One of the most effective modern marketing strategies from both a cost-effectiveness and impact standpoint is content marketing.
Content marketing can help financial brands expand their audience of interested consumers and drive digital growth to boost new customer acquisition.
Given the popularity of digital marketing, simply publishing a new blog post now and then is not enough to distinguish your financial institution from all the others doing the same thing. For your content marketing strategy to be successful, you must ensure that the content you are making available to your audience offers them value.
In this article, you will learn how to design an effective content marketing strategy for your financial brand.
Create Content, Not Marketing Copy
Yes, it’s true that the content you create serves a marketing purpose. But don’t make the mistake of making this too obvious in your content.
If your blog posts simply list the benefits of doing business with your institution, people will likely have the same reaction they normally have to blatant marketing copy: they will do their best to ignore it.
Conversely, if you create content that provides your readers with value – tips about taking out a mortgage loan, how to calculate important financial ratios, how to invest for the future, etc. – you will not only hold their attention but will also likely keep them coming back to your site on a regular basis.
By providing your readers with useful information, you increase the chances that they will ultimately do business with your institution.
Define Your Strategy
Even if your blog doesn’t contain obvious marketing appeals that cause readers to tune out, it can still suffer from a lack of direction. Your results are likely to be better if you adhere to a well-defined content roadmap instead of merely covering topics that seem relevant with no overall strategy in mind.
Make sure that there is a purpose behind every post you publish. For instance, if you write a post providing tips for managing your finances, ask yourself what type of conversion should be associated with the post. It may be signing up for your email list, or it may be scheduling a visit with a financial planning specialist at your branch. While your blogs should hold your readers’ interest, it’s important to think at least a step or two ahead and ask yourself what reaction you hope to achieve and how you can capitalize on that reaction.
This is not to say that there has to be a separate goal for every blog post you publish. But your strategy needs to be designed to convert interest in your blogs to concrete actions that can turn into leads and, ultimately, new customers.
It’s also important to realize that current clients are a rich source of add-on business for any financial institution, so it’s important to consider this when designing a content marketing strategy. It makes sense to orient some of your content marketing efforts towards mentioning the benefits existing customers can take advantage of when signing up for new products.
This can help promote upsells as your existing client base is made aware of products they might not have otherwise known you offered or been inclined to sign up for without your content marketing efforts.
Another factor to consider when building your content marketing strategy is the type of content you will be using. A multimedia approach can help optimize the appeal of your content. Using images, videos, and infographics can enable your content to attract greater attention than would be the case if you simply use text.
Maximize Your Resources
There is much more to content marketing than simply creating quality content. To maximize your content’s impact, it needs to be as widely distributed as possible. To this end, make sure to take advantage of all your channels when getting the word out about your content. For instance, rather than simply placing a blog on your company website, use your social platforms to let people know about it. This could include channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Another important factor to consider when embarking on a content marketing strategy is investing in the process. While content marketing, generally speaking, is often a highly cost-effective process, potentially delivering a high ROI in terms of money spent, this doesn’t mean spending as little money on your campaigns as possible is the best strategy.
In some cases, it makes sense to pay to distribute your content more widely than usual in the form of paid content on various sites. For instance, you can spend a fairly small amount on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook to get your content in front of subscribers who match your preferred criteria.
It’s also important to look to your personnel when starting up a content marketing plan. Your financial institution is likely to have a number of staff members who have expertise in various areas that may be of interest to your readers. Even if these team members don’t write a blog post, it makes sense to get them involved by interviewing them to make your posts more valuable to your readers.
It can also make sense to look outside the institution for information. In your content marketing, you might want to feature outside experts who can provide your readers with interesting perspectives or valuable insights.
Audit Your Results
The final piece of the content marketing puzzle is evaluating your results to see if you are getting the desired ROI from your efforts. There are a number of analytics programs that can provide metrics relating to your campaigns for analysis. These solutions can track the number of visitors to your page, how long they stay, where they come from, etc.
Marketing campaign auditing software provides feedback on how your content marketing efforts are performing. Ultimately, of course, the most important metric is conversions, which shows how many new account signups or how much add-on business from existing customers you receive.
Content marketing is highly flexible. If a certain approach isn’t delivering the results you expect, it’s easy to take another tack. The key is to make sure to follow a plan that has specific goals in mind with associated metrics so you can track performance.
Boost Your Brand Awareness Online with Banks.com
To kickstart your content marketing campaign, consider partnering with Banks.com.
Banks.com is a market-leading, go-to resource for all things financial that works with financial brands to reach, engage, and educate a broad audience of potential customers.
Click here to learn how partnering with Banks.com can help you boost brand awareness and stimulate your digital growth.
