Introduction

From my time as a digital marketer in the B2B investment management industry, I’ve noticed several important issues with how digital marketing — and marketing more generally — is attempted. This guide is my attempt at a solution.

What is B2B investment management?

Firms that perform investment management services devise investment strategies and manage investment products on behalf of investors.

Some investment managers sell their products directly to retail investors (non-professionals) — who are usually able to purchase them through the firm's website — while others focus solely on business-to-business (B2B) relationships. Some firms focus on both.

Salespeople at B2B-focused investment managers are tasked with developing relationships with, and winning business from, investment professionals at other organisations — such as financial advisors, fund selectors, or investment consultants — who can allocate money, either directly or indirectly, into the firm's products.

Marketing issues

One of the main reasons for writing this guide was to help combat several issues (which I noticed at every marketing team I worked for):

• Lack of industry knowledge. Marketers tend to have a very poor understanding of even the basics of investment management. In many cases, they have no idea about what their firm does or who their target audience is.
• Lack of digital marketing knowledge. In addition to a poor level of technical skill (such as coding), there is an important lack of basic common sense around how digital marketing works. This deficiency make marketers insecure, keen to impress, and uncomfortable with simplicity — so they buy impressive-sounding and expensive software with no understanding of how it works, how it will be maintained, or how the huge amounts of data they can generate will be used. Additionally, multiple agencies are often paid large sums of money to perform basic tasks that should be done internally.
• No direction or strategy. Marketers rarely have any long-term strategy in place and are constantly distracted by a mishmash of unfocused projects and tasks, often started prematurely. Additionally, each poorly-completed or abandoned project adds more mess and unnecessary complexity to existing systems, data, and processes.
• Poor time management. There is a growing trend, in the digital age, of being constantly busy. A culture of back-to-back meetings, overflowing email inboxes, and cluttered desktops stifles independent thought and ability to effect change.

Some examples of how these issues can play out in the real world include:

• At one firm I joined, the marketing team boasted that they had a data lake. I was shocked — they could barely upload a PDF to the website. However, it soon became clear that it wasn't actually used for anything, was only updated via an occasional manual spreadsheet upload, and was costing the firm a small fortune.
• I was once asked to collect registrants of a third-party webinar as leads, which would have to be manually uploaded to the marketing automation system. At that point, however, we didn't collect leads ourselves, or have a process to assign them to a salesperson — so they would just sit in our database, untouched.
• At another firm, the marketing team sent an email to prospects about a report they had produced (I forget what the report was about). The email directed recipients to a landing page which required them to submit their personal details in a form to download the report — even though they were already in the firm's database.

Capable and enthusiastic marketers can quickly end up frustrated, disillusioned and demotivated — in an industry where the value of marketing is already being questioned.

A potential solution

This guide suggests a method for creating and implementing a digital marketing strategy for a B2B investment manager, with some important characteristics:

• Built step-by-step. Rather than jumping from project to project, the strategy is built up through a series of steps, and each step is only started once the previous step has been fully completed. Once built, any future projects should be "bolted on" to the framework as much as possible.
• Focus on simplicity. Unnecessary complexity, external marketing agencies, and expensive software will be avoided (you will discover that you can do much more with less). Additional complexity or costs will only be added if they make sense, and only once the basics are in place.
• Properly prepared. We will perform important research on key aspects of our firm — what it does, products it offers, and its target audience — before jumping into the implementation of the strategy.
• Organic focus. Organic and free digital channels — such as organic search, email, and social media — will be prioritised over paid advertising.

I believe that implementing the strategy will lead to positive outcomes for your firm: happier colleagues, better relations between marketing and sales teams, and an improved reputation with clients and prospects. And by eliminating a lot of agency, advertising, and software costs, it can also significantly reduce marketing spend — with any cost savings ideally passed on to the firm's clients through lower product fees.

Challenges

Implementing the strategy won't be easy — especially if you are a new hire. Any systems and processes you inherit will likely have flaws that have built up over the years, and colleagues will want to operate the same way they always have (which usually means haphazardly starting and abandoning projects and tasks). You can quickly become consumed by it all — and then nothing changes.

After struggling with these same challenges across several jobs, which occured over a couple of years following the COVID pandemic, I realised that to break the cycle I would need to present a long-term plan to my next boss that would be unaffected by the short-term whims of colleagues. I figured that if my manager was convinced of its potential benefits, they could help pause some of the distractions and give me the necessary space to put the long-term plan in place. Hopefully, you can use the guide in a similar way.

Lewisham Asset Management

To be able to explain and demonstrate various concepts and examples throughout the guide, I will use a fictional B2B investment management firm, called Lewisham Asset Management (or "Lewisham" for short).

Who is this guide for?

This guide is primarily aimed at digital marketing professionals who work at B2B investment managers, but could also be of interest to members of the wider marketing team, students, and professionals in similar industries.

What tools and software are required?

To implement the strategy, you will need a website — with the ability to publish content — and tools for marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM) and online document storage.

Within the guide, I use Pardot for marketing automation (renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in April 2022) and the Salesforce CRM system. Other systems will work differently, but the basic principles are the same.