Many of the firms we work with saw 2020 as a year of reckoning for their marketing strategies. Disruption from COVID forced M&A and corporate access professionals to rethink their approach.
What are the risks, and where are the major opportunities to holding events online and launching digital marketing strategies? Can information be securely shared and relationships effectively built on an all-digital platform?
The answer is yes, yes, and yes. With the right tools and technology, investment banks can embrace the power of digital marketing. Here’s how.
4 digital marketing tactics investment banks should focus on
Let’s look at some of the tactics that investment bankers used in the past year, and why it’s important to continue building digital-first relationships as the industry continues to change:
1. A solid social media strategy to drive awareness
Social media as a channel isn’t new, even for financial services. But what’s changing is that followers expect a level of engagement and interest from the brand that didn’t exist before. They’re willing to engage with you, so engage with them.
Social media platforms give your brand the main stage and provide a space to engage with clients and referral partners directly. A nimble social strategy can help pick up deal volumes and source new leads from non-traditional channels. To make social media work, you’ll need technology like progressive landing pages for industries or transaction types, social posting and advertising, and chatbot experiences for more easily scheduling prospect meetings.
2. A targeted account-based strategy to generate deal interest
Pair a social media-driven awareness strategy with an account-based model for bottom-of-funnel dealmaking. Investing in targeting industry and content marketing programs deliver an exceptional client experience that feels personalized and unique — at scale.
By building multi-touch nurture campaigns with marketing automation tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot, you can deepen engagement and offer additional value to your clients and prospects. This captures attention not only for research notes and formal publications through tools like BlueMatrix, but also markets to a captive channel about successful deals and tombstones.
This content doesn’t have to be limited to the written word. Experiment with multimedia content strategies like video channels and podcasts in which their bankers share valuable market advice.
By leveraging intelligent marketing automation tools to distribute these high-value content pieces to their audiences, banks can collect far greater data about client and prospect engagement, including a deeper understanding of who is actively engaging with them on social, on webinars and analyst calls, and more. For example, event engagement data from systems like MeetMax, CVent, and Zoom is layered into Salesforce so that a banker can quickly and easily tap into 360-degree relationship insights; it is easy to imagine a future in which the research reports that a private equity dealmaker reads are nearly as indicative of interest as the good old-fashioned call notes the banker might record.
3. Continuing to embrace virtual events
Face-to-face events are historically one of the most important drivers of deal-making. The most important deal marketing conferences attract thousands of bankers while mega-cap corporations participate in an average of 12 investment conferences per year.
Whether your firm plans to restart event marketing or attending conferences in 2021 or longer, it’s clear that digital marketing tactics are here to stay. And what makes a digital marketing program effective comes down to the ability for firms to access and understand their first-party, second-party, and third-party data, surfacing it in ways that provide a top-notch experience for their prospects and clients.
4. Your best salespeople may be your alumni
There’s no better testament to the value of your firm than your alumni. Investment banks increasingly tap this underrated resource when it comes to referrals and deals, and the best way to do this is treat alumni as their own marketing segment. This includes strategies like alumni-focused mobile apps and intranet-style portals, newsletters, and more. By creating an incredible employee experience, the bet on this technology is that bankers will continue to refer deals back into the bank as they move along in their careers and hope to continue working together across the table.
Digital marketing powered by Salesforce
In-person, high-touch marketing efforts will always be a powerful lever in your marketing strategy. But we’re living in a digital age — and digital marketing strategies like these give you flexibility and advanced targeting that makes it possible to succeed.
The key to all of these tactics? A robust data infrastructure and CRM.
If you want to unlock the power of your data for your digital marketing efforts, you need a robust set of technology that can handle multiple sources of data — and provide predictive capabilities so you can stay one step ahead of the competition.
That’s where Silverline comes in.
If your investment banking firm needs help with operational strategy, planning for your portfolio integration initiatives, or building your data and security roadmap, Silverline is here to help. Our team of experts are ready to build value for your organization and would be glad to have a discussion about where your firm currently stands. No matter where you are in your Salesforce journey, we can help you find your way forward.
