As one quarter wraps up and another begins, many money managers are finalizing last quarter’s activity and starting to think about the best way to distribute it to their clients.
This can be an overwhelming task, especially if you’re a larger firm.
At Dakota we’ve been fundraising since 2006, and have spent the last fifteen years working out the best ways to disseminate the information that is most critical to our clients.
We do this through quarterly update webinars, which have been a grand slam success time and time again.
In this article, we’re going to help you determine if a quarterly webinar is right for your investment firm, as well as the key things you need to know before you get started. By the end of the article, you’ll have a list of takeaways and a plan for how to get started planning your own update webinars.
Is a quarterly update webinar right for your firm?
At Dakota, we firmly believe that a quarterly webinar is the best piece of free marketing you can do for your firm and for your clients.
However, we also know that they’re not feasible for everyone and can become a large strain on time and resources. If you manage a small to medium portfolio, though, whether you manage a single-product firm or a handful of products, you will want to do a quarterly webinar.
If you’re a larger firm and have dozens of products, this might not be a fit for you, as it can become extremely time-consuming as you try to give an update on every one. In this case, a written update or abstract would be a better approach for your team.
In the next section, we’ll outline what components you’ll need for a successful webinar.
How do you start planning a quarterly webinar?
The answer is simple, of course: you'll need to gather all the information you have about what happened over the last quarter, and provide an overview of that to your clients.
In this section, we’ll break the webinar into two key components: email strategy and event outlines.
1. An email strategy
Before you can present anything, you need to make sure that the right people are invited and attending the update webinar.
We’ve found that this series of emails works best when planning out your webinar:
- A “save the date” email: This email notifies your clients that the webinar is upcoming, including the date and time so that they can ensure they’ll be available and can expect an update.
- An invitation with a link to register for the webinar: This is the formal event invitation that lists the date, time, and includes a link to register for the event. Be sure to encourage everyone to register even if they can’t attend it live, so that they can receive a copy of the recording afterwards.
- A day-of reminder: This email can be sent an hour or two before the webinar begins, reminding attendees that the event is upcoming. People get tons of emails and invitations, so it’s easy for things to get missed or forgotten.
- A follow-up email: These emails can be sent following the event, thanking everyone for their time and should include a link to watch the recording of the webinar.
2. An engaging, easy to follow event outline
We all get invited to dozens of webinars and virtual events every month, so you likely already know how over-saturated this area can be.
However, our team has found the following structure to be incredibly impactful, and has helped us find success over the last fifteen years. Remember, you’re doing this to make the lives of your clients easier, so you’ll want to make sure they’re absorbing the content.
- If you’re a public strategy, you’re going to first remind everyone who you are, what you do, and what you manage. It’s very important to do a refresher of your firm that is ideally one to two minutes long.
- Next, talk about what happened during the quarter: buys, sells, trims, adds, detractors, and all of the key elements of what happened during the quarter.
- Following that, you can highlight a theme or a trend that you’re seeing in the portfolio, and take a deep dive into one of your holdings. This can be a holding that you bought during the quarter, or a holding that you really wanted to highlight, and go deep on that holding.
- Finally, be sure to have some prepared concluding remarks, including some pre-planned questions. You should also always leave room for any additional questions at the end of your presentation.
The entire webinar can be around twenty minutes long: you don’t need to speak for a long time, just enough to give a complete overview to your audience.
Finally, we’ll dive into what you should do once the webinar is over.
What should you do after the webinar?
Upon the conclusion of the webinar, you can send out the recording of the presentation to the entire distribution list. This starts with sending it out to everyone who attended live, as well as anyone who registered but couldn’t attend at the time listed.
Because you put so much time and effort into planning the webinar, though, there are other way you can distribute it as well.
You can put the recording of the webinar on your website behind a form and encourage people to watch it at their leisure. Additionally, you can have it transcribed for anyone who would rather read through the content rather than listen. This ensures that the content is accessible and doesn’t leave anyone out.
Finally, you can prepare an abstract of the presentation. This is a simple, one page summary of what was explained on the webinar, along with any key takeaways. This will let everyone know what’s happening with your firm even if they didn’t have the time to listen to the entire webinar.
Being massively communicative on your investment strategy every quarter, in both good times and bad, ensures that you establish a relationship built on trust, communication, and transparency.