6 Content Marketing Tips for Financial Services
Published by Spinutech on November 2, 2021
Content marketing helps you organically foster relationships with the target audience for your financial services institution, whether you’re a bank, lender or advisory firm. Use this powerful tool to boost customer acquisition and retention and support your business overall.
Content marketing takes time, energy, and resources, so it’s not surprising that 30% of businesses outsource their content marketing needs. Read on to learn six content marketing tips for financial services and how the financial services digital marketing agency partner can help you grow your financial services business.
Identify Your Target Audience
To create content that effectively leads your customers through their buyer journey, you need to know exactly who they are. It used to be that you would market your products and services to everyone, and hope the right people would find you. However, casting too wide a net isn’t effective or efficient. Modern digital media lets you fine tune your target audience and focus your efforts.
A great starting point is to develop your buyer personas. Knowing your target audience and their specific behaviors can help you better understand how to tailor your content. For example, certain demographics may prefer to communicate with their bank through mobile apps while others prefer using a computer. Customizing your content and designing a website in favor of these preferences will enable you to generate more high-quality leads that are likely to convert, making your efforts that much more effective.
Map Out Your Customers’ Buyer’s Journey
In any industry, new customers move through a buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration and decision. Each of these stages requires different types of content.
- In the awareness stage, a customer may be looking to learn more about investing, which is where an educational blog can help.
- In the consideration stage, a customer could have realized their insurance doesn’t meet their needs and are searching for a solution. A case study will separate you from your competition by showing them how you’ve helped your customers in the past.
- In the decision stage, a customer may find that your bank offers good interest rates on personal loans. Offering a free or discounted consultation could be the incentive they need to convert.
Providing the content your customer needs, when they need it, will help them move through the funnel easily. This prevents friction in their buyer journey, establishes your credibility and creates a lasting relationship — keeping them from taking their business elsewhere.
Create Useful Content
The end goal of your marketing efforts is to convert people to customers or clients. Being overly promotional by emphasizing how amazing your business is may seem like the right way to achieve this goal — however, 70% of consumers prefer to learn about a company through content instead of an advertisement. Providing valuable content puts your customer’s concerns at the forefront and establishes your expertise and credibility — something that being salesy doesn’t accomplish.
Show your customers you care by providing useful content and acknowledging their pain points. Some customers may mistrust banks, some may be confused about mortgage rates and others may need wealth management guidance. Explain the ways they can solve their problems and offer your services as a solution. Along with creating valuable content, you should also customize it. 90% of people find custom-created content beneficial. Tailor your content to your target audience and provide value in a way that no one else has. This will separate you from your competition and keep your customers coming back.
Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts With SEO
SEO improves your content’s performance by helping it appear higher in search results — the higher the content ranks, the more likely it will be clicked. Implementing an SEO strategy will make your content marketing efforts that much more effective.
To build an SEO strategy, start with keyword research. Keyword research provides valuable insight into what specific phrases your target audience is searching for. A financial institution’s website SEO is held to a higher standard, gaining a consumer’s trust through expertise is important. From there, you can adjust your content to match, enabling your customers to find you easily.
Leverage Cross-Channel Marketing
Creating content to speak to your specific target audience can be challenging, especially when your customers are all in different stages of their buyer journey. This is where cross-channel marketing can help.
Utilize different channels for your content marketing efforts to reach different customers in your intended audience, such as:
- Social media
- Blogs
- Video content
- Email marketing
- Podcasts
- And more
Your market research will help you decide which channels you should use and what type of content to create for each channel. Every piece of content you create should also include a clear call to action to guide the customer through the funnel. Cross-channel marketing keeps your business top of mind and helps you maintain your customer relationships.
Develop a Content Marketing Plan
Creating a content marketing plan can help you focus your efforts on making content that will successfully lead your customer through their buyer journey. Your content should be created strategically and in a way that answers your customer’s questions. Giving them this insight demonstrates your credibility — which is especially important to your business considering only 56% of the population trusts businesses in financial services. Educate your customers with money-saving tips, provide industry insights and show them how you’re there for them by being a transparent and helpful resource.
Effective content starts and ends with strategy — without this, your content can lack direction and fall flat. Building a content marketing strategy with an established agency partner can help you maximize your efforts when it comes time to plan.
Creating a steady stream of quality content establishes you as an industry expert, increases brand awareness and keeps your business top of mind. What’s more, planning ahead makes the content marketing process run smoothly, helps you identify content gaps and ensures you stay consistent.
When to Outsource Your Content Marketing Needs
When trying to keep up with customer demands, industry trends and the ins and outs of financial services, it’s easy to fall behind with your content marketing efforts. If you find you don’t have the time, bandwidth or content creation skills to keep up, leverage a team of content marketing experts to handle it for you.
As a financial services business, you should look for an agency partner that helps you keep your website secure, compliant and user-friendly. The right agency partner will act as an extension of your team — giving you the peace of mind that your content marketing is being taken care of so that you can focus on managing your business.
At Spinutech we offer end-to-end digital solutions for banks, credit unions, insurance agencies, and other financial organizations and are happy to share examples of other companies similar to yours with whom we have worked. Contact Spinutech today to discuss how we can help grow your business through expert web design and development, digital marketing, and hosting.