Targeting your future investors and identifying your most useful access points.

*In an article about targeting it is obligatory to post a picture of an archery target. I’m getting it out of the way.*

The Raising Awareness Series

Stimulating interest beyond your immediate contacts.

Pitch decks, tear sheets and newsletters are probably the bones of your investor communications. I shall write endless articles about those in future, but for now, we are looking at accessing potential investors who aren’t on your mailing list. We are aiming to stimulate interest beyond your immediate contacts and grow your authority and profile in the wider industry. This will populate your future sales pipeline and set you up for long-term growth. The aim is to provide a consistent, valuable and relevant experience for potential investors so that you build trust and credibility over time.

Targeting

Whatever stage you’re at in your growth, I am going to assume you’ve already defined your target investor audience for at least the next six months of asset raising. You know that your fund will be appealing to x types of investors and that you need to reach out to a defined list of y individuals. Your salespeople should know this. If they’ve been around a while, some of them know it instinctually but couldn’t tell you why. Others will have detailed spreadsheets and dashboards - both methods are valid. This isn’t the targeting I’m talking about. I want you to focus one step removed.

To help your salespeople enrich their pipeline you need to create interest in the areas that influence your future potential investors. Not just the ones you’re targeting in the next six months, but those who will be interested one or two or even five years out. Your awareness goals and targets are longer-term and cast a wider net. You need to ask yourself who your investor targets could be in the next few years.

Don’t forget, you want your potential investors to self-select out as much as self-select in. In an ideal world, you should be able to get them to self-select out - for now - whilst maintaining a positive impression. Your ideal opt-out would be thinking:

“That’s an interesting, differentiated strategy and I’m impressed with the team. It doesn’t fit what I’m looking for now, but I’m going to flag it as a one to watch. If our allocations change, I want to look into this fund.”

That’s a massive win. You have reached platinum-level awareness. Get a badge. Have a trophy. All you have to do now is maintain timely and clear communication so that as soon as they change their allocation, you’re still on their mind. That’s the best way to stack your sales pipeline. (There will be many pieces on nurturing investor interest to come.)

Access

Ordinarily, most articles will now start talking about ‘crafting your value proposition’ and creating ‘core messages.’ I love all that schtick, it’s my bread and butter. You’re going to hear a lot about that from me in future! But for this particular type of awareness building, the channel through which you access your potential investors will influence what you’re telling them. To bastardise Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.”

You have eight channels to access your potential investors. Many of the channels are not direct and they require you to reformat your content to make it relevant and thus get the channel to pass the content on to your end targets - your potential investors. Each channel will have relevance to your potential investor at different stages of their awareness. Equally, you need to tailor your content to your channel - deep diving into complex strategy differentiators with a secondary connector will not be as effective as it will with strategy influencers because your Investors will not be expecting to have that level of conversation - it won’t resonate as much.

Using as many channels as you can increases the likelihood of your potential investor interacting with your messages. Increased interaction means increased awareness. Increased awareness makes your firm, fund and strategy automatically included in a group for consideration. Bingo! We’ve got them onto the next stage.

It’s also important to mention that different target investor types will naturally migrate to different channels. You should weigh your effort accordingly, for example if your focus is on growth for a mainstream UCITS strategy, socials, larger events and investment media may be more effective. If you’re looking to increase your segregated accounts for a relatively niche strategy, you should lean towards primary connectors, strategy influencers and self-created events.

Once you’ve pinned down which channels you’re going to use, you can define the tactics for each channel. This is key to making it easy to answer the question ‘Can I use this again?’ (see previous article for more on that question.)

I’m going to give you a quick overview of the channels here and will give each channel due attention in further articles:

1. Primary Connectors

These are always a key target for awareness building. They are the people and companies whose job it is to connect funds to potential investors. Primary connectors are all the cap intro teams - be they with your prime broker or not. Equally, they are third-party marketers, platform providers and incubator teams. They may also be contacts at groups that introduce a different sort of investment to potential investors. The clever ones gain authority by highlighting interesting funds that they have no financial interest in introducing. Equally, they’re aware that if they successfully send an investor your way, you may do more business with them. It is always a good idea to nurture and target as many primary connectors as possible.

2. Secondary Connectors

This group is underutilised by almost all firms and nurturing their interest should pay dividends. Secondary connectors are people and companies that connect with investors professionally, but not to introduce funds. It’s everything from fund lawyers and administrators to IT providers and events organisers. You have a lot of them in your network, they’ve been trying to sell you their services for years. Some of them are currently providing services for you. You can either communicate with them in bulk with more generic messages or sift through them and find a concentrated group of high-value secondary connectors. In an ideal world, you have both. However, be warned that incorrect messaging to the wider group can clog your email, phone and socials with return pitches for their services!

3. Strategy influencers

These are the people who are socially prominent in your chosen investment strategy and/or with whom you have a close relationship. Making this a conscious channel, rather than an ad hoc group, streamlines your communication about your fund and reduces the effort needed to keep them aware. You’re freed up to continue your high-value communication with them while not missing opportunities to promote what you’re doing. Some you will need to consciously cultivate while others will spring to mind immediately as someone you are happy to share with. Investors who are specialists in your strategy will be plugged into the same network. Many strategy-specific investors talk to the sell side at banks, have relationships with academics in your field and read the same reports you receive from the same sources. It is invaluable to have well-regarded individuals speak positively about you, your strategy and your team.

4. Industry Media

Investors have mixed feelings about industry media. I know some who read the industry news daily. While others claim that it’s a waste of eyeball juice and that they ‘always know the important news before it hits the rags.’ Industry media is useful for three reasons: 1) There is a lower barrier to entry for industry media than investment media in general. You can send them a press release about a new hire and it’ll probably get into a news roundup. 2) tech-savvy and more sophisticated investors have bots scrape sites for news about the funds in their databases. Getting published puts you in their feed. 3) Anything published by third parties is compliance clean fodder for your socials (more below).

5. Media Forward Companies

This is a separate group of companies that are also likely to be strategy influencers, secondary connectors or in some cases primary connectors. They are companies that have an advanced educational content strategy and have embraced the maxim ‘every company is a media company.’ We can argue about if that’s relevant or necessary for B2B strategies at another time, right now, they’re useful to you. These companies have podcasts, webinars, interview series, and guest spots for articles etc. They have a strong social media strategy and presence, and will create and disseminate content for you! What a win! All you need to do is amplify their reach by intelligently reposting their hard work. Particularly in B2B it can be tough to find new things to talk about, so presenting media forward companies with a solution gets you exposure. You need to nurture this group so you can target them with outcome-specific requests - ie ‘I know A at B, I want to be on their podcast to talk about X. Let’s put together a media pitch.’

6. Social Media

I get it, it’s compliantly fraught. I can see why many funds chose not to use social media. However, it is one of the few forms of direct contact to generate awareness. There is no filter. There are edge cases for Instagram (do you have a foundation associated with your firm that sponsors artists? Great, get an Insta). If you’re a crypto fund, there’s an argument for Twitter, urgh X (but it’s getting quieter by the day). Currently, I can’t see the point of using TikTok, telegram groups, Discord servers, Facebook, Bluesky or Mastadon. They come with so many compliance headaches that it’s too complex to create valuable content. (You can create rubbish content that won’t resonate with the audience, but I don’t know why you’d bother.) I’m open to using them if there’s a use case!

For now, it’s easier (and safer) to use LinkedIn and forget the rest. I’ve read an unverified stat that says only about 60% of hedge fund managers have a company profile on LinkedIn. Even if the stat is wildly out, you can be sure that a much smaller portion is posting, never mind about posting regularly. Using this channel puts you ahead of the pack. Don’t forget, bored investors are just as likely as anyone else to trawl LinkedIn pretending to themselves that it’s work (if you don’t you’re winning the social media war, have a gamified, AI-generated star).

7. Investment Media

Cultivating this channel can be arduous without dedicated resources or outsourced PR. However, if you’re cultivating media-forward companies, industry media and socials, your path to getting published will be smoother. Equally, if you want to be featured in investment media, you can make that goal (subtly) part of your industry influencer strategy. Investment media players are swayed by awareness work as much as potential investors. And let’s not pretend otherwise, potential investors are more swayed by a piece about you in the FT than a mention in Hedgeweek Talent Tracker. It gives good scrape and SEO! Leveraging the investment media (and mainstream financial-focused sections) is worth it, but has a long path to success. If you want continuous exposure, jump the queue and hire an agency. The same goes for firms who know they will have continuous exposure and want to manage it - hiring an agency or dedicated in-house talent is the simplest solution. For everyone else, it’s about making sure you’re tracking, engaging and cultivating a good number of individuals who write both freelance and on staff. It will pay dividends in the end.

8. Events

On its face, this seems a different beast from the other channels, but it’s less different than you think. There are a variety of different events that target disparate audiences that you want to get in front of. Equally, attendance can be useful for creating content for other channels. The messages for events still need to be created and have a vehicle to disseminate them (you). The process for getting the most out of an event is almost event-agnostic. It’s formulaic and effective. An event strategy as part of your awareness building is essential - especially as you’re probably attending the events anyway. Self-created events (like a roundtable or talk on a relevant industry topic) are useful for engagement further down your funnel and are a fantastic space for creating awareness content for your other channels - not least because you have your captured target right in front of you asking you relevant questions! It’s difficult to get investors to open up about their pain points - a targeted event is gold for this kind of investor feedback.

A quick and dirty example - a new hire

The above is a bit theoretical, I’m going to take a universal occurrence to make the idea concrete. Let’s go for a new hire - the most common and pedestrian piece of news. The Social Media activity is higher in this example than I would expect for other forms of content. A new hire is a natural fit for Social Media, where personal stories do well.

As part of a comprehensive strategy, a new hire adds to the number of possible touchpoints your targets will have with your firm. You should have a well-worn content plan that swings into action. It’s so basic, that a new hire almost falls outside of your content pillars. It’s an evergreen content staple, with varying content!

This example is to demonstrate how you can repurpose content for your various channels, with little effort, to maximise impact. It doesn’t demonstrate the intricacies of precise messaging for a targeted growth outcome.

Within the first month:

You need a bio and photo for your website. Yes, you do. Don’t hire someone you wouldn’t be proud to have on your website. If you have nothing on your website, we need to have a larger conversation.
If it is a high-profile hire, repurpose the bio into a press release for your investment media contacts. Include the photo, quotes and what they will be doing at your firm (you’d be surprised how often this is forgotten!) Include recent and interesting information about your fund and firm at a relatively high level. Link to your further standard key messages and/or your media pack.
Repurpose the above press release for a press release for your industry media contacts. Include all of the above but be more granular on your fund and firm information.
Repurpose the industry press release into an email blast for your primary connectors. Include something interesting about the person and the skills they bring. Never forget to link to the key messaging of your fund, strategy and team - never forget.
If the hire is on the investment team, repurpose the email blast for strategy influencers, highlighting the skills they bring and something from their past that sparks interest. You may want to split it into two groups, one an announcement email, and another more of an introduction, for those people who may later interact with the new hire. (link to key messaging info)
If the hire is from the rest of your team, repurpose for secondary connectors (for example, all the administrators and PB contacts for an operations hire) also include skills and an interesting story. If relevant split the groups again, for this channel, I would lean more towards the introductory message, even if it’s unlikely they will actually work with them. (link to key messaging info)
Post it on your company’s social media. Repurpose any of the relevant information from the above activity. Include the photo in a media-appropriate frame that conforms with your brand. Do not be ‘delighted to announce’ NEVER be ‘delighted to announce….’ Instead, introduce the new hire and how they will be relevant to at least one of your key messages.
Get the new hire to repost the announcement with a comment and update their profile with the relevant firm messaging.
Get all the senior members of your team to repost the announcement with a relevant comment. Again, no delight, key messages.
The CEO and CIO should create their own posts introducing the new team member (your social media manager does your posting for you. If they forget the key messages… ouff)
Use the repurposed social media card to announce the new hire in your monthly newsletter.
Later, repost to your socials all the industry media mentions of the hire (they like that and will be more likely to publish your stories in the future)

Ongoing content:

As part of their onboarding:

Get your new hire up to speed on the ‘can I use this again?’ mantra and start suggesting more content that can be repurposed for your channels.
Explain your growth strategy and ask them to add people to your channels - but only if adding them will bring value to the recipients (it’s also an opportunity for them to reach out one-to-one).
Work with your new hire to see what they are comfortable contributing and create a content plan just for them.
Make sure they are also subscribed to receive information for channels that are relevant to their role.
Get them on the newsletter lists! (Do you know how many funds forget to add their teams to their newsletter lists? My goodness.)

Lean into the formulaic nature of a new hire: Consider a content series, ‘My first 90 days - what I learned,’ ‘Six months at xxx fund has taught me…’ I’m celebrating one year at xxx, how things have changed’ This stuff is social media schlock but is easy to plan, and if done well can be great for awareness. It shows prospective investors that your company isn’t a living hell to be involved with (low bar). It’s also gold for attracting new hires. This is also good content for media forward companies, it’s not too controversial and it’s useful to help them plan ahead - great if you can get a podcast or video interview out of it as the repurposing opportunities there are much higher. Sometimes you can get feature pieces in industry media covering the same content. But it won’t work every time.

That’s a lot of targeted and valuable content for your channels! …. Valuable? What’s valuable about a new hire to those channels? Good question! For the media channels, the value is obvious, they have to publish stuff. If you write something interesting enough about your new hire, they’ll publish it because it’s easy and they don’t need to do extra work - value.

The other channels are a little more nuanced. Firstly, don’t underestimate the value of an information exchange. “I heard x is moving to y” Okay, okay, it’s gossip! People love to be first with information and they enjoy being in the loop. Dry ‘we’re delighted to announce’ is not valuable. An introduction to a new person or a new dimension to a familiar person is valuable. You add the extra value by including an interesting story and describing what the new hire will be doing. You should also be encouraging your channels to share the information (sometimes by asking them not to!) A new hire announcement is a difficult example to tack on a clear call-to-action, but if you can do it, you are acing your communication game.

The social media activity is simple. LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards interaction by increasing the number of feeds it pushes your post to - therefore increasing your impressions and reach. New hire and new job posts have naturally high engagement rates - people like congratulating! Equally, if you make these posts even mildly less generic, the engagement significantly increases. Thus promoting your post further and getting in front of more of your target investors.

So there you have it! Targeting and channels. Now you know your channels, you can decide which ones are right for you and start building them!

The next in the series will deep dive into a channel and cover messaging, timing, the best ways to penetrate and more. (Follow us on LinkedIn for alerts to new content in your feed. Sign up to our newsletter in the footer for monthly-ish summaries and roundups.)

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More in the Series

Yellow Bricks Articles Unfiltered

Raising awareness part 1: “Can I use this again?”

It's more like launching a balloon than a rocket. The first in a series on generating awareness of your fund to stimulate growth. Advanced tactics to help you understand the investor journey, target your future investors and build your sales pipeline.

Raising awareness part 2: Targeting and channels