How Does Content Marketing Work?
An inbound marketing strategy is called content marketing when businesses develop content that is relevant and useful to their target audience.
Awareness-building for brands, Building trust with your prospects, Achieving higher conversion rates…
Rather than directly pitching your financial services, content marketing focuses on what problems your prospects are experiencing and seeks to solve these problems.
This blog post is a form of content marketing – it aims to provide you with useful tips and help you understand its benefits.
Common challenges and solutions in the financial services industry:
1. Search engine optimization: competing organically
Google’s EAT and YMYL guidelines make it impossible for financial blogs and websites to compete with Turbotax or Nerdwallet.
Creating thought leadership for their brand is the most obvious solution.
For broad topics that provide the greatest exposure, Google makes it very difficult to build authority.
We can present unique ideas by upping our content game.
The solutions:
Guest post on reputable blogs, write an ebook or book or establish a social media brand relating to your industry to become a thought leader.
Your audience may be more interested in long-tail keywords with a lower search volume.
Make your website an authoritative source of information by inviting experts to write guest posts.
To expand the scope of a topic, create content featuring multiple financial experts.
Establish partnerships with companies that provide data or analytics for the purpose of conducting original research.
To see how trends in the industry are shifting, create a survey about a broad topic.
Create shareable content on your website by using video and alternative media.
2. Regulations Compliance
The authorities will quickly take action against your client if they receive false information.
As a result, your image will be badly tarnished, something that no one wants to build after facing a lot of negative criticism.
Regulatory scrutiny is particularly intense for financial services when it comes to publishing online content, sharing it on social media, and advertising your brand.
As well as monitoring influencers and financial services content on social media, FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) oversees everything related to the financial industry.
FINRA’s rules intend to “protect investors from false, misleading claims, exaggerated statements, and material omissions.”
The financial services industry is governed by a number of additional regulations in addition to FINRA.
Bank content must comply with strict rules established by the Office of the Comptroller of Currency, for example.
Solutions
Protect your client’s legal interests by creating disclaimers.
In order to avoid liability, businesses should update their websites to reflect local privacy laws.
Financial services writers should be hired.
Identify common regulatory barriers and set strict guidelines for content.
To ensure compliance, ensure your client uses a legal review process.
Select topics that you are familiar with and that your legal team has experience with.0
3. Finding Knowledgeable Writers
In the solutions above, I outlined the need to find writers that have expertise in financial and regulatory matters.
However, as someone who’s managed a team of freelancers for years now, that’s certainly easier said than done.
The largest problem is finding those that are subject matter experts. Once you do find an expert, two other issues surface – the writer is either too expensive for your budget, or they simply can’t write well.
Solutions
Reverse engineer E-A-T. Find writers on high-ranking SERP articles and offer them a freelance partnership (if in the budget –many of the best finance writers won’t touch articles for under $1 a word or $750 per piece!)
Use LinkedIn to create exact ads about what you’re looking for, with examples and budget in mind. You’ll get much noise there, but you’ll find someone capable. My success rate for riders is about 10% – yes, one out of every 10 writers is typically capable of creating the content needed.
Hire and train in-house writers.
4. Time Is Of The Essence
Financial news and current events move fast, as government and independent financial reports are generated daily.
The last thing you want is a post on a major story stuck in a week-long review. These frustrations are further amplified when working with the extended review process of enterprise companies.
If your client offers any sort of financial advice or reporting, it’s essential to optimize review processes to pump out content in real-time.
Solutions
Set content guidelines of legal compliance with your client to reduce review times.
Prioritize real-time and interactive content editorial review.
Something about streamlining review with other partners (maybe taking ownership of channels or getting prior go ahead).
5. Targeting The Right Readers
You will come across a wide variety of people with different levels of expertise in the finance world.
It’s easy for readers to become inundated by jargon and complicated financial procedures, especially when dealing with topics like taxes, cryptocurrency, retirement accounts, and portfolio investing.
Simplifying content so it’s understandable by most readers is important, but so is making the optimal content for those readers most likely to go further with you or your client’s brand.
You’ll need to create a strategy that caters to people looking for general financial advice to increase your client’s authority and create targeted content for people specifically interested in employing their company.
Solutions
Simplify top-funnel content to attract a broader audience.
Employ a CMS to meet customers mid-funnel with targeted content based on their interaction with your site (content can be more sophisticated).
Nurture intent by following up with relevant advice and selling points based on their engagement history.
Feed this information to sales staff to follow up with a sales call that focuses on specific customer pain points.