Tips on Content Marketing for Financial Services
Content marketing is a very good inbound marketing strategy which involves businesses developing content useful and relevant to their intended audiences with these general goals in mind; nurturing trust in the prospects, increasing brand awareness and improving conversion rates. Content marketing is not a direct pitch of financial services. Rather, it focuses on the pain points prospects are suffering from with the aim of solving them using helpful content. The financial services market is very cutthroat, meaning services not capable of using content marketing effectively eventually get overtaken by competitors successful in content marketing. Some types of content marketing that yield fruitful results in the financial services industry include; social media posts, blog posts, podcasts, e-books and Whitepapers and videos. Below, are some ways to ensure good ROI on your content marketing regardless of your preferred method.
First, ensure that the content you develop is relevant and interesting to the audience you target. While relevance is important, never waste too much effort and time making your content relevant for everyone. This will only be counter-productive, by watering down its relevance. Also, avoid using any click bait headlines that appear useful, only leading your audience to irrelevant content. Relevant content engages the audience and makes sure they never get bored, meaning that they will look forward to consuming your content and trust you. Relevant content is voiced properly, addresses the pain points of the specific audience and uses examples the audience can relate to.
All the content you publish, more so blog posts and videos needs to be optimised for specific keywords. However, you should desist from keyword stuffing, since this makes the content unnatural and stilted, not to mention how penalising it can be on search engine rankings. Rather, shift your attention to addressing searcher intents for specific keywords to genuinely help them. A good place to start is including answers to questions that appear in the section “people also ask”. Additionally, financial services firms should seek to optimise around their geographical regions, which seems simple enough but is surprisingly not done enough by most people.
While plenty of organizations avoid publishing long content due to the impression that it can be too expensive or come off as boring to the audience, this is very far from the truth. Averagely, blog posts that rank highly have a minimum of 1900 words, implying that they drive traffic more compared to short posts. Additionally, regardless of your preferred length of posts, always make sure that they are both engaging and relevant so that the audience never gets bored. While long posts can be useful, most people fall into the trap of not making them engaging enough, making the audience get bored quickly.
Something extremely important financial services businesses should take heed of is repurposing content to stretch their ROI. For instance, people can develop entertaining infographics from blog posts and share them on social media platforms, convert blog posts into videos or write blog posts that resume a podcast. Generally, pieces of content that perform well in certain areas have a good chance of impressive performance in other areas as well. Additionally, repurposed content can be useful in reaching new audience members.
