Introduction

After more than fifteen years working in marketing teams at B2B investment managers, it's become clear to me that these teams haven't adapted their strategies and tactics (when they have them) to fit the industry — which helps explain their lacklustre performance.

To help address this oversight, this guide refines the popular inbound marketing methodology, which broadly involves:

• Drawing in the target audience organically with valuable content
• Converting website visitors into subscribers
• Nurturing prospects and customers with tailored emails

Why inbound marketing needs adapting

For teams to be able to "do" inbound marketing, they need to know whether each contact in the marketing automation system is a prospect or a customer, so each segment can be targeted appropriately.

For most firms — including investment managers that sell products directly to retail investors via their website — this is relatively straightforward.

But for B2B managers, sales can occur offline or through third-party online platforms, which means transaction or holdings data usually isn't held in the contact database. Furthermore, a key segment of the target audience (including fund selectors and manager research analysts) don't hold investments, as they only perform research. As a result, the marketing team can't distinguish between prospects and customers.

Even if this segmentation were possible, there isn't much segment-specific content available to use for inbound marketing anyway, because:

• Investment products don't need to be assessed through usage or experience — which negates the need for case studies, testimonials, demos, or user guides
• Non-product content (such as commentary on interest rates or inflation) tends to be relevant for both segments, as it can influence decisions to make new investments as well as modifying allocations to existing holdings

Adapting the inbound marketing approach

Given that customers can't be identified, communications will purely be based on subscription preferences (i.e., what each contact has expressed an interest in) and won't target prospects or customers specifically.

Additionally, information about the digital behaviour of subscribers (who are being tracked by the marketing automation system) will be routed to their assigned salesperson — who will know where they sit in the sales process — instead of being used to influence marketing activity.

Overall, the focus for marketing shifts to sales enablement:

• Help attract new audiences
• Nurture the contact database with content based on individual subscription preferences
• Provide salespeople with information about the digital activity of subscribers to help them nurture relationships offline

This is a much better fit for an industry that is heavily relationship-driven, and in which salespeople are ultimately responsible for revenue.