Asset managers are looking to content marketing strategies to build relationships with investors. Many are increasing their marketing budget with an increasing focus on content marketing activity, but what does content marketing look like for asset managers in the hedge fund industry?

In finance, it’s difficult to differentiate your brand amongst the competition. Many come up with a series of unique values and use content marketing as a vehicle to set themselves apart in the way they convey their values. Instead of telling your investors how trustworthy and insightful your firm is, good content marketing can demonstrate them through valuable thought leadership content.

Asset management thought leadership

Today’s investors engage less with traditional content like fund fact sheets and corporate brochures. Instead, they want to research broader topics and hear viewpoints on asset classes, market sectors and risk management strategies. As seen in marketing teams from multiple sectors, the focus has shifted from a sales lead conversation to a customer-orientated one.

Creating thought-leadership content is just one of several key steps asset managers must take to take to succeed with their marketing strategy. Developing materials that help to elevate conversations should also be considered. These could include case studies, how-to-guides, interviews and opinion surveys from others in the hedge fund industry.

Looking for inspiration? Check out these examples:

  • Goldman Sachs uses video to cover capital and money markets, but also tangential topics such as ‘citizenship’ and ‘progress’.
  • Schroders produces a regular infographic that summarises market activity from the month before.
  • M&G Investments does a great job of conveying the voice of its advisors in its Bond Vigilantes series.

Content distribution strategies

There’s more to content marketing than just the content. Successful content marketing strategies depend on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Building an audience on these platforms can take time, so it’s also worth considering other channels, such as an email newsletter, presenting at conferences, trade publications, or by encouraging employees to share content amongst their network.

To refine your content distribution, it’s important that you build in monitoring tools to understand how investors are interacting with content. Another obvious, but overlooked way of collecting feedback is to ask your employees and your audience when you meet them in person about the content they’re interested in.

Create an editorial calendar

The foundation of any content marketing plan is an editorial calendar, which states what will be said, where and when. There are plenty of calendar templates available as a starting point, however some of the headings you may want to consider for your plan include:

  • Topic synopsis – What is the title and key message
  • Date of publication – or date to submit to a third party
  • Channel – Where will the content be distributed
  • Format – White paper, blog post, article, video, podcast, webinar, etc.
  • Production status – Complete, awaiting review, etc
  • Authour/ owner – Who is responsible for the delivery of the content.

Summary

Content marketing and social media are great ways for asset managers to develop stronger, more active relationships. Through more frequent and value-added interactions with clients, asset managers can build trust with investors and stay top of mind with them.

By rejecting self-promotion in favour of genuinely customer-centric and insightful content, asset managers can better understand what value they can provide to the very people their business depends – their clients.

For today’s digital marketer, the tactics and use of technology is a key consideration, which is why we developed FundPortal as a bespoke CRM, fund analysis and marketing platform for hedge fund managers. You can head over here to read more about FundPortal, the document portal solution from Edgefolio. If you would like to find out more or request a tour of the tool, feel free to contact us.

Sign up to our newsletter for further updates from the Edgefolio blog.