Planning how to best reach prospects and build your private equity firm’s brand involves prioritizing which digital marketing tactics and channels you want to focus on.
The two main digital marketing channels you should focus on are as follows:
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
Let’s get you up to speed on each.
Email marketing
Email marketing takes three primary forms:
- Cold biz dev email
- Cold (non-opt-in) marketing email
- Opt-in marketing email
Cold biz dev email
Cold biz dev email is where your team members send personal emails to prospects to make an introduction and work to build a relationship.
Cold biz dev email is the single most important channel for a private equity firm. While every other channel is about sowing seeds and spreading fertilizer, cold biz dev email is the only channel that harvests the crop. If you do nothing else, send out biz dev emails.
Cold (non-opt-in) marketing email
Cold (non-opt-in) marketing email is a way for you to broadcast noteworthy announcements (like acquisitions or exits) to a large group of prospects.
Platforms like Clickback enable you to send these announcements to lists of prospects that you have assembled but who have not explicitly opted in to receiving communications (though the platform allows them to opt out). These announcements give you a chance to showcase your firm’s successes to a wide group, strengthening your brand image.
Opt-in email marketing
Opt-in email marketing is when you send announcements and newsletters to contacts who have explicitly opted in to receiving mailings from your firm. These mailings can take the form of:
- Noteworthy announcements
- Top performing pieces of content
- Recently published content
- Upcoming events and webinars
While theoretically non-opt-in and opt-in email marketing campaigns can be identical, you can send to opted-in audiences more frequently without the risk of tarnishing relationships with prospects.
Generally, email marketing is a fantastic digital marketing tactic for a private equity firm because your efforts are focused on an owned audience where you have some visibility into who you’re reaching.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing takes two primary forms:
- Organic social
- Paid social
Organic social
Organic social is when you put your content or announcements out on a social media platform and see if the platform’s algorithm deigns to put it in front of your prospects. Approached correctly, you can give your posts a boost with algorithms by following best practices like:
- Posting frequently
- Posting at optimal times of the day
- Writing post content that encourages readers to linger or engage
- Publishing video content
- Engaging with others’ content
- Limiting the number of links you include in your posts
Note that gaining organic exposure on social media is more common for personal social profiles than it is for business profiles, so you’ll want to make sure you don’t limit social promotion to just your business page.
Paid social
Paid social is an incredible channel to promote the content your firm puts out on social media to your prospects. When you “sponsor content,” you can put hard dollars behind a social post to make sure it gets in front of the prospects you care about. The process looks like this:
- Post an organic post on social media
- Export a list of contacts from your prospect database
- Upload the list to the social site’s ad platform (called “matched audiences”)
- Sponsor your organic post targeting your prospect list
The beauty of paid social is that you can dramatically increase exposure to your firm and stay top of mind with your prospects. The downside of course is that you have to pay for that exposure each time you want it to occur.
Which social media platforms should a private equity firm be on?
100% a private equity firm should promote itself on LinkedIn. You can also adopt YouTube once you start producing video content.
Other than that, you don’t need to worry about many other platforms, unless you know your prospects tend to hang out in other places and your message fels appropriate for those other platforms.
What about SEO?
Search engine marketing takes two forms:
- SEO (organic search)
- Paid search
SEO is about creating content that organically shows up in search engines like Google because that engine feels the content best addresses a searcher’s query.
Paid search is a way to improve exposure via paid advertising on search engines.
Frankly, search engine marketing is not a relevant channel unless you can get really good at targeting. For the most part, you shouldn't even worry about it.
Build Out Your Marketing Plan
Each of the above channels should play an important role in your overall private equity marketing plan. Looking at specific channels and subchannels, my recommendation would be to prioritize them as follows:
- Cold biz dev email
- Organic social
- Paid social
- Cold (non-opt-in) marketing email
- Opt-in marketing email
If you have questions about how to get started, connect with me on LinkedIn so we can kick off the conversation.
