Introduction

After more than fifteen years working in marketing teams at B2B investment managers, it's become clear to me that these teams haven't adapted their strategies and tactics (when they have them) to fit the industry — which helps explain their lacklustre performance.

This guide aims to address this by adopting and refining the inbound marketing methodology, in which:

• The target audience is drawn in organically with valuable content
• Website visitors are converted into subscribers and nurtured through the "buyer's journey" with personalised emails
• Customers are provided with tailored support post-purchase

Why inbound marketing needs adapting

Typically, inbound marketing is split into the three stages mentioned above, with prospects moving through each stage linearly.

For the third stage, the marketing team needs to know if the subscribers in their marketing database are prospects or customers, so they can be targeted appropriately. This should be relatively straightforward for most businesses — including investment managers selling products directly to retail investors via their website.

However, information about who holds investments in a B2B manager's products isn't usually available to marketing, and a key segment of their target audience (such as fund selectors and manager research analysts) don't hold investments anyway, as their role only involves research.

While this means that subscribers can't be identified as prospects or customers by the marketing team, there's another issue: even if they could, there isn't much segment-specific content available to use for inbound marketing, because:

• Investment products don't need to be assessed through usage or experience — which negates the need for case studies, testimonials, demos, or user guides
• Non-product content (such as commentary on interest rates or inflation) tends to be relevant for both segments, influencing new investments as well as modifications to existing holdings

Adapting the inbound marketing approach

To adapt inbound marketing for B2B investment managers, communications won't target prospects or customers specifically, and will purely be based on subscription preferences (i.e., what each contact has expressed an interest in).

Additionally, information about the digital behaviour of subscribers (who are being tracked by the marketing automation system) will be routed to their assigned salesperson — who will know where they sit in the sales process — instead of being used to influence marketing activity.

Overall, the focus for marketing shifts to sales enablement:

• Help attract new audiences
• Convert visitors into subscribers so their digital activity can be tracked
• Nurture subscribers with content based on their individual subscription preferences to increase overall digital activity
• Provide salespeople with information about the digital activity of subscribers they are assigned to, which they can choose to follow up on when they feel it's appropriate

This is a much better fit for an relationship-driven industry in which salespeople are ultimately responsible for revenue.