Financial Content Marketing

What is Content Marketing in Financial Services?

In the financial industry, engaging clients and business partners through effective content marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of a financial marketing strategy. Content in the financial industry can take a variety of formats, including white papers, blog posts, podcasts, e-books, social posts, video and much more. This content gets distributed to business-to-business (B2B) clients and consumers on a mix of channels, including the web, email, social media, paid advertorials and external blogs. The goal of content marketing in the financial space is to raise awareness, educate audiences, engage them with value and ultimately drive business.
 

Why is Content Marketing Important in Finance?

Content marketing in the financial services industry means creating and posting high-quality information related to finance or products that you offer to customers and prospective customers. The customer experience for the financial services industry, like for almost every other industry, is increasingly becoming digital, which makes content marketing extremely valuable. 

This shift to digital presents an opportunity for financial services marketers to leverage content marketing to connect with their customers on a personal level and grow awareness of their products and services. Engaging finance customers with valuable content that explains financial products, provides helpful tips for managing money or even keeps consumers up to date on changes in the finance industry can increase credibility and build trust with audiences.
 

What Kinds of Financial Companies Can Benefit from Content Marketing?

A wide range of financial companies can benefit from establishing a content marketing program, such as:
 

Banking Institutions: 

Content marketing for banking has become increasingly popular, and that comes at no surprise. Long gone are the days of customers doing the majority of their banking in person or via ATM. Consumers are now accessing their financial information online or through mobile apps. In fact, nearly 50% of millennials are using mobile banking. Consumers are also increasingly going online to find financial advice and make decisions on financial products. According to Google, mobile searches related to “financial planning and management” and “best credit card(s)” have increased by 70% over the last two years. Similarly, B2B clients are more frequently interacting with brands online. Video calls are taking the place of in-person meetings and business decision-makers are evaluating websites and thought leadership pieces to make financial decisions even before making contact with a sales representative.

Banks can leverage content marketing to enhance their brand awareness, engage with customers and prospective customers, and promote their products and services. When banks create informational articles, blog posts, and interactive content, banks can establish themselves as thought leaders and build trust with their target audience while also providing valuable information about their niche.
 

Asset Management Firms: 

Asset management firms can benefit from content marketing by sharing market analysis, expert insights, and investment strategies. This high quality content assets will help firms to position themselves as trusted advisors and attract potential investors.
 

Insurance Companies:

Insurance companies can implement insurance content marketing to educate potential policyholders about various coverage options, risk management strategies, the importance of financial protection, and what types of insurance options are best for each individual.

 

Mortgage Lenders and Real Estate Agencies: 

Mortgage lenders and real estate agencies can create content that educates prospective homebuyers, provides guidance on the mortgage process, and showcases available properties. This type of financial content is beneficial to educate homebuyers on the process, and it also lends the opportunity for the Mortgage Lender and Real Estate Agencies to promote their services.

 

Fintechs: 

Fintech can leverage content marketing to increase their visibility, explain complex financial technologies, and highlight the unique value propositions they offer. 

What is a Financial Content Marketing Strategy?

A financial content marketing strategy is a digital strategy where your company shares industry knowledge about finance via online materials. Unlike traditional marketing which directly promotes your brand, content marketing focuses on offering information that helps to solve customer problems. This content is meant to motivate customers to reach out to you and potentially do business with you. 

A strategy looks beyond just the content however, to determine how marketers can help a company reach their business goals. A good strategy will tie content marketing initiatives to specific KPIs such as engagement, lead generation and website traffic. These goals should then tie into overarching business objectives such as improving customer relationships or sales.

 

Getting Started with Financial Content Marketing

When creating content for the financial industry, it can be difficult to know where to start. Below are some steps to complete before documenting your strategy. 

 

Create Personas

The first step involves determining who your target customer is. Your team should take a data-driven approach to this exercise, by conducting client interviews and working together with sales and product to incorporate any feedback into your findings.  

 

Conduct a Content Audit

When choosing which types of assets to leverage, begin with a content audit. Assess what has performed well and resonated with audiences. By starting with this, you will be able to identify gaps and see which topics are most interesting to your target demographic before creating new pieces. 

 

Outsource Content Development

Outsourcing content development can help your team provide high-quality information at regular intervals. Content licensing companies such as NYTLicensing offer various publications that your team can reuse in their marketing materials, such as The New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Before starting a content marketing strategy, it’s important to determine who will be creating content and when. Your team should also determine how much content they can realistically produce on a regular cadence and which kinds of topics should be outsourced.

 

What Types of Content Marketing Exist in Finance?

Content marketing is beneficial for many different types of finance companies, including fintech, financial services, and banking. There are numerous kinds of content marketing strategies available to financial marketers, including:

• White papers

• Ebooks

• Podcasts

• Blog Posts

• Byline Articles

• Webinars

• Video 

• Infographics

Choosing the type of asset to create will depend on your target audience, how they like to consume content, and what stage of the buyer journey they are in. For example, assets such as webinars are great for mid to lower funnel prospects, since they are a big-time commitment for someone unfamiliar with your brand. Infographics on the other hand are easy to digest and can be appealing to higher funnel leads who may not have heard of your organization or product. 

Benefits of Content Marketing for Financial Services

Despite any challenges that come with building a content strategy, marketers are enthusiastic about the benefits of content marketing for financial institutions.

 

Increase Brand Awareness

Promoting your brand and protecting its reputation are very important to your business’ success. When planning your content strategy, you will want to determine the topics you want to cover, as well as where you will publish each resource. Doing this ahead of time allows you to strategically increase your brand awareness where it will be the most impactful.

 

Continually Engage Users

Through your content marketing, you will want to concentrate on not only educating your target audience,  but also continually engaging your current clients. Providing them with informative knowledge so they can make beneficial decisions is crucial to your success.

 

Identify & Help Reduce Pain Points

Addressing pain points with your educational content shows that your company is aware of the challenges surrounding finances and considers them important as well. 

 

Increase Trust

Adding customer testimonial videos can increase trust and spur interaction. You want to show customers you are a go-to source for information when your customers are making their financial decisions.

 

Reach Customers in a Genuine Way

Content marketing allows you to appeal to prospects by retiring overly sales-sounding language often used in pitches. Salesy language like this can leave customers anxious, and replacing it with helpful, non-promotional content can be more beneficial.

 

Deliver the Right Message 

Broad advertisements and messages can typically go overlooked, but content marketing helps you tailor your messages, deliver personalized content, and connect more with your target audiences.

 

Reach Younger Generations

Younger generations find and consume information in different ways. They also think about financial services vastly differently. Since millennials now make up a large portion of the world’s population, businesses need to consider how millennials have different ideas and concerns when it comes to financial issues.

 

Differentiate Yourself from Competitors

Providing content that is engaging and helpful helps you differentiate yourself from competitors - drawing in more prospects. 

 

Generate Leads with Better Return on Investment

Content marketing can be an extremely efficient way of generating leads for your business. Educational content helps guide prospective clients through their buyer’s journey toward services and solutions you offer.

11 Tips for Getting Started With Financial Content

1. Build Trust With Educational Content:

Consumers and B2B clients are looking for credible financial information online. Establish your brand as an expert in financial services and provide value to customers and prospective clients by publishing educational content that helps them make the most of their financial lives and businesses. Helpful pieces of financial content could include articles on investing money, steps to consider before taking out a mortgage, business loans or even teaching young adults how to save for the future. These articles should be well-researched and vetted by internal experts. By providing credible content that consumers can use in their daily lives, your brand can build trust and loyalty with its customers.
 

2. Create FAQ Pages for Financial Advice:

For most, managing finances can be a confusing and overwhelming process. Provide value to customers and prospective clients by creating FAQ-style website content which answers their questions related to finance. Gather feedback from your team and determine the most commonly asked questions from clients. Topics could include anything from retirement savings to student loans. Use these questions as a basis to build out your FAQ page, a resource that can ultimately become a helpful tool for both SEO and engaging digital audiences.
 

3. Showcase Financial News:

From the fluctuations in the stock market to the latest from the Federal Reserve, the world of finance is always changing. Consider curating the news as part of your strategy. Create a current events section on your content platform that showcases news articles and in-depth analysis of news from the world of finance. Alternatively, you can leverage news content in your curated emails or as part of your blog strategy. 

71% of decision-makers note that most of the thought leadership they read is not delivering valuable information. By incorporating journalism into your marketing strategy, you can ensure you are providing cutting-edge information that will be valuable for clients. Additionally, by partnering with a licensing firm, such as NYTLicensing, you can guarantee this content is unique for most of your viewers. Most Americans are not paying for digital news and only about 37% are paying for more than a subscription.

By providing timely coverage of business and finance news, as well as translating it in a way that is relevant and understandable to your customers, you can build loyalty and establish your brand as a thought leader. Licensing financial content from a reputable news source to provide customers with timely and up-to-the-minute information can be an effective way to cover the finance industry and build credibility with your customer base without straining your team’s time and resources.
 

4. Make Sure Your Financial Content Is Reliable:

As a financial company, your reliability is paramount to your success. This also applies to the content that you publish. When considering, curating, or syndicating financial content, it's critical for the pieces to be well-researched and consistently reliable. Employ the help of your in-house finance experts and ask them to review or write blog posts that showcase expertise. Also consider licensing articles or editorial content from reputable publishers such as The New York Times or The Economist to provide insights from leading experts that you can be sure have been thoroughly vetted and provide the most up-to-date information.
 

5. Don’t Ignore the In-Person Connection

As important as it is to embrace the new digital age of finance, the in-person experience is still a critical part of doing business. Whether you are interacting with customers at a local branch or setting up Zoom meetings with B2B clients, it's important to have people on staff who espouse the same values through personal interactions as you do through your content. Team members that have direct interactions with your customers are also a great resource for generating content ideas. They often have the best insight into what kinds of questions clients ask and the pain points that you can address through content.

 

6. Leverage Thought Leadership: 

Whether it be an article from a respected sales leader on your team or licensed material from Dealbook, thought leadership can help improve trust and credibility. In fact, 89 percent of decision-makers note that this kind of content can positively impact their perception of an organization. Additionally, 50 percent of decision-makers are reading an hour or more of this kind of content every week. For companies looking to improve ROI and drive impact, demonstrating thought leadership is a must.
 

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Try Something New

Feel free to experiment with new kinds of financial content or different formats to see what resonates best with your audience. This can include hosting a webinar for the first time, trying our different kinds of email campaigns to see which has the best conversion rate, or experimenting with new copy on landing pages. Once the results are gathered, these new insights should be incorporated into the next content piece or campaign.
 

8. Deliver Across Multiple Channels

Planning to deliver your content across different channels makes sure that your content marketing is built in a way where it can be repurposed. By showcasing content across multiple channels, you can increase your exposure to customers and prospects without creating new assets. Additionally, your customers will have different preferences for when and where they consume content. 
 

9. Develop Accessible Financial Information

Oftentimes, financial information or messaging can be excruciatingly complex. While this can be broken down further in words, another great opportunity may be infographics. This visual content can take technical, difficult-to-understand content, and make it significantly more accessible. Additionally, make sure that writing is clear and concise. Avoid industry jargon that makes content difficult to understand.

 

10. Use Interactive Content

Interactive content marketing delivers impressive results when it comes to engagement. This format draws users into branded online spaces in a more personal way. For finance brands, this creates an opportunity to connect and offer value to customers.

 

11. Tell Short Stories

Many struggle to understand the more complex, detailed side of finance. Storytelling in content marketing is an effective way to engage customers while helping them remember your brand.  This form of content marketing can deliver intimidating data into bitesize snapshots.

Examples of Companies Benefiting From Financial Content Marketing

As you begin to work through your financial content marketing strategy, it’s helpful to look at other companies that have found success. Here are some B2C and B2B content marketing examples:

 

Betterment leverages content marketing to help customers navigate finance:

Betterment is a robo-advisor and financial advisory company based in New York. Having launched in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Betterment has committed to providing customers with content that can help them reach their financial goals and navigate the world of finance. A great example of content marketing is Betterment's retirement page, which features resources for the company’s customers, including a breakdown of retirement account options, links to relevant betterment articles and answers to frequently asked questions, all presented in a way that is accessible and easy to understand.

 

AdvisorStream builds trust with clients through credible content:

AdvisorStream is an award-winning marketing platform that helps financial advisors grow their practices by building trust and credibility with clients through highly engaging and personalized communications. AdvisorStream leverages licensed content from a number of reputable publishers in the financial space including The Economist and The New York Times, allowing advisors to create automated marketing programs centered on engaging and informing clients with reputable, high-value content. By leveraging this content, financial advisors have been able to successfully deepen relationships with their customers and nurture leads.

 

Final Thoughts

The financial services sector is rapidly evolving and progressively embracing a digital-first approach. It’s no longer enough to solely focus on conversions – financial services brands must also build trust and loyalty with their audiences through content marketing strategy and initiatives. By developing an understanding of your customers’ pain points, you can develop content that is effective and delivers value to them. Credibility and authenticity are also critical to maintaining your reputation and deepening relationships with consumers. Leveraging helpful resources from team members on the front lines of your business as well as licensing articles from well-known publishers can help you build out a content strategy that drives results and keeps readers coming back. 

 

Frequently Asked Questions about Financial Content Marketing:
 

Why is content marketing important for financial institutions and banks?

Content marketing is important for financial institutions and banks because it allows them to build trust and credibility with their audience by providing valuable and informative content and establishing themselves as thought leaders in the field. It also allows banks to engage with existing and prospective customers by raising brand awareness and demonstrating expertise in the field. Finally, content marketing for financial institutions can contribute to lead generation and conversion through answering pain points of potential customers.

 

How does content marketing in finance compare to other sectors?

Finance is a highly regulated industry, requiring financial companies to ensure their content adheres to regulations or compliance guidelines, which can add an extra layer of review and editing when creating and distributing content. Additionally, Finance can be an elevated topic about which the public has limited awareness, necessitating content that explains concepts, provides guidance, and addresses the questions of the audience. Transparent and educational financial content will help build trust with the website’s audience.

 

What is a financial marketing strategy?

A financial marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan to promote financial services and products, drive business growth, and attract new customers. When creating a financial marketing strategy, one must identify target audiences and understand their needs and preferences, and develop tailored financial marketing messages to communicate the value proposition. A financial marketing strategy typically includes market research, branding, product positioning, customer segmentation, advertising, digital marketing, content creation, and customer relationship management. Through enacting a financial marketing strategy, a company may aim to differentiate itself from competitors, establish trust, and ultimately drive customer acquisition, retention, and revenue generation.