Frederik Bussler — December 29, 2019 The soul of marketing is sharing a unique value proposition to a detailed target audience, and this holds true for financial professionals. However, there’s one caveat: Finance is a uniquely difficult industry to stand out in due to the massive number of competitors, both legitimate and fraudulent.
When you’re in finance, wild claims are thrown all around, so if you claim that you offer “guaranteed returns” or “safe investments,” you’ll be seen as just another shady company, even if these are technically accurate in your offerings. In short, one-liners, cliches, and phrases will get financial and investment management marketers nowhere. You need a different playbook than the mass content strategy followed by the likes of Gary Vaynerchuck.
Quality, Not Quantity
“Quality over quantity” is more than a platitude in this space, as pumping out loads of content can actually serve to decrease your audience’s perception of you, firmly placing you in the “spam” bucket in consumers’ minds.
Check your email’s spam folder, and you’ll notice that a huge amount of it comes down to financial scams. If you use apps like Telegram, you’ll notice that almost all spammers are trying to peddle some financial product or service. In fact, messages about financial matters make up around 27% of the 14.5 billion spam emails sent every single day.
Differentiate Yourself
Another key tactic is product differentiation, as having a unique offering will help you stick in the minds of your audience, who are used to being bombarded with financial offerings.
Of course, this is easier said than done and requires you to actually have a unique offering, like a tokenized cryptocurrency fund or a highly niched offer like a solar energy infrastructure asset portfolio. If you’re offering something like a traditional, conservative portfolio, then be honest about that and focus on things like the aforementioned quality.
Let The Leaders Lead
Investors want to know that investment specialists have the needed expertise and can be trusted. After all, they’re risking potentially substantial amounts of their hard-earned money, and won’t fork it over easily.
A company’s founder is usually the first, best place to look for an ambassador for your project. The founder is deeply in sync with the firm and its story, and can share their experiences with the media. After all, storytelling is the future of marketing.
Lead With Transparency
We all know that trust is a digital currency, but how exactly can you build it? For investment managers, trust is created through transparency. This means complete transparency in your fees, real-time updates, as well as transparent communication.
You can see some examples with Nutmeg’s transparency in a fund hiccup, TransferWise’s transparency commitment, or Invictus Capital’s distributed-ledger transparency.
Offer The Best Rates You Can
When you’re looking to maximize revenue and cut costs, it’s best not to skimp on offering the lowest rates possible. A note of caution: Price competition often leads to a race to the bottom, squeezing out everyone’s margins. However, at a certain point, if your rates are too high, it doesn’t matter what your selling advantages are – investors will go elsewhere.
Conclusion
Clearly, marketing is a different ball-game for financial professionals and fund managers, but you can stand out from the crowd with quality, differentiation, leadership, transparency, and appealing rates.
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