Hedge Fund Marketing

Welcome to this video on Hedge Fund Marketing. This is Richard Wilson and this is one of my favorite topics to do training and live workshops on because my passion is capital raising, marketing, sales, influence and persuasion, positioning, authority building and all of that relates directly to hedge fund marketing. So what I’m going to do with you today is share with you a common piece of advice that is somewhat obvious, a piece of advice that’s not obvious and then one strategy you can use in hedge fund marketing.
The one thing that’s obvious but most people don’t focus on enough in hedge marketing is the fact that common knowledge is not worth nearly as much as specialized knowledge. Common knowledge that’s not directly applied to something functional would be like memorizing pie out to 2,000 digits. That’s a general knowledge that’s not directly applicable to something valuable. A specialized knowledge would be if you read every book on marketing and you spoke and met with every hedge fund marketing expert in person and took notes and wrote up notes on everything those people said and combined those two pieces of knowledge, that would be very specialized knowledge and that would be worth a lot of money.
So folks on specialized knowledge as much as you can and stop reading the general newspapers, stop seeing the car crashes on general TV and start reading more books on marketing and sales and taking training programs on hedge fund marketing and you’ll really see a huge difference in your productivity and the results you get.
Now, here’s sometimes it’s not too obvious, is that most people when they start looking as hedge marketing, they’re looking for a magic strategy that’s going to raise them a lot of capital. There are lots of strategies. There’s a whole buffet of ideas you can use to raise capital but there is no magic bullet, there is no one strategy that exist that’s going to help you raise a lot of capital, so you just know that right off the bat. So I think most people look for that often and it just doesn’t exist.
Another quote I like to say often in my training programs is that “If you want to have what others don’t you must do what others won’t.” And I think that’s a quote from Brian Tracy who we actually just interview a few weeks ago, so you can listen to my interview with him within our training programs or on YouTube as well. And what this quote means is that if you want to be good at doing hedge fund marketing you should do the hard work that others won’t to be good at hedge fund marketing. You have to do the research, you’ve to meet in person with people, you have to follow up more often, you have to add more value to them first because most people are too lazy to do that.
Hedge fund marketing takes a lot of planning, hard work, and long-term strategy. But that’s a good and bad thing. The bad thing is it’s challenging. The good thing is there’s huge rewards if you can get good at hedge marketing whether you’re running your own hedge fund, working as a third-party marketer or a consultant of some type, or if you’re just working as a capital raiser within a large organization.
Another quote I’d like to bring up in my training program is by Muhammad Ali. Everyone says he’s the most talented person of all time. But really if you look at his life history, he really just trained himself more than anyone else around him. And he even says here in this quote, “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” And the reason I say that here and read his quote is to show that even Muhammad Ali who was considered so insanely talented had to work very, very hard and you’re going to need to if you want to succeed in hedge fund marketing. It’s going to be easy.
Now, one concept I want to share with you today instead of just telling you things that are somewhat obvious or not obvious to you already is the concept of the Hedge Fund Investor Avatar. This is something that we cover for a full hour, hour and a half within our full day live workshops because it’s so important that you get this. And in fact everything else that we train and teach on, on hedge fund marketing lies on the foundation of knowing exactly who your hedge fund investor avatar is.
So what is an avatar? It has nothing to do with the recently popular movie. Avatar means that you have a very well-defined picture of who you’re marketing to, who that investor is you’re trying to reach out to and who you’re trying to raise capital from. If you try to raise capital from all types of investors, you’ll fail. If you don’t know the specific needs, challenges and fears of the investor you’re approaching, you will fail. Many times you can have a well-defined avatar and you can still fail because it is so challenging to raise capital so you need every trick in the book that’s compliance approved and legal to get it so that you can raise capital consistently because it is very hard to do even if you’re intelligent, hardworking and focused.
So what is a hedge fund investor avatar look like? Basically, let’s give an example to make this a little bit easier to understand. If you’re a $100M hedge fund you could be marketing yourself to family offices. You need to understand how family offices as ultra high-net-worth wealth managers operate, how they invest, who they typically invest in, what they expect of their investment managers that they work with and really understand everything about how that family office operates so you can add value to them first, communicate with them on a peer level and get them to invest in your hedge fund.
If you’re a $1M hedge fund or let’s say $10M hedge fund, you might focus on some mid-level to small wealth management firms that invest in hedge funds that are kind of up and coming. This is because wealth management firms that are small to medium size have lower due diligence requirements than very institutional investors who will never work with a $10M size hedge fund that just want to invest with you because you’re too small of an operation.
So if you’re approaching a wealth management firm you need to get inside their shoes and understand, you know have they been burned before by investing in small hedge fund managers? Are they scared of hedge fund managers who have offices based out of their house? Are they scared to invest in hedge fund managers that have no employees or no board of advisers? Do they expect you to have certain types of audit firms or service providers? You need to understand everything about that type of investor that you’re focusing on and then craft all of your marketing materials, everything you do, the types of e-mails you send, how often you call, whether you’re requested to meet in person, what fees are you charging, everything in your hedge fund business should be formed around those 1 or 2 investors that you’ve identified as your number one focus for growing your hedge fund.
Often times people say “Well, we’re approaching all types of investors.” That’s a losing strategy. You need to figure out where 60% or 80% of your assets are going to come from or where they have come from in the past and focus on that for your hedge fund investor avatar. This is really kind of an advanced strategy in hedge fund marketing that nobody really ever talks about in our industry. But it’s pretty common in the marketing industry to talk about doing this and I think more hedge fund managers need to be doing this. So I encourage you to look into this, practice it, identify who your investor avatar is and hopefully we will see you in person one day in one of our live training programs or workshops or within our certified hedge fund professional designation program.
This is Richard Wilson and keep in touch and we’ll talk to you soon.