It’s not rocket science. Emerging growth companies and hedge/venture funds need to find investors. While there are many ways to do this, the process can be streamlined. Digital marketing is a great way to use analytics to identify potential investors. I will give you some of the big picture steps in this article. Then, I will lay out some of the details of each step over the next few weeks.
Over the past year, I have spent significant time at investor conferences like The Money Show in Florida or the Family Office Club meetings around the country in New York, Miami, and Dallas. A common theme I have seen is that companies and funds are seeking investor dollars, but they struggle to get their message in front of the right people. Then, once the game is afoot, fundraisers need to identify individuals most likely to invest in their projects. Digital marketing can help significantly with this process. The problem is that companies and fund managers don’t have the time nor the knowledge to implement a marketing campaign and extract the leads. However, if you can hire someone or designate a team member to focus on this strategy, you will be glad you did.
There are four main components to a marketing methodology that can lead to well-identified investor prospects. The first step is to establish an online presence with an active blog and social media pages. If people are going to invest in you, you can’t be a dud on the web. You have to have an active and engaging presence to have credibility today. It’s not hard to do, but there are some basic best practices you should know. We will discuss those in the weeks ahead.
Once you have an active blog and engaging social media pages going, you can put out regular emails educating people about your business or industry. This can occur without violating SEC regulations if you focus on a content marketing philosophy and don’t merely spam people by pitching your opportunity. You will build credibility and gain trust by educating people instead of consistently annoying people by sending out mini versions of your pitch deck.
Successful people have told me they don’t read emails. Therefore, they don’t believe that email marketing can help them find investors. I will be writing an article to address that issue specifically. That article will be titled: “They’re not weird, they’re just not like you!” Please don’t make the mistake of thinking certain marketing techniques can’t work because of your specific opinion of them. Not everybody holds the same view as you. Secondly, we already know most people are not going to respond to an email marketing campaign. Open rates are low. Click rates are low. However, if this is your focus, you are missing the point. Email marketing applied to this objective doesn’t attempt to get large numbers of opens and clicks.
The purpose of email marketing is to get your message in front of many people so you can identify just a few who are genuinely interested. The beauty of email marketing is that the analytics will help you identify the few good prospects in your database. It’s like pulling a needle out of the haystack with a magnet. Don’t make the mistake of discounting this essential and effective methodology just because you see some low open and click rates. One thousand interested people are still 1,000 interested people no matter how large your list is. If your list is 10,000 people, that’s a 10% rate of subject matter interest. If your list is 100,000 people, it’s only a 1% rate of subject matter interest. So what! You still have identified 1,000 interested people. Open and click rates don’t matter (except for deliverability reasons – that’s another topic). Finding interested people is what matters.
Stay tuned in the weeks ahead. We will be diving into these subjects in more depth, and I will lay out some of the specific best practices to make these concepts work for you.