As a marketer in the asset management industry, part of your role will be to develop an understanding of key markets and clients. While your exact responsibilities will vary based on your position, some common tenets of our work include:

• Understanding the characteristics and preferences of key parties in this industry, such as institutional investors, retail investors and financial advisers.
• Identifying market trends and opportunities that can be leveraged to attract and retain clients.
• Developing marketing materials that effectively communicate the features and benefits of clients’ business offerings to different audience segments.
• Collaborating across different departments within client firms, to ensure their marketing is aligned with their sales objectives, business capabilities etc.
• Collaborating across different departments within White Marble, to ensure that the work we do is clear and consistent. For example, if our Content and Creative teams have mis-aligned visions of a project, this may result in a confused final product being delivered to the client.
• Utilizing different channels, such as digital marketing, events and media relations, to reach out to and engage with clients.
• Monitoring and measuring the effectiveness of our marketing efforts so we’re able to continuously improve and optimise our strategies.

Clients of clients

We work with asset managers, who are our clients. In turn, they manage investments on the behalf of investors – their clients.

When we’re working with an asset manager, it’s therefore important to keep the end-client that will ultimately be investing in these products in mind. For example, retail investors are likely to lack deep financial knowledge, so producing marketing materials that are more accessible would be appropriate if we’re targeting this audience segment. In contrast, institutional investors are more sophisticated, so our marketing work should reflect this.

There are also other nuances that are useful to be aware of. Institutional investors, such as pension funds, tend to invest over a longer term than retail investors. This is because, in most cases, a pension fund should have decades to produce returns for a investor that are sufficient for them to retire on. This means they can make lower-risk investments.

What differentiates a fund?

There are a number of ways in which a fund can be differentiated from its competitors:

• It might have produced stronger returns than its peers or consistently outperformed a benchmark.
• It might be managed by an outstanding fund manager with a strong industry reputation.
• It might align with the values of investors, i.e. if it has a strong ESG profile.
• It might offer an opportunity to invest in assets that many of its peers don’t, such as alternatives.
• It might offer opportunities to invest in regions that many of its peers don’t. This often involves investing in emerging market (EM) nations, as opposed to more conventional markets such as Europe, North America and Asia.
• It might be designed to expose investors to less risk than its peers.
• It might charge lower fees than its peers.

What differentiates a firm?

There are also some key areas in which a firm can set itself apart from its peers. These often intersect with how funds are differentiated – if a firm’s funds are more appealing than those of its competitors, that contributes to the firm itself being more appealing. However, here are some elements of differentiation that relate to the business more broadly.

• It might offer specialisms that its competitors don’t, such as expertise in a specific element of ESG-based investing.
• It might have access to technologies and processes that other firms don’t.
• It might have a brand that resonates with investors more than its peers.
• It might offer a broader fund range than its peers, presenting more investment opportunities.
• It might offer other services in addition to asset management, such as wealth management or insurance services.