Delio Roundtable: Discussing investor engagement strategies

Given the current climate of economic, political and societal instability, maintaining and building relationships with your investors is perhaps more important than ever before. 

But this is easier said than done, particularly given the volume of messages, product promotions and general ‘noise’ that they are exposed to on a daily basis. With this in mind, we brought a group of Delio’s clients together in our latest digital roundtable to discuss their investor engagement strategies and what tactics they are finding helps to keep them ‘top of mind’ with clients. 

Delio’s chief marketing officer, Sam Roberts, led the discussion and shared some of his own communications and engagement strategies from a 20 year career in marketing. 

How can you build an investor base on and off your Delio platform?

The discussion kicked off with a fundamental challenge facing any firm operating in private markets; how do I build my audience of potential investors? Sam opened up the session by sharing some of the ways that Delio clients have successfully engaged existing and new pools of investors, often at very little or no expense:

• Use your network and the ‘network of your network’ – For many firms, the ‘little black book’ of contacts held by your management team will be a rich source of valuable contacts. The power of existing relationships is often overlooked, so make sure you’re reaching out to your network on a regular basis and don’t be afraid to ask for referrals or ‘second connections’ to people that may be interested in your offering.
• Use free social media tools – Sam explained that organic social media offers a cheap and effective way of building an investor audience that you can engage with on a regular basis. Paid tools, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, enables you to target individuals based on highly targeted criteria, to ensure that you build a pool of potential investors that is relevant to your proposition or area of expertise.
• Build your personal brand – Having built your audience, it’s just as important to engage with them. This can be done through sharing educational content that adds value to your audience on a consistent basis; however, it’s important to resist the ‘hard sales pitch’ too soon after establishing a relationship with them.
• Repurpose other people’s content – Several members of the discussion argued that they often don’t have the time to write their own content, blogs or newsletters. Sam explained that repurposing third-party content, such as industry research or opinion pieces, can be a quick and effective way to share information while adding your own commentary or opinions.

Tips for presenting deals on your Delio Core platform

As members of the roundtable were all existing Delio clients, they had first-hand experience of how using their white-labelled platform was key to driving better client engagement with their respective investment opportunities. This part of the discussion focussed on how they could optimise the presentation of their deals by configuring information in the most appealing way possible.

Through the group’s discussion, we concluded the five following points were the most important for firms to consider:

• Ensure that your platform is an interesting and enticing online destination for investors – update news and events regularly and populate your deals before inviting clients to onboard.
• Configure your deals so that they are categorised appropriately as this will enable investors to filter opportunities that are most appropriate to them and deliver a more personalised experience.
• Keep your deal summaries short, snappy and concise so that investors can assess the opportunity quickly. Upload more detailed information into the main body content of the deal and use videos, images and other multimedia to help bring the deal to life and cater for investors that digest information visually
• Take proactive steps to drive traffic to your platform such as email outreach, regular content updates and social media posts. 
• Tailor your homepage by adding a bespoke banner message and selecting your preferred layout based upon the information that’s most important to your clients. 

A member of the group raised a question around the importance of personalising the investor experience. Sam pointed out that personalisation has been a hot topic across marketing for several years, and that a ‘spray and pray’ approach to communication is widely seen as a redundant strategy that is likely to lower engagement and potentially even result in clients unsubscribing from your communications. 

He went on to explain that while it’s virtually impossible to cater for every specific client, taking steps to ensure that investor preferences and thematic interests are captured as part of a client’s onboarding to the Delio Core platform will mean that the deals that are presented to them will be aligned to their profile. Small steps such as these will help to personalise their experience, increase their engagement and help to generate return visits to the platform on a regular basis.

Is email marketing out-dated or a core part of your client engagement strategy?

As most members of the group were non-marketers by profession, it was interesting to gauge opinions on the role of email marketing as part of their client engagement strategy.

Several contributors said that they considered email marketing to be an ‘old fashioned’ method of communication, with some saying that WhatsApp or social media channels were their most commonly used channels for communicating with clients. Others reported that they still consider email to be the ‘professional’ way of sharing information in a business environment.

While there is no right or wrong answer regarding the role of email, Sam argued that it should still be considered as part of your client engagement strategy given it offers a cheap, effective and consistent way of keeping your brand in front of clients. He also reminded the group that it is vitally important to prompt clients to visit their Delio platform and that well constructed emails or e-newsletters are a great way of achieving this. 

There are also some key considerations that firms must remember when planning an email strategy. This includes:

• Frequency of emails – Resist the urge to spam investors, but don’t leave long gaps between emails.
• Build a consistent routine – Test different times and days to identify when your clients are most receptive to emails, and try to find a ‘slot’ that becomes your regular distribution time.
• Make your content short and snappy – Use emails as a way of ‘teasing’ information that is hosted on your website or platform and driving traffic to these pages.
• Consider your email formatting – Make sure that you use images and content appropriately, particularly if investors are likely to be viewing emails on mobile devices.

Thank you to all of the contributors in our latest digital roundtable event. For more information on how Delio Core can power your private markets engagement strategy, get in touch or request a personalised demo today.