3 Key Strategies to Content Marketing in Financial Services

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With two out of three consumers trusting branded content more than traditional advertising (Time Inc), content marketing should be part of every financial marketers advertising “mix.” But, with the increase in utilization of content marketing also comes the risk of become part of the advertising noise. Fortunately, the content marketing of today has come a long way over the past few years: marketers now have greater access to data and insights that, when used correctly, can increase campaign performance and cultivate a positive relationship with customers of all kinds, from the millennial consumer to the professional investor.
Here are some tips on how to get content marketing, in financial services, right:

 

Know your audience.
Chances are that your audience is a mix of job functions, ages and financial demographic. For example, for one customer whose ads run on our platform, we were able to identify four very specific job functions for their customers, with one generating the most traffic to our client’s ads. By analyzing your site’s traffic and data from your DMP, you will have a very specific understanding of who your audience is and greater ability to target your content based on who you are actually reaching. As you may know, content that appeals to one group (or even job function) does not necessarily interest another. Narrowing in on your audience should be the first step in developing your content strategy.

 

Use data to make content even more relevant or risk becoming “noise.”
Once you know who you are reaching, you need to understand what types of content interests that audience the most and in what depth and frequency your target customer is engaged with it. Your web site analytics data will only get you so far in developing a full picture. Financial content marketers should look to augment their data with publishers’ audience data to understand the topics surging with audiences so that they can reach them with the content that is most timely and relevant. For example, our data pinpointed an article in Seeking Alpha that was trending the highest with the ETF audience. The broader and less relevant the data, the more marketers risk their content and brand become part of the “noise.” Consumers will filter out their messages that doesn’t relate to them.

 

Don’t underestimate context.
Now that you’ve done the hard work of pinpointing your audience, backing your content strategy with data, and drafting your content, don’t mess up the implementation by running your ad on a Web site or other piece of content that undermines its value. Our data shows that conversions rate drop dramatically for content when it’s out of context. Finance is a category in which advertisers sell sophisticated products to narrow audiences, so it’s better to reach those audiences while they’re reading about finance and business than say retargeted on a gossip site.

 

 

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