Branding for High-Net-Worth Individuals
There are whole books written about the topic of branding.
This isn’t one (it’s only a chapter). We don't have time for everything.
So here’s a quick cheat sheet, so we can get down to the important stuff - the secrets of branding for high-net-worth individuals.
Branding isn’t really about logos, colors, taglines, or fonts
It’s about building relationships
Branding works by hijacking human neurophysiological systems for interpersonal communications
Good branding is hard
Because of the whole neuro hijacking thing (above) - it not 100% surprising that the best branding works by treating brands like they are people
Successful brands are people their customers want to spend time with
In short - good brands are people customers want to hang out with (and build relationships with). Relationships are impossible without trust.
Consequently and in conclusion - brand relationships are only possible when your customers trust your brand.
Next up - the brand strategies that work best with high-net-worth individuals.
Relationship Growth
Bit of background: Over a period of 5 years, I successfully scaled high-net-worth investors at two commercial real estate crowdfunding marketplaces: Crowd Street & Cadre.
Together these two brands recruited 100,000 HNW and placed $5.5 Billion in investment capital. They built a lot of successful business relationships with lots of active investors.
Building for this many high-net-worths was challenging:
Acquiring thousands of HNW prospects every month
Providing expert educational content on a new industry (CRE Crowdfunding)
Automating (and personalizing) lead scoring + engagement + nurturing (early relationships)
Seamlessly handing off ‘hand-raisers’ (opportunities) to Investments (growing relationships)
Optimizing the entire customer journey for maximum conversions and lowest cost-of-capital (mature relationships)
What's the secret to acquiring, educating, and building relationships with thousands of new prospects every month?
The secret was something I’ll get to in a second.
Secrets of Scaling Relationships
Finding the secret took me a year and cost two million dollars in VC funding.
The secret enabled Crowd Street to scale investors from a couple hundred to over 100,000.
The secret came from what should have seemed an obvious source.
When I started at Crowd Street in 2015 as the company’s first VP Marketing - CS was a 10-person seed-stage startup with a couple hundred active investors and a handful of commercial real estate deals on the marketplace.
I was responsible for scaling both sides of that marketplace - recruiting high-net-worths (interested in investing) & commercial real estate sponsors (with deals needing investment capital).
Scaling the investor side of the marketplace was the bigger challenge.
In 2015, I was coming off 8+ years of running marketing programs for Fortune 100s (Microsoft, Intel, Dodge) with senior exec product and marketing roles at IPG (ad agencies).
Of the things I brought to Crowd Street, I was most proud of my programmatic advertising skills.
Arriving at Crowd Street, I whipped out my skills expecting to unlock explosive high-net-worth investor growth.
I failed. (a lot)
I also learned a lot.
I learned high-net-worth individuals really don’t respond well to marketing tactics.
Marketing language (nope)
Sales copy (nope)
Squeeze pages (big nope)
Promissory language (nope & FINRA would like a word)
Exclusivity, Scarcity, and FOMO (nope, nope, nope)
On the hook for big investor gains by the end of Q3, I turned to Crowd Street’s best and worst customers.
I started weekly customer surveys & interviews with our ‘most active’ and most ‘not-yet-active’ investors.
I asked what made them feel ready, able, and willing to invest (and what did the opposite).
Fear featured more prominently than Hope among Crowd Street high-net-worths.
Second from the top on ‘The Fear List’ - Making an Investment Mistake
Top of the ‘The Fear List‘- Being Taken Advantage Of
Turns out high-net-worth individuals value trust (and trust-worthy people).
I should have asked sooner.
Jumping out the gates and landing flat on my butt, taught me a lot about how to interact with high-net-worth individuals.
Marketing tactics don’t work.
Sales tactics are likely to get you spam-foldered.
Unbiased educational tools help HNWs not make foolish investing mistakes (they like this).
Prioritizing honesty, transparency, trust - is the single best strategy for building successful, long-term business relationships with high-net-worth prospects and customers.
Next up - specific branding tactics you can use to build trust and profitable brand relationships with HNWs.
Branding Starts with Your Website
Successful branding starts at your website.
Knowing this - it can sometimes be confusing why there are so many bad sponsor websites out there. A couple asset pics. A few GP bios. No deep information. No reason for HNWs to engage.
Why is it like this.?
It's at least partly due to the fact that prior to 2015, many sponsors weren’t allowed to do more.
Starting in 2015 The JOBS ACT, Regulation D, Rule 506(c) opened the door to general solicitation of private equity investment from the public.
For the first time, sponsors could promote deals to accredited investors outside of the Securities Act and SEC broker-dealer requirements.
Before Rule 506(c), investment websites were restricted to be just digital brochures - not business tools.
Back in the old days, branding barely mattered. Credibility (and capital) came from in-person meetings, personal referrals, and country club investor networks.
After 2015, the game completely changed. Sponsors raising millions from HNWs using new digital recruitment tactics quickly realized they weren’t just pitching their single asset deal. They were pitching their entire brand. Their website needed to fit with this new and expanded role.
A modern sponsor website - with professional branding, investor-focused tone, visual appeal and lots of expert educational content - quickly emerged as the single most powerful tool for building a successful CRE brand and thousands of new HNW investment relationships.
Technical savvy sponsors went beyond - recognizing further potential in new products able to extend the sponsor websites to function as the firm’s in-house wire-service, investor relations portal, and investment management platform (details in later chapters).
If your a sponsor and your website isn’t an updated, modern, and educational introduction to your brand - drop what you’re doing and make updating it top priority.
A modern, well-branded website is the foundation for the success of every successful HNW brand strategy we’ll be discussing from here on.
Pitching is a No-hitter
High-net-worth individuals are the single most difficult audience to find, attract, engage, and convert. They’ve seen everything. They see everything. Including every kind of sales pitch.
They’ve read emails from emerging sponsors promising ‘20% IRR’. They’ve seen postcards espousing ‘democratized investing’ and ‘generational wealth’ via ‘passive ownership of syndicated real estate assets’.
If your website, article, ad, or email speaks with this type of tone - cheap, over-leveraged, and overtly pitching - you won’t win business from HNWs.
Overt pitching doesn’t just lose attention. It erodes trust.
Instead of cold-pitching your latest recap, try giving away meaningful educational content. Not a couple paragraphs segueing into a thinly veiled promotional touch-and-turn (If you like this, you’ll love our new continuation fund).
To get your HNW relationships off on the right foot, give away substantial, unbiased, valuable, non-promotional, educational content.
I recommend starting with 1200-1500 word pieces focused on a single aspect of your industry that HNW would find interesting and valuable when doing business with you.
At Crowd Street I started creating content with our Chief Investment Office, Ian Formigle.
We started with a series of introductory articles on commercial real estate investing
These articles were so successful with our HNWs, we expanded to create CRE Introductory Guides
Understanding CRE: A Comprehensive Commercial Real Estate Guide
The Definitive Guide to Commercial Real Estate Property Types
As the content catalog grew, our customers learned and asked for additional pieces on new topics.
At this point, Google started picking up our educational content and SEO updates further improved our organic search rankings, until more than 30% of Crowd Street’s monthly HNW leads were coming from free organic search rankings on our free educational articles.
After more two years of writing educational content, Ian and I eventually had enough content for a book.
In 2017 we self-published ‘The Comprehensive Guide to Commercial Real Estate Investing’.
Over the next decade, the content Ian and I created as a way to educate and develop better brand relationships with Crowd Street investors, managed to bring in organic search HNW leads worth more than $10M of paid advertising.
Most importantly, Crowd Street’s content successfully addressed the top two high-net-worth concerns from ‘The Fear List’
Making an Investment Mistake (education)
Being Taken Advantage Of (trust)
Giving away free educational content was the single most valuable ‘marketing program’ we ran at Crowd Street. It started us down a highly successful path of ‘Trust Optimization’ and it educated our investor base on the essentials of the newly-opened (and democratized) commercial real estate industry.
Educating our investor base made Crowd Street investors feel capable of making an informed investment decision.
Investment conversions began increasing, HNW lead growth accelerated, and our customers increasingly valued Crowd Street as a trusted educational resource in addition to an investment vehicle.
Giving away free content was our first secret for unlocking profitable HNW growth.
Aesthetic of Trust
Next up let’s talk about the importance of focusing on your brand’s visual appearance and the effect it can have on trust.
Think of it as taking a cue from the aspirational version of your brand.
When I led marketing at Cadre, we modeled our brand off Blackstone. The similarity wasn't a coincidence. It was a strategy.
Why Blackstone? They were an icon. A brand that said “We don't need to impress - we’re impressive.”
Restrained design. Deep palettes, sans-serif fonts, and lots of clear space. When you looked at the Blackstone website - every choice was deliberate. Nothing was loud. Everything was confident. Everything exuded trust.
The secret to successful visual branding? Great branding doesn’t create trust. It borrows it.
Remember Apple’s “Think Different” campaign? It didn’t highlight the specs of the PowerBook G4. It celebrated Einstein. Dylan, Earhart. Visionaries who had nothing to do with computers - and everything to do with human genius.
Apple was co-opting mental real estate. Thinking was - iIf you trusted these paragons - you’d trust the company celebrating them (and then go buy a PowerBook like everyone else who Think Different).
The technique can be a powerful one for an HNW brand as well.
The key thing to remember is: You don’t need to build your brand in isolation. You don’t need to build a brand from scratch. You can build your brand on the shoulders of giants your audience already trusts.
Between Text & Tone
Branding isn’t just visual. It’s verbal as well. It includes the copy (the text) on your website, emails, and presentations - as well as the way this text ‘speaks’.
Tone is an essential tool for conveying your brand to HNW prospects - and it played a key role in the branding of Cadre.
We called it ‘Institutional Tone’. Calm. Understated. Factual.
It avoided hype, and - more importantly - the promissory language that triggered FINRA spidey senses.
Cadre was already a licensed broker-dealer. Which meant I had to run every. single. word. through. Compliance.
At Cadre, Compliance was embodied in one man, the esteemed Alexander Labowitz, Esq. Pedigreed Wall Street general counsel, SEC guidance scryer, and sworn nemesis to adjectives everywhere.
When I started at Cadre, the only ad copy I could get through Compliance was “Cadre has an investment offering. It is a Multifamily single-asset. Contact Cadre for details.”
I’d already been through multiple rounds of copy revisions with Alexander Labowitz, Esq.
Each time, my marketing copy came back redlined to pieces - pared beyond bare essentials - looking more like a Form D filing than compelling Investments copy.
I’m sure a bit of my frustration crept into my voice when I (I’ll admit - a bit snidely) asked Alexander Labowitz, Esq. for ‘A List of Adjectives I Could Actually Use’.
With an impressively straight-face, Alexander dead-paned, ‘No Adjectives’.
That was the starting point of our relationship.
Alexander Labowitz, Esq. eventually became Alex We both grew to enjoy the back-and-forth of our respective roles. Key to our relationship was the tone of every discussion - always with respect and appreciation of the other’s responsibilities at the forefront.
Proper tone builds trust - and over time, trusted relationships.
This simple act of adopting your audience’s point-of-view - of imagining how they want to be spoken with - is a powerful tool for setting yourself apart from out-of-touch pitchmen promising the moon.
Consistency Brings Capital
The tone you use — whether Institutional, Analytical, Conversational, or Quotidian— needs to be consistent to be effective.
Your tone should be the same in every webpage. Same in every email. In every newsletter. Every social post. Every webinar.
Consistency builds familiarity. Familiarity fosters trust. Trust is the foundation for strong relationships.
This extends beyond how your brand copy speaks - it also involves who is doing the ‘speaking’.
At Cadre we stumbled on a powerful tactic for enhancing the Investments team’s effectiveness. While implementing a new marketing automation system we decided to run a series of test + learn experiments testing automated workflow emails personalized in the voice of each Investments staffer.
When new HNW leads entered the Cadre automation system, they were assigned to an Investment staffer who would work the Leads in the event they matured into an Opportunity.
Our experiment involved rewriting the existing series of six Cadre introductory ‘Orientation’ workflow emails to be in the voice, tone, and come from the return email of the Investment staffer who would own them for their entire future.
Immediately we saw an uptick in HNW engagements with these ‘personalized’ emails, but the real benefit came later. Over time Leads receiving personalized emails converted to active investors at rates far higher than baseline controls.
What’s more - when we interviewed these investors regarding satisfaction with Investments staff - they cited these personalized emails as part of their engagement history with the Investment rep. In having each Investment rep recreate the original content, we for the first time automated the building of brand relationships.
Cadre had a lot of tech-savvy investors on the platform and some of them spotted what we were doing and asked about it on Investments calls. The Investments folks were always transparent with the process and our investors love it. In that way we ensured this powerful marketing & sales tool was also a method for reinforcing the transparency and genuine consideration Cadre had for customers.
Conclusion
Branding isn’t your logo.
It’s what happens after someone lands on your site. What they feel. What they associate. What they trust.
For an audience that’s used to being chased, pitched, and over-sold - what they trust is the relationship.
Your brand is the first impression. That first hand-shake. There is no do-over. Make it count.
