Events are well and truly back on the agenda for the financial services industry, but the expectations have changed. With tighter budgets, attendees can no longer justify turning up just for the networking drinks or to catch up with familiar faces. Today, every event must offer something more. People need to leave feeling it was worth their while: that they’ve learned something, met someone valuable or gained a new perspective.
Institutional Investor has recognised this shift and taken a distinctly different approach. Rather than hosting traditional conferences packed with exhibition stands and sales pitches, its events are carefully curated to foster a sense of community. The focus is on high-quality, meaningful conversations that centre on the issues shaping the market right now.
Alex Beveridge, head of content and private markets EMEA at Institutional Investor, says it’s a model built around delivering value in different ways. For some attendees, that might be a fresh insight or an idea they can take back to their team. For others, it might be the start of a professional relationship that evolves into a future client partnership. Either way, it’s not just about showing up, it’s about walking away with something that lasts.
But this model hinges on the right people being in the room, which has prompted Institutional Investor to take a highly targeted approach to its promotion of events. With more than 11,000 people attending Institutional Investor’s events each year, clearly, that value is being felt.
Communities rather than conference halls
Institutional Investor supports two types of communities. One is a peer-to-peer network that connects CEOs, CIOs, heads of legal, and other asset management professionals for direct, peer-level discussions.
While the other, and primary, community brings together institutional asset owners, pension funds, insurance companies, family offices, and other institutional investors.
The key to a successful event is making attendees feel comfortable enough to have meaningful conversations. That’s why all events follow Chatham House rules, allowing information to be shared while keeping the identity and affiliation of speakers and participants confidential, Beveridge notes.
“The crucial thing is that it’s all held under the Chatham House rule,” he says. “People that come to the communities want to be able to discuss things and maybe play devil’s advocate without being quoted or misquoted.”
With a background in journalism, Beveridge understands the value of firms like asset managers and pension funds engaging with the media, particularly from a marketing standpoint. However, for these community meetings, he says privacy is essential to encourage open, honest conversation.
His role involves directly engaging with asset owners to understand what is and isn’t working for them, and what topics they’re most interested in exploring.
This insight allows the events to be carefully shaped around the issues that matter most to attendees, making them more relevant, impactful and ultimately easier to attract the right audience, Beveridge says.
“At the moment, people are wanting to talk about tariffs and changing geopolitical landscape and what that means for long term investing,” he says. “Any kind of crisis is quite good for us, because people want to hang out and talk, so we bring them together.”
Beveridge acknowledges that, given the fast pace of change in markets and politics, it can be challenging to ensure events planned months ahead still feel relevant by the time they take place.
“Of course we’ve changed events on a dime. We ran a single-family office event back in 2016 three or four days after the Brexit vote. I was literally rewriting the agenda over the weekend,” he says.
However, Beveridge adds that most of the investors Institutional Investor works with take a long-term view—unlike typical retail investors—which allows the events to focus on enduring themes.
“The key for us is to cut between the noise that people like Donald Trump are great at creating and trying to find that long term theme,” he notes.
Balancing revenue with a light sales touch
Unlike traditional conferences, Institutional Investor has had to rethink how it generates revenue from its events. Because the focus is on meaningful discussions rather than hard selling, the firm has to carefully balance monetisation with maintaining a genuine, community-driven atmosphere that doesn’t feel overly salesy.
Beveridge explains that events are monetised through asset managers paying to attend or to speak, allowing them to showcase their branding. However, the firm makes sure the focus of these speeches remains on thought leadership-led discussions rather than sales pitches.
To reinforce this approach, he adds that speakers aren’t allowed to give formal presentations. Instead, they are interviewed, which enables Institutional Investor to maintain control over the narrative.
“The most important thing for us is that the asset owners, the pension funds, insurance companies, the family offices feel that they’re not going to get oversold to,” he says.
“But at the same time, we’re not a charity and we need to bring in the asset managers to make sure that they can connect with these asset owners.”
Delivering premium value
As Institutional Investor’s events are positioned as premium, it’s crucial that attendees receive premium value. Beveridge emphasises that he wants asset owners, pension funds and other institutional investors to leave with actionable insights or a clear benchmark for their thinking.
“It’s very easy as an investor to become insular. You hang out with your people in your office, and you have your views on the markets and risk,” he says. “But when we bring them together with their peers, they get different views.”
Meanwhile, from the perspective of Institutional Investor’s clients, Beveridge says the events provide a valuable opportunity to build long-term relationships with potential clients.
To truly enable this opportunity, the events are carefully designed to encourage it. For example, presentations and panel sessions are kept brief to allow ample time for attendee discussions and seating is deliberately assigned to ensure the right people sit next to each other, he says.
Even though asset managers seated beside potential clients are not permitted to sell at that moment, the forum offers a chance for genuine conversation, which helps start relationships and opens the door for future follow-ups, he notes.
“Because we are premium, we don’t have that many asset managers in the room, so it’s quite high touch. We really look after each one to make sure that they are meeting the right people,” he says.
While Beveridge acknowledges that quantifying value in terms of return on investment is challenging, he says Institutional Investor does provide sponsors’ marketing teams with a ‘return on investment statement’ detailing who their salespeople engaged with during the event.
Reaching the right audiences
When Beveridge joined Institutional Investor 14 years ago, he noticed that despite the clear value these events offered attendees, there was little marketing promotion around them.
“One of the things that always frustrated me about our firm was we weren’t making as much fuss as we should have about the events,” he says.
As a result, over the past couple of years, Beveridge says he has begun actively promoting the events and the firm more broadly, moving away from the previous reliance on word-of-mouth.
This is particularly important as marketing teams’ influence is changing and they are becoming the decision makers, so they need to be actively targeted through event promotion, he adds.
“Our sales team is great, they know the right people to talk to, but the asset management landscape has changed, and marketing teams are much more in control now of budgets and strategy,” he says.
That’s why Institutional Investor sponsored FP Live! and the FP Awards as it gave the firm a chance to raise its profile among the right audience and spark conversations about its events, he says.
Another approach the firm adopted was targeting previously untapped audiences. Beveridge says there has been success from marketing certain groups that previously were once overlooked, particularly the family office segment.
While family offices are typically known as secretive investors that prefer to keep a low profile, Beveridge says he noticed some ground swelling interest among assets managers in wanting to work with and raise capital from family them. He therefore recognised the need to attract family offices to Institutional Investor’s events to facilitate connections with asset managers.
To achieve this, he explains that the firm built the family office community organically by first understanding what topics family offices want to hear and discuss, then ensuring these subjects were prominently featured at events to attract their interest.
Institutional Investor also takes an organic approach to promoting events on social media, by encouraging attendees, keynote speakers and advisory boards to share their experiences on their own channels, generating valuable earned media, Beveridge says.
He adds that over the past year, the firm has also begun exploring paid media, increasing its LinkedIn ad spend by around 20%. However, Beveridge says the most effective strategy has been its focus on targeted campaigns.
He says he now acts as a bridge between the sales and marketing teams, ensuring they work closely together to develop highly targeted campaigns and messaging.
By adopting this approach, the firm has seen a 500% increase in leads this year, according to Beveridge. He adds that not every lead will be relevant and it’s crucial to have the right people attending the events to maintain their value. Therefore, the firm regularly refines its follow-up lists on a near-weekly basis to create a smaller, but more relevant group of potential attendees.
In addition to an increase in leads, this approach has also opened the firm up to a new audience, helping to diversify its reach and engage with potential attendees who, much like family offices, can often be overlooked, he adds.
“Lots of these leads were smaller asset managers who weren’t in our universe before and now are. Hopefully they’ll grow, and then one day they’ll be able to afford to use us,” he says.
Continued collaboration
Looking ahead, Beveridge says he plans to apply the same targeted campaign approach to other communities in order to expand Institutional Investor’s potential client base. In particular, he aims to increase engagement with individuals outside the traditional asset management sector.
“People in accountancy firms, data providers or legal firms, who we haven’t traditionally targeted. We have had some clients like that, but not to a large extent that we want. That’s part of our ambition,” he says.
As with any business, Institutional Investor has plans for growth. Beveridge says that continuing to strengthen collaboration between the marketing and sales teams will be a key driver of that growth as it can create more effective strategies that deliver better results.
He explains this shift in mindset: “Instead of being something that was seen as over there, that’s the marketing department. ‘Can you help us get the sales brochure, ready? Or can you put up a website?’ It’s now very much hand in glove with sales.”
This integrated approach is reflected in the organisational structure, with marketing now reporting to Beveridge. He works closely with the content, sales, and marketing teams to ensure they operate as one cohesive unit.
“It is all about growth, and the marketing team is absolutely central to that,” he says.
Encouraging closer collaboration between the marketing and sales team enables sales to guide marketing on which audiences to target with event campaigns. This ensures the right people attend and highlights previously untapped groups worth reaching out to.
This approach not only supports Institutional Investor’s goal of broadening its audience but also reinforces its long-standing strategy of hosting events that foster communities where attendees can speak openly and share insights. These gatherings help participants learn and build lasting relationships.