IR and Comms Forum: Walking the fine digital marketing line

When it comes to digital marketing it’s important for private equity firms not to cross any compliance boundaries.

“A lot of people’s frustration at last year’s conference was that compliance was limiting what they can do from a marketing standpoint,” one panelist said at the Investor Relations Marketing and Communications Forum in New York City. “When you think about digital marketing and investor relations, there has to be a clear separation between church and state, where you’re not marketing for fundraising purposes.”

The panelist described their firm’s marketing efforts and the missed opportunities that came with being too cautious.

They started their sophisticated digital marketing efforts more than two years ago. At the beginning of that time frame the firm was emailing quarterly transaction updates and year-end reviews to their “massive database of contacts,” which includes investment banks and intermediaries they work with. At the start, they kept a separate database for limited partners and prospective LPs and never sent out those updates to their investors. That has now changed.

“The names stay in that separate database,” the panelist said. “We extract that list of LPs and we put it directly in Marketo and they get that one-time email and we’re able to track the engagement windows but we’re not feeding the data back into our database.” Marketo is a marketing automation software.

The Forum continues on Thursday in New York.