Your hedge fund asset raising requires two marketing plans (Part 2 of 2)

Winning over sophisticated institutional investors to your investment strategy requires creating and managing your marketing effort the right way. Outmarketing competitors, turning prospects into clients quicker, and attracting more sticky assets actually necessitates an investment firm's executive team to produce and oversee two marketing efforts, not one. And this requires having two distinct marketing plans.

There are two parts to marketing a hedge fund's investment products to sophisticated institutional investors: sales marketing and communications marketing. Sales marketing is the process of selling to these prospects and their advisors. But what is it that the prospects are told? That's the job of communications marketing.

In our article last month, we offered insights and tips for building or refining your money management firm's sales marketing plan. Now, let's turn our attention to the communications marketing plan.

If you lack a written communications marketing plan you lack a playbook, and the content, for arming your sales marketing staff with the tools they need to tell and sell the firm's story throughout the selling cycle to raise assets from sophisticated institutional investors such as family offices, endowments and foundations, institutional plan sponsors and the investment consultant gatekeepers

Important as this is, over the past three decades our financial communications and sales marketing consulting firm has observed that the majority of hedge fund firms it has come across, no matter their size, seem to be operating without any communications marketing plan of action. While investment management firms may take the occasional communications marketing related step every once in a while, in support of their sales marketing efforts, there often is no full plan of action. Also, many lack the full arsenal of content l......................

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This article was published in Opalesque's New Managers a top-down monthly analysis, news and research publication on the global emerging manager space.