How to build a successful financial content marketing strategy in 5 steps

Financial institutions—particularly smaller, community-focused ones—have limited marketing budgets and resources. As a result, every investment has to count, and every piece of content has to show impact. For financial institutions looking to build an impactful content marketing program, learn the five steps your institution can follow to build a successful financial content marketing program that can help your institution improve its bottom line.

Invest in Mobile

Any millennial and Gen-Xer will tell you—and so will a growing number of boomers—that their phones are their lives. The average adult is reported to check their phone 30 times a day and the average millennial checks their phone more than 150 times a day.[1] Consumers and small businesses are buying, selling, connecting, and transacting through their phones in increasing numbers every year. Having a mobile-first and responsive approach to design and development can make your phone and tablet experiences as usable and functional as your online offering. This leads to more positive consumer engagements, more often. And a good mobile experience is more than transactional—it builds your brand as well as, if not better than, any marketing campaign.

Interact

As you double down on technology, make sure you’re also using as much interactivity as possible to drive engagement. Give your audience something to do—click, view, listen, answer, ask, “like,” and comment. This can be through your social media channels, online calculators for mortgage or loan rates, or goal-based savings apps that receive deposits based consumers accomplishing goals. Online interactions might not be quite the same as personal ones, but in the digital age, they’re expected and crucial to creating engagement, gathering data, and growing your brand.

Personalize

Your financial marketing content, whether it takes the form of email, social sharing, blogs, white papers, videos, or any combination of these and other methods, should be personalized. This requires more than taking a consumer’s name to a field at the front of an email. To get truly personal means ensuring that the content is relevant to the consumer—both who, where, and when they are. After all, the same consumer at 35 or 55 will respond to content differently, based on where they are in their life cycle. They key is to gather as much data as you can—potentially through your mobile, interactive, and digital marketing efforts—and use it to your advantage.

Educate

In addition to relevance, financial marketing content only works if it offers real value. Often this value comes in the form of education. Teaching your audience can be as simple as sharing your expertise through a blog or white paper, or as sophisticated as leveraging more interactive ways: through a webinar, a video, or an online or mobile learning application. The former, webinars, are a great way to engage in back-and-forth discussions and really get to know the issues your consumers face, but they can be a heavy lift to do well. While online applications may lack some of the webinars’ face-to-face connection, they make up for it in other ways. Most online applications are extremely scalable—able to reach dozens, hundreds, even thousands of learners quickly for a much smaller investment of resources on your part—and are able to be used by consumers anytime, anywhere.

Market Targeted Products

As an added bonus, strong content can help you market relevant products to willing consumers. For example, learners seeking—or completing—online lessons about mortgages or credit scores are more likely to engage with additional marketing that targets them with specific loan offers. And their education has not only revealed what they may be interested in, but it can also help them interact with those products in a more sophisticated, educated manner. They’ll be better consumers.

You may have noticed that these five steps to effective financial marketing build on each other. Each is an important piece of a greater holistic strategy that focuses on offering real value and creating better, more relevant engagement with your account-holders. The result is powerful, educational marketing that reaches consumers where they are—on their own time. Want to learn more about creating financial content marketing? Download The Ultimate Guide to Financial Marketing Success to learn more.

[1] SMW Staff (2016). Millennials Check Their Phones More Than 157 Times Per Day | Social Media Week. Retrieved February 23, 2017, from https://socialmediaweek.org/newyork/2016/05/31/millennials-check-phones-157-times-per-day
Lindsey McElhaney

Lindsey McElhaney

Lindsey McElhaney serves as the Director of Marketing in EVERFI's Financial Education vertical. In this capacity, Lindsey is responsible for leading all content marketing and digital marketing strategies with a ... Web: https://everfi.com Details