The magazine ad is a difficult medium to find success in. This is especially true now that the internet is ever-present. These days, when you put a hedge fund ad in a magazine, a reader as likely to head straight to Google and type in “hedge fund” as he is to respond directly to the ad.

 

So why do hedge funds seem to prefer running ads in financial magazines? Probably because it’s so easy to do so. The hedge fund doesn’t need to put in any work; it just hands over a wad of cash to an ad agency and hopes for the best – a wishful strategy at best. I urge you to take a smarter way of approaching hedge fund magazine ads.

 

Five Problems with Financial Magazine Ads

1. Attention is a precious resource. The magazine’s readers aren’t going to read every article in the magazine, so it goes without saying they’re even less likely to read every ad in the magazine. Because most readers skip over the ads, you’re actually only exposing your hedge fund’s ad to a small proportion of the magazine’s readers.
2. Many financial magazines are switching to online versions. Both free and membership-based online financial magazines are slowly eroding the financial magazine readership levels. Yet prices for getting an ad in a magazine haven’t proportionally reduced.
3. The vast variety of financial magazines makes it hard for a hedge fund to determine which magazine to place an ad in. The readership levels and demographics vary across these magazines. You’re going to be spending a good amount of time calling these magazines to check out who their readership are before making the final decision. This is a time expense you can do without.
4. Magazines are ephemeral. If your ad works in a weekly or bi-weekly magazine, you might see a temporary spike in interest in your hedge fund. But for long-term benefit from an ad, you’ll have to rerun it often, which is a huge cost.
5. People don’t read financial magazines for the ads. Thus, your purpose and the reader’s purpose are out-of-sync. Is this really how you want to design your marketing?

 

6 Steps to Designing a Successful Financial Magazine Ad

1. Read through the financial magazines you are considering, looking for other hedge fund ads. Collect them, analyze them, and determine their main marketing message. Usually it’s something like, “You can beat the market by investing with us.”
2. Design a message for your ad that both differs from the messages of the other hedge funds and displays your hedge fund’s unique characteristics (e.g., focusing on emerging markets, a reduced performance fee, a unique investment strategy, and so on).
3. Make the call of action a request for a book or other education materials. This is where most hedge fund ads go wrong. Either they don’t have any call to action, or they have a vague one, such as “call now” or “contact us.” You, in contrast, are going to say something like, “get your free book on how to invest in the emerging markets,” and give a link to a webpage in which they can enter their address. Alternatively, you can ask them to call a phone number. Adding both methods would be even better. The point is to give them an incentive to contact you, which most hedge funds don’t do.
4. Ensure that the webpage and phone number you put in the ad are created exclusively for your ad. Don’t just link to your homepage and don’t just leave your main office phone. By using a specific page and a specific phone number, you can track your ad’s effectiveness.
5. Design the website landing page so that it flows smoothly from the ad, continuing the conversation you started in the ad. When readers enter your URL, they should know right away that they are in the right place. Don’t create a generic or unrelated webpage. Remember that anyone who goes to your webpage is doing so because of what you wrote in your ad, so follow up on your promise to provide that information or book.
6. Follow up. Send out the book or educational materials to the prospects that respond to the ad. Now you can start relationship-building, which is how you really sell any financial product that requires a good deal of thought – i.e., not a spontaneous buy.

 

Your ad isn’t just to sell your hedge fund to new investors, although that would be great. Your ad has an equally important role: helping you build a database of qualified prospects. In contrast, most hedge funds don’t do any sort of lead capturing with their ads.

 

Sound difficult? Sound like a lot of involved effort? It should. And it’s what scares away other hedge funds, pushing them toward the “pay and pray” approach of throwing buckets of cash at advertising agencies and hoping for the best. If you follow this 6-step plan, you’ll have an unfair advantage.

 

4 Tips for Your Hedge Fund’s Financial Magazine Ad

1. Plan out the entire advertisement -> lead capture -> follow up system before designing your ad.
2. Don’t outsource your advertisement’s copy to an advertising agency. If you need help with the graphical design, fine. But don’t outsource the actual writing to the agency unless you don’t mind a lower conversion rate.
3. On that note, consider outsourcing your ad’s copy to a professional copywriter. A copywriter can increase your ad’s conversion rate, getting you a better response for your money.
4. Negotiate on price with the magazine. A variety of negotiation tactics apply here. But that’s for a later article…