What We Do
Our clients hire us for our ideas, insights and content deliverables regarding what to say, how to say it, how to communicate it in written and verbal form throughout the selling cycle, and how to get third-party endorsement for the intellectual acumen of management. Our work equips investment firm clients with more and better tools for making it through the due diligence gauntlet, including the two month to two year selling cycle money management firms face in marketing to sophisticated investors.
Out-marketing Your Competitors To Win New Business
The more adept a company is at managing its communications marketing process, the more successful it will be in attracting new business.
The right strategic positioning and points of emphasis in an organization’s communications can give it a competitive edge in its marketing. Obtaining an outside perspective helps an organization better see itself through the eyes of its target audiences.
When it comes to financial and professional services firms, communications is as much about making an effective conceptual sell about the people and how they think as it is to explain about the product or service being offered. Frumerman & Nemeth’s buyer-focused Conceptual Communications Marketing® approach for developing and managing communications programs helps clients accomplish both objectives.
Effective communications marketing requires identifying and developing what to say, how to say it, to whom to say it, and where else to say it.
What To Say
Frumerman & Nemeth employs its proprietary Communications Marketing Road Map® process for helping clients develop or refine their strategic positioning. Taking into account what an organization has to say and the environment in which it has to market, key selling messages are created to serve as building blocks for crafting a more cogent and compelling way to tell the organization’s story. The result is a more prospect-focused strategic positioning for the organization.
How To Say It
Once the key selling messages are selected, Frumerman & Nemeth can help the client draft and design prospect-focused sales materials, brochures and marketing kits, pitchbook presentations, letters to shareholders and the answers to essay questions in asset management RFPs and DDQs. Frumerman & Nemeth also assists in preparing the verbal sales presentations used in meetings with prospects and the media, and for giving speeches.
To Whom To Say It
How an organization describes itself and what it has to offer can differ depending on the audience it is addressing. Frumerman & Nemeth helps clients recognize the differences between their audiences — customers, prospects and those who influence them. We customize our clients’ communications efforts so that they appeal to each particular group.
Where Else To Say It
Speaking at industry conferences and media relations marketing are high ROI (return on investment) means of communicating an organization’s story to its target audiences. Success in integrating conference speaking and a media relations marketing program with a sales marketing effort is in part dependent on an organization’s ability to communicate its story in the proper perspective for its different constituencies, each of whom may view the organization in a different context. Also important is participation as a speaker or panelist at appropriate industry conferences, and speaking about subjects and offering insights that are relevant to the product or the service a firm is marketing.
Frumerman & Nemeth has a long track record of success in helping clients use industry conference speaking and media relations marketing as ways to garner third-party endorsement for the intellectual acumen of management while increasing their reach to more prospects and potential sources of referral.
Services
Strategy Development
- Creating content marketing strategies.
- Company and product positioning.
- Pre-launch and post-launch strategies for financial products and services.
- Development of comprehensive, resource-sensitive marketing and branding plans.
Writing & Design
- Drafting, editing, formatting and producing sales marketing materials, IR communications and thought leadership content; including brochures, sales and seminar presentations, speeches, sales letters, letters to investors, research reports, bylined articles and white papers.
- Design capabilities for desktop publishing and commercial printing of marketing materials.
Business Management Consulting
- Counsel on evaluating and selecting Ops and Admin service providers.
- Counsel on analyzing performance attribution data and how to best communicate such information to investors.
Public Relations
- Industry conference participation of key staff as speakers or panelists to promote their expertise and insights, and further achieve third-party endorsement for a company, its products and people.
- Media relations marketing program development, implementation and maintenance to enhance sales marketing efforts and to achieve third-party endorsement for a company, its products and people.
- Application of our proprietary Conceptual Public Relations® approach for marketing financial and professional services firms.
- Investor relations.
How We Are Different
Beyond the Pitchbook Methods
Our methods go far beyond just the typical flipchart pitchbook marketing focus. (Among other things, that is the wrong tool for delivering detailed investment process content that sophisticated investors expect and require.) We solve that communications and sales marketing selling problem in a specific, different way.
The Value of Portfolio Management Knowledge
As a result of our depth and breadth of knowledge about investment strategies and portfolio management, we speak to portfolio managers as peers and can get important content required for marketing and passing due diligence muster out of their heads that others cannot.
Additionally, we actually understand the buy side — family offices, endowments and foundations, institutional plan sponsors, investment consultant gatekeepers, and other sophisticated investors. In fact, family offices share their thoughts with us because they know that we know of people and firms who may be of use to them, and that since Frumerman & Nemeth is not a third-party marketer we aren’t trying to sell them anything. So, we ‘get’ both the investment strategy sellers and buyers.
Crafting the Content Marketing Ammunition
We work with portfolio managers acting as ghost co-writer and editor of white papers, research reports and quarterly letters to investors. We help clients get, write and give speeches as panelists or stand-alone speakers at industry conferences. Also, we offer, where appropriate, media relations marketing services, as well as graphic design and layout services. In these ways we help money management firms to better tell and sell their stories to prospective investors and out-market competitors who are delivering similar performance.
Business Strategy Counsel
We provide business strategy consulting to many clients regarding new product development, identifying the right target audiences for their strategies, development of communications and sales marketing action plans, as well as workflow process and staff management counsel for implementing these activities.
Results
Creating a compelling storyline to communicate a hedge fund’s investment process, obtaining industry exposure for its fund manager through conference speaking opportunities and generating third-party endorsement with targeted press coverage that worked as a door opener for meeting and converting prospects into investors helped a first-time hedge fund manager grow in one year from pre-launch to over $220 million in assets under management.
Crafting a marketing storyline, creating educational marketing materials and running a targeted media relations marketing program helped attract over $500 million in assets under management in 16 months for the most complex hedge fund strategy ever marketed, and with no track record: mortgage derivative investing with a market neutral overlay.
An investment firm serving institutional plan sponsor clients had such asset raising success with our storyline and marketing content created for repositioning their 18-year-old emerging market debt strategy that they retained us four more times to restructure communications marketing for four other strategies they ran.
A restructured sales presentation with new, buyer-focused key selling messages helped a client land a $50 million account from an institutional investor that it had been on the brink of losing.
A media relations marketing branding program for a little known mutual fund family that focused on marketing its investment process helped it become one of the most recognized names in the marketplace and attract billions in new assets under management. No advertising or direct mail marketing was used.
A media relations marketing program to launch the first solo 401(k) plan product in the country resulted in the mutual fund family opening thousands of new accounts. The greatest number of hits ever on the firm’s website resulted from prospective investors and investment advisors downloading press coverage reprints explaining about the new product. Demand was so high among investment advisors that the mutual fund family had to make 115,000 reprints to meet the demand for hard copy versions of the press coverage that both explained and gave third-party endorsement to the new product.
One press placement helped a client attract $15 million worth of new business.
A client attracted new business as a result of a media relations marketing program that got prospects to read about, and buy into, the client’s services — despite the fact that the prospects had not read the sales materials sent to them.
An audit of a client’s sales marketing program identified five additional prospect types to pursue above the single type it had identified on its own. A new positioning strategy and sales presentation were created to enable the client to market to these six types of prospective investors.
A fee-only, independent financial planning/investment advisory wealth management firm had such success having our counsel, content creation and media relations marketing support that they remained a client for 20 years, up until the firm owner sold his business and retired. As he wrote us then, “We would never have received the offer and the ultimate selling value without your talent, caring and dedication.”
New sales letters that better positioned a client and its services motivated prospects to request meetings even before the salespeople made their follow-up calls.
A media relations marketing campaign publicizing his plight aided a client in obtaining financial compensation from the German government for property expropriated by the East German communists after World War II.
A small mom-and-pop published trade magazine increased subscription and advertising revenues, and established a branding as the leading business magazine in its industry as a result of our idea to refocus and restructure their publication and our program to market it.