A strong content marketing strategy is required for a financial institution to have a complete digital marketing plan. A broad collection of content is necessary to compete in search and to provide engagement elements for your social and email marketing channels. This guide will help you put your content marketing strategy into action.
Required Elements of a Financial Services Content Marketing Strategy
For a financial institution to use content to attract and engage existing and prospective customers, its website needs to be more than just financial product content. Search engines have become more sophisticated, and blatant attempts to generate traffic with 'clickbait' headlines or keyword-packed articles are doomed to fail.
A website full of content showcasing your expertise around financial services and your willingness to engage and educate consumers on subjects of importance to them will prove most effective. Building that content inventory and deploying it should be guided by a strategy that involves a repeatable process for developing and delivering relevant content to your target audience.
Here are the essential elements of a successful financial services content marketing strategy.
1. A Targeted Audience
Like any advertising campaign, content marketing plans should have specific audiences in mind and take a segmented approach, just as you would for traditional awareness or product marketing initiatives. The questions a 25-year-old has about personal finances differ from a 45-year-old, and your content plan needs to address those segments differently.
2. Goals
What is the purpose of your content? Do you want to raise brand awareness or create an engaged group of website visitors you can retarget in other channels? Are you looking to generate webinar signups or in-branch appointments? Your goals determine how deep your content funnel needs to be and how you will measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
3. Content Plan
Examining the goals for each audience will help you produce a content "wish list." You will also need to identify the types of content (articles, how-to videos, infographics, etc.) required to reach your goals for each audience. Engagement frequency will also help you understand the number of content pieces needed. That is the "aim" part of the "ready, aim, fire" approach to marketing.
4. Content Development
Having a plan ensures all aspects of your content are ready for deployment in the proper order. If you promote a webinar, you need the webinar content and a landing page prepared before you send emails and post social content.
A note on audiences, your content should be straightforward and varied. Still, well-designed content can appeal to multiple kinds of consumers if it addresses a topic that crosses various profiles.
This step is where many content marketing strategies falter as the marketer realizes how much content is needed. That is where a solution like Fintactix's AdviceSite can play a role. AdviceSite offers a turnkey library of financial education content covering subjects from saving to budgeting to home buying and debt management. AdviceSite gives you content you can build your strategy around.
5. Promotion/Distribution
Content can't live in a bubble. At the elementary level, you should optimize content for search engines (SEO) with all the elements necessary to help it match up to one or two primary search queries. SEO is a long-term strategy; you should promote the content through other channels, including email and social media. You can feature quality "evergreen" content repeatedly. And why not? You promote your products constantly. If you have an excellent answer to a common question, why not present it to the right audience regularly, too?
6. Measurement
Content marketing is a piece of the marketing puzzle that will be most effective if measured regularly. However, regular measurement can be disheartening if the execution of your program focuses on something other than your goals. Remember to set goals at each stage of the content funnel to provide a perspective for each stage. For example, suppose you measure what content is generating a lot of awareness (visits) but not delivering conversions. In that case, you'll have the opportunity to improve links and calls to action on these pages to increase the impact of that content.
Conculsions
Employing an effective content marketing program can help you grow share-of-wallet by providing the means to engage with existing customers continually without making a continuous sales pitch. The most positive engagements you can build are those that are meaningful to consumers.
Contact Fintactix today to find out how hundreds of banks and credit unions use our calculators and content library to engage consumers during their financial journeys.