Marketing Materials

The most important marketing content produced by investment managers is the suite of materials that support the firm’s products and strategies.

Although these materials — mostly PDFs — might seem somewhat old-fashioned, they largely deliver what the firm’s audience needs to assess investments.

Because they are so central — used in campaigns, on the website, and directly by salespeople — the sales team should have full visibility into what’s available and be notified of any downloads by contacts who are being tracked by the marketing automation system.

In this chapter, we collate marketing materials, set up download tracking, and create an internal library to support both marketing and sales.

Collating materials

The first step is to identify the types of documents created for each product and strategy. Common examples include:

• Factsheets — periodic updates (monthly or quarterly) on performance and holdings
• Pitchbooks/presentations — in-depth documents covering investment philosophy, process, performance, and rationale
• Flyers — shorter summaries (1–2 pages), often drawn from pitchbooks
• Commentaries — periodic insights (monthly, quarterly, annually) on performance, attribution, portfolio changes, and outlook

Most documents are produced one-to-one — a version for each product or strategy. For pooled funds, however, some documents (e.g., factsheets) are often created at the share class level.

Resource constraints may mean not every product has a full set of documents. It’s therefore useful to create a matrix showing which documents exist for each product or strategy, like the example below:

Fund name	Factsheet	Flyer	Pitchbook	Commentary
Global Equity Fund
US Equity Fund
Global Bond Fund

Once product and strategy materials have been mapped, identify any other key documents, such as:

• Firm factsheets
• Corporate presentations
• Fund range brochures

For all materials, include multilingual versions where applicable.

Setting up download tracking

With all materials identified, the next step is to ensure sure any downloads can be tracked by the marketing automation system and attributed to tracked contacts — otherwise, they remain anonymous.

Document hosting

Documents are typically hosted in a document management system (DMS) or externally (e.g., when factsheet production is outsourced). If they are hosted directly in the marketing automation platform, tracking is usually built-in and this step can be skipped.

For document hosting, there is one requirement: each document should be available on a static, publicly available URL that always points to the latest version of the document.

Redirect URLs

Next, redirect URLs need to be added in the marketing automation platform for each document. These links silently forward to the original document URL but allow downloads to be tracked and attributed to individual contacts.

Redirect links also offer a chance to create cleaner, more intuitive URLs:

Original URL:

Redirect URL:

Once redirect links are created, replace all original document links on the public website with their redirect equivalents.

Creating an internal document library

With materials collated and tracking in place, the final step is to create an internal document library that houses all marketing documents on a single page.

The purpose is to allow sales (and other teams) to easily find and share materials — using tracked links rather than sending files directly.

This page should:

• Display all available marketing documents in a clear, structured format
• Use redirect URLs (not original links)
• Be hosted either in the marketing automation system, website CMS, or on the intranet

Once live, the page can be shared across the firm and colleagues encouraged to bookmark it.