Introduction

After more than a decade working as a digital marketer in the B2B investment management industry, I’ve come to believe that marketing teams can play a far greater role in their firm’s success.

There's a fundamental reason for their lacklustre performance: they haven’t tailored their approach (when they have one) to the industry.

This guide offers a practical solution by adapting a widely used methodology known as inbound marketing, 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

Inbound marketing requires contacts in the marketing database to be segmented based on product ownership, which allows the two main segments (prospects and customers) to be targeted appropriately.

For most firms, including investment managers that sell their products directly to retail investors, this is relatively straightforward. However, it’s often not possible for B2B managers, for two reasons:

• Lack of data — sales might occur offline or through third-party online platforms, so there is often a lack of consistent or reliable transaction and holdings data available to marketing
• Unconventional customers — an important segment of the target audience (known as gatekeepers) research products without investing money themselves (e.g., fund selectors or manager research analysts)

Furthermore, there’s no need for many types of marketing collateral (including case studies, testimonials, demos, or user guides) because the value-proposition of investment products can be determined through data and analysis alone — there’s no need to use or experience them. This leaves the marketing team without segment-specific content they could use for inbound marketing.

Adapting the inbound marketing approach

Given that customers can’t be identified, marketing communications must be primarily driven (and constrained) by the subscription preferences of individual contacts (i.e., what they have explicitly expressed an interest in).

Additionally, information about the digital behaviour of subscribers — who are being tracked by the marketing automation system — that might be used to trigger marketing activity should be routed to the sales team instead, who will know where each contact sits in the sales process.

Overall, the focus for marketing shifts to sales enablement, in which they:

• Attract new contacts
• Nurture existing contacts with interest-based content
• Equip salespeople with information about the digital behaviour of contacts to help them nurture relationships offline

This redefined focus is a much better fit for a relationship-driven industry in which salespeople are ultimately responsible for revenue.