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 fundmental reason for their lacklustre performance: digital marketing teams haven’t tailored their approach (when they have one) to the numerous peculiarities of 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 by publishing valuable content
• Convincing website visitors to subscribe to receive tailord communications
• Supporting customers post-purchase

Why inbound marketing needs adapting

Inbound marketing requires contacts in the marketing database to be segmented based on product ownership, so each segment can be targeted appropriately.

For most firms, this is straightforward, including investment managers that sell their products directly to retail investors. 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 efforts must be primarily driven (and constrained) by the subscription preferences of individual contacts.

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.