘provable’ to the C-suite that ultimately wants to see how their investor-first teams contribute to AuM.
TOF may feel like playing a numbers game, yet with a consistent branded approach to outreach it grants the possibility of attracting more of an audience than expected. Utilising AI to collate their data in one place shows the quality of certain content or platforms (and where to improve), so that no interaction, no matter how small, gets missed. Every investor metric is vital to helping the conversion mission – showing that data analysis is the complementary piece sales and marketing need to bear fruit for all their hard work!
ProFundCom can assist fund marketing and sales teams appeal to, and identify, prospective investors with tools specific to the financial industry:
Lead Scoring and Qualification: Prioritise leads based on engagement levels and interactions through scoring and focus efforts on high-potential prospects.
Content Recommendations: Personalise content to website visitors based on their interests and engagement history to enhance user experience and increase lead conversion rates.
Website Analytics: Use analytical tools to provide insights into visitor behaviour, traffic sources, and conversion metrics.
Automated Lead Nurturing: Set up workflows to engage with leads at different stages of the customer journey, delivering targeted content, follow-up emails, and personalised messages to drive conversions.
Data Analytics and Reporting: Track the performance of lead generation campaigns, measure conversion rates, and analyse the effectiveness of their marketing strategies to monitor key metrics and optimise lead generation efforts for reliable results.
Cross-Selling Opportunities: ProFundCom’s reporting capabilities highlight cross-selling opportunities by identifying when a prospect shows interest in additional products or services.
