Designing a financial services content marketing strategy comes with unique issues. Here we outline a repeatable strategy for creating content that solves problems to engage and attract new customers in this niche.

Creating a financial services content marketing strategy can be a challenge for marketing teams. This is because financial services firms exist in a unique niche. Exploring what makes them different is an important part of developing a sound content process and strategy.

Financial services is a unique ecosystem

Financial services firms are distinct from other firms that employ content marketing for several reasons:

• They are highly regulated, and content must often meet compliance guidelines and receive clearance from compliance departments.
• They are prone to disruption, primarily because they have been regulated so heavily.
• Their subject matter can be dry, making engagement more challenging.
• Their work can be especially lucrative, making competition levels high.

Below is a process that marketing teams can use to create financial services content marketing strategies that perform.

Consider the goal

This might seem obvious, but asking yourself exactly what you’re trying to accomplish is essential. When we answer this question, it serves several functions. Asking the question early helps to clarify goals and eliminate fluff. Content that does this well will stand out if our audience is mostly Generation Z and Millenials versus Boomers or Gen Xers. This is because what is important in the financial life cycles of each of these groups is different. Young people typically have more debt, less income and higher spending than their older counterparts, who often have more assets, more income and less debt. Tailor your messaging to each group, and your results will thank you.

Create unique, detailed personas

To create great content is to craft content so it informs the audience while getting them to engage with it. Drawing them in can mean different things, though. It can be helpful to develop detailed marketing personas for each of the types you wish to attract. In this process, marketing teams decide who their desired customer is and what their biggest pain points are. What are they trying to accomplish? What stands in their way?

Then, the team can create content that leads each persona step by step through each stage of the customer acquisition process. Doing this in a financial services context might involve going into much more detail in this step since finances tend to color and be colored by other aspects of our lives. For example, it could be important to know for marketing purposes that Zach Zoomer, your Gen Z persona, drinks highly caffeinated drinks every day (and thus budgets for it and views this purchase as essential). Make your marketing personas as detailed as is reasonable for your campaign.

Identify bottlenecks

Finding the bottlenecks that impede progress is the longest and most involved step when designing a financial services content marketing strategy. Process bottlenecks that appear on the surface frequently aren’t the actual bottlenecks.

Once you’ve set the goal and identified the composite personas and problems you’ll be helping them solve, many times you will identify apparent bottlenecks before arriving at the real ones. Problems that appear on the surface can be complex outcomes of other sub-processes. Compliance tends to be a recurring bottleneck in financial services, for example. Still, solutions to compliance constraints often come about by examining those processes and finding ways to work with compliance personnel to speed things up.

Create simple rules to swarm bottlenecks

Once you’ve found the bottlenecks that inhibit your process, you can begin to create simple rules that eliminate them. A marketing manager could, for example, meet with the client’s compliance director and come up with processes that speed up approval times. Batch processing, creating AI-based scanning scripts, or even training and certifying an editor to pre-approve content could all be possible solutions.

This entire process of “Goal, Bottleneck, Rules” can also be applied to each smaller issue. Helping the compliance team to identify their true goal could help to streamline their process, for example.

Get help with financial services content marketing

At Tempesta Media, financial services is one of three core industries that our managed service solution serves. We can help you build and capitalize on your content marketing strategy to connect with your target audience and grow your customer base. To find out more about how we can help you, contact us today.