Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their very own. (*5*)
As crucial audience for a lot of corporations, it is important that investors are smitten by the corporate’s marketing activities. Provided that different investors have various levels of promoting acumen and beliefs about effective marketing, your marketing team must customize the way it collaborates with investors on an individualized basis.(*5*)
That said, there are several tactics which are often effective in ensuring investor confidence in your marketing program.(*5*)
Related: 5 Suggestions for Customizing Your Pitch for Every Investor(*5*)
Research your markets and construct marketing around the outcomes
An intelligent marketing program begins with market intelligence. To exhibit to investors the strategies and execution your marketing team has put together will provide optimal results, quantitative and qualitative research creates a robust foundation.(*5*)
As well as to formal market research, the marketing team also needs to talk informally with goal customers, technology and distribution partners, media, industry analysts and market influencers to construct and repeatedly update its understanding of dynamics comparable to recent activities, trends and potential recent competitors.(*5*)
Involve your investors in marketing
Investors often have significant followings of their very own on social media and are sometimes considered thought leaders and industry experts within the enterprise capital and tech communities. These links can often provide significant advantages to your organization as you look to enter recent markets, attract talent, ink partnerships and pursue similar goals. A simple way to involve investors and tap into their networks is to include them in the corporate’s social media program to explore cross-promotion, especially on LinkedIn.(*5*)
One approach that will be effective is to ask investors to post on their social channels when the corporate proclaims or closes a funding round, senior executive appointment, product or related announcement. We regularly draft the posts for investors upfront to minimize their time commitment and to make sure the posting takes place.(*5*)
Many investors, especially VC and PE firms, have created marketing programs to highlight the businesses during which they’ve invested. Your marketing team should aggressively pursue these opportunities as they each function free publicity and deepen your ties to the investor.(*5*)
Related: Ask These 3 Questions to Determine Where to Spend Your Marketing Dollars(*5*)
Study competitors and discover best practices
To exhibit to investors that your marketing team is exploring all avenues to support the corporate’s growth, it should periodically undertake an intensive evaluation of competitors’ marketing activities in addition to general best practices. This review should include digging in to learn as many details as possible about competitors’ products, future product strategy, market expansion plans, et al — all by ethical means, in fact.(*5*)
The team also needs to study marketing approaches at corporations in other industries and consider applying relevant activities to your organization. Corporations in certain industries, comparable to food and beverage products, tend to be very sophisticated marketers since they’ve fierce competition and try to influence consumers who are sometimes fickle. Marketers in a big selection of industries can learn precious lessons from their peers at consumer product corporations after which report back findings to their investors.(*5*)
Measure ROI of all marketing activities
Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) and managing metrics on an ongoing basis provides a quantitative way to show investors each the effectiveness and the ROI of the marketing program. After all, some marketing elements, comparable to promoting and digital marketing, are much easier to quantify than activities like media relations.(*5*)
But even for activities which are less measurable when it comes to driving lead generation and sales, marketers should get creative and develop some sort of metrics. For instance, while it’s nearly unimaginable to prove that media coverage has driven sales, it is feasible to tie media coverage to increases in website and social media activity and exhibit a correlation.(*5*)
Related: 10 Things You Must Do Before Connecting With Investors(*5*)
Tie marketing to lead generation and never just brand awareness
Many investors think of promoting as more of a function to construct brand awareness than to generate leads and sales — however it does each. The extent of contribution to business development is determined by the services or products being sold. If a consumer is planning to buy a printer for his or her home, seeing a web-based ad with a reduction coupon or reading a positive review in reputable media can very possibly generate that sale. If a CIO is researching intrusion detection software for his or her cybersecurity stack to protect her company’s critical data assets, marketing may attract her interest and encourage her to contact the corporate, however it’s definitely not going to end in a sale.(*5*)
As with so many activities inside a business, demonstrating the effectiveness of your marketing program to investors will probably be much easier in case your marketing team plans ahead, gets the foundational research in place, measures their results and anticipates questions investors are likely to ask. Anticipating and addressing investor queries will facilitate working with them when difficult marketing situations arise.(*5*)