Content marketing is becoming an increasingly critical strategy for companies in the financial industry to attract and retain customers. In an industry where competitors often struggle to differentiate their services from each other, content can be a crucial tool for distinguishing your brand. But developing content simply for the sake of filling out a blog calendar usually leads nowhere. To drive growth and return on investment (ROI), financial brands need a winning content plan that captures audience interest and positions their expertise.
At Creatives On Call, our on-demand teams have extensive experience in the banking and financial industries and deliver curated solutions that meet your customers’ needs. From financial copywriters to content strategists specializing in niches like insurance and investment, we can create your dream team for financial content.
Importance of a Financial Content Marketing Strategy
The financial services marketplace has become intensely competitive, with shifting customer expectations around personalized experiences, value-added services and convenience. Financial institutions face rising pressures to adapt quickly in order to:
- Attract new customers: Getting found by the right audiences and conveying your differentiated value is vital to fueling new account growth and loan volume pipelines. This requires resources and skill sets that content can supply through organic search visibility and shareable informative material.
- Retain existing customers: Content helps you develop ongoing engagement opportunities through copy that nurtures customer relationships, cross-sells products like planning tools or payment methods, and positions your expertise. This keeps clients coming back to you as a trusted partner rather than to competitors.
- Enhance brand reputation: Clearly communicating “who you are, what you do and why you keep money safe” builds confidence and preference. Content presents low-funnel opportunities to repeatedly showcase stability, security and customer service — the foundations of brand reputation.
- Drive urgency for conversion: With constrained budgets, creating compelling content that persuades prospects to take action now rather than later becomes vital. This could mean optimizing pages to highlight limited-time offers or using content types like how-to guides that lead readers to application completion.
An intentional content plan provides the visibility, trust and calls-to-action (CTAs) that enables banks, lenders, advisors and insurance providers to achieve growth in a changing marketplace. With experience across the content landscape — from web copywriting to content strategy consulting — Creatives On Call helps you get content initiatives off the ground so they start working for you.
Defining Your Content Marketing Strategy
A content strategy is more than just planning out pieces to write or images to produce. It involves putting the pieces of content and marketing together to work in harmony to achieve overarching business goals. Content strategies outline a plan for topics that engage your audience and funnel them toward conversion points, and then lay out actionable insights to deliver on those content pieces.
Without a documented approach, it’s easy to find yourself playing an endless game of catch-up on a treadmill of one-off articles or social media posts. Having a guiding strategy empowers you to coordinate all marketing efforts under a unified mission.
Knowing the Reasons and Aims
To start developing a content strategy, ask yourself what goals you have in terms of:
- Lead generation to fuel the sales pipeline.
- Brand awareness and positioning.
- Customer retention and loyalty building.
- Thought leadership and authority establishment.
With clear objectives defined, ensure your ideas and topics strongly support your reasons for investing in content creation. Maintain focus on promoting products, growing market share, improving retention rates or whatever lines up with current strategic targets. Creatives On Call can meet you where you’re at in your financial marketing strategy, help you identify goals that align with a content plan and put our team to work.
Understanding Your Financial Services Audience
One of the biggest mistakes brands make is producing content to satisfy themselves rather than cater to their customers. Your content must resonate with your audience’s interests, address their difficulties and speak their language.
Truly knowing the financial customers you serve allows you to create content that feels like it was written specifically for them. Build detailed buyer personas that capture demographic details as well as deeper psychographics around attitudes, pain points, behaviors and motivations. This is one of the key benefits of partnering with Creatives On Call – we can provide a holistic approach to content marketing (and other creative marketing efforts) to deliver the services you need. We have experts in buyer personas in the finance industry who can help you identify who you’re marketing to, and then expert content strategists who can create a plan based on these personas.
Customer Personas in Finance
Here are two examples of personas for the financial industry:
Retirement-Focused Baby Boomers
- Age 63–70
- About to retire or recently retired
- Interested in wealth preservation, income streams
- Concerns around healthcare, taxes, running out of funds
First-Time Homebuying Millennials
- Age 24–32 urban dwellers
- Educated with entry-level careers
- Seeking financial advice on mortgage options
Create personas covering your product/service ecosystem and review them when making content decisions to keep perspective. The more you know your audience, the more targeted you can make your content.
Mapping Out Content Pillars and Topics
With your target audience and goals clarified, the next phase is structuring a content architecture to organize upcoming articles.
Building Content Pillars
Content pillars act as overarching themes and categories relevant to your financial brand and customers. They reflect areas your audience shows interest in based on search behavior, questions asked and materials downloaded.
Here are popular pillars in financial services:
- Investing 101: Covers investing basics, types of accounts, building a portfolio, retirement plans, etc.
- Wealth management: Tax strategy, estate planning and wealth transfer.
- Mortgages: Home loan guidance and first-time buyer tips.
- Personal finance habits: Budgeting help, dealing with debt, and increasing savings.
Developing Specific Article Topics
With pillars defined, generate article topics that provide value and align with strategic goals.
Consider:
- Keyword opportunities based on search volume/competition.
- Most link-worthy ideas to build domain authority.
- Evergreen versus time-sensitive posts.
- Different formats like explainers, how-tos, list posts, etc.
Continually brainstorm fresh ideas across pillars so you always have a healthy list of articles to produce at your fingertips. Our team helps you keep content fresh by staying up to date with the latest industry practices and trends.
Crafting SEO-Friendly Financial Content
Writing excellent content also means optimizing it for visibility. Conduct keyword research to identify terms and questions customers type around your products and services during their journey. Focus on authoritative keywords that attract qualified traffic. Key elements of search engine optimization (SEO) include:
- Article title and metadata: Include primary and secondary keywords in titles and metadata. Write compelling meta descriptions that appear in search snippets conveying the essence of content.
- Headers: Divide content with nested heading tags H2 and H3, and mark the main topics and ideas covered.
- Alt text: Describe images with accurate alt text, including target keywords where they fit organically.
Promoting and Repurposing Your Financial Content
Equally important to crafting awesome finance content is having a promotion plan to amplify its impact. Consider building an editorial calendar that plots out social media posts driving visitors to articles.
Email subscribers about special content recommendations through newsletters. Run retargeting digital ads towards recent site visitors guiding them back to relevant articles. To expand value, repurpose articles into multiple formats. Turn a series of posts into a lead magnet report. Record a podcast discussion around a popular article. Infographics also play well for visual learners.
If this sounds like a lot of coordination, that’s because it is. Thankfully, Creatives On Call serves as your trusted partner helping you navigate all facets of a comprehensive content strategy, so you see the results you’re looking for. Over 100 financial institutions in the U.S. have worked with us to solve their most complex commercial challenges, and we’re eager to partner with you next.
Tracking Content Performance
Finally, your business must continually measure content against indicators revealing what’s moving the needle on overarching goals:
Brand Key Performance Indicators
- Brand search volume showing awareness
- Backlinks displaying domain authority
- Direct traffic showing loyalty
- Social media followers and engagement
Sales Key Performance Indicators
- Traffic and leads from segments
- Lead-to-customer conversion rates
- Form fills and downloads
- Sales influenced by content
Use insights into the highest-performing pieces to shape upcoming content plans toward initiatives working well. The more data you collect on your content, the more you can refine it.
Investing in a Content Strategy
An effective financial content strategy is not just about rising to the top of search engine rankings. Instead, it’s about building a strategy that prioritizes trust above all else. By focusing on ensuring transparency, credibility and consistency, financial companies can leverage content marketing to foster trust among their audiences.
Look To Creatives On Call for Financial Marketing Services
Creatives On Call is an industry-leading marketing and creative consultancy specializing in helping businesses solve marketing and communications challenges. With over 900 financial subject matter experts (SMEs) on our team, we have vast experience helping financial institutions solve their most pressing marketing and creative problems. From financial branding strategies to infographic design, we’re here to help you stand out in the industry.
While we believe financial marketing services should be an ongoing effort, we can also connect you with our content experts for single projects. We can build teams fast and on demand and start delivering on our promises right away.
Wherever you are in your marketing journey, we’re here to meet you and get to work. Contact us today to get started.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an example of a content strategy?
A content strategy is a plan that outlines the types of content an organization will create and share to attract its target audience. For example, a company may create blog posts, videos, podcasts and white papers as part of an overall content strategy aimed at educating potential customers about their products or services.
What is the meaning of financial content?
Financial content refers to any information, data or media that focuses on topics related to money, investing, business or economics. This can include news articles, videos, blog posts, podcasts, reports or other media covering the financial markets, companies, industries, personal finance advice and economic analysis or data.
