Financial advisors are always looking for ways to market their services to the right audience(s) at the right time — and with the right message. Achieving this marketing trifecta is a key component of any promotion or campaign, but this is especially true for digital marketing channels. And the best way to appeal to these audiences is through content marketing.
Hubspot defines content marketing as “…the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content …to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty". In short, content marketing is creating and sharing content in an effort to increase engagement and get leads.
Financial advisor marketing is especially important because it can be used to educate as well as sell. Read on to learn tips about content marketing for financial advisors and how to get started today!
Tip #1: Produce Quality Content
All financial advisor content is not created equal. And your target audience can tell the difference between generic content they’ve likely seen before and authentic, original content created by a financial professional.
Financial advisor content should be more detailed than the generic stuff but not so in-depth that you overwhelm and/or lose your audience. It’s important to remember that many consumers searching online for information on investing and financial advisors aren’t particularly knowledgeable on the subject and are looking for ways to be educated before taking the next step.
If your financial advisor website is where they find the information they need, then you’re one step closer to gaining a client. Many types of content can be used for content marketing, including white papers, eBooks, webinars/seminars (digital or in-person) videos, blogs, social media content, website content, infographics, podcasts, guest posts on other websites, case studies, and testimonials.
Tip #2: Share Your Content Across All of Your Channels
While creating unique quality content takes more time and effort than churning out generic content, it can pay off immensely when you consider how many places the same content can be shared when it’s simply reframed/positioned to be relevant in that channel.
For example, a 5-minute explainer video can be edited down to 15-second preview snippets that can be shared on social media. Another example is taking a 2-page whitepaper and condensing the key points into an infographic summarizing the data from the whitepaper.
Repurposing content is a great way to get more value from an asset you’ve already created and an efficient way to reach different audiences on different platforms. Pro Tip: Sharing financial advisor content across platforms shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. Each channel/platform has different content delivery methods; some media will work better than others.
For example, a 10-minute video can do very well on YouTube but won’t likely gain much traction on Instagram, which is better suited for shorter, attention-grabbing content.
Tip #3: Use Gated Content to Generate Leads
"Gating” your content is when a visitor must fill out a lead generation form to access your financial advisor content. This can be a great way to grow your prospect list, and gauge the intent of someone looking to access this content. As a general rule, gated content will weed out those visitors who aren’t as serious because accessing said content involves giving something on their part.
In this case, it’s their contact information. And while this may seem counterintuitive to lead generation, this is a case of quality over quantity. There is no hard and fast rule on when and where you place lead-generated content.
Still, a practice for financial advisors is placing premium content such as white papers, eBooks, and other more intensive assets behind gates, and leaving the short-form content types such as blog posts and videos outside of a lead generation gate.
Once the lead generation prospects are in your database, you can segment them into groups based on the type of content they were interested in so you can deliver more content like that in the future.
Tip #4: Find Your Niche
As a financial advisor, you likely have a niche within the business. You may cater to a specific clientele and are extremely knowledgeable about the products and services they use most.
Or you could be very experienced in a given discipline of the investment sector and have the ability to produce a great deal of quality content on the subject. But even if you don’t already have a niche, nothing is stopping you from carving out a place in the marketplace where you can be seen as an industry expert.
Some ways to achieve this include creating timely content that breaks down any newsworthy events, being featured as a guest blogger on another site, speaking on someone’s podcast about your niche topic, or even sharing 3rd-party content on your channels and then offering your own take on their content. Just be sure the content you share is from a reliable source and that your compliance team has reviewed your own content.
Tip #5: Be Consistent
As with all types of marketing, content marketing efforts don’t show meteoric success overnight. And the only thing worse than having no marketing efforts is to come out strong out of the gate and then go dark when you hit busier times.
And while there’s no preventing the ebbs and flows and the general seasonality of the business, there are ways to prepare for these busier times without sacrificing your marketing efforts. Creating a content calendar is a great way to keep track of your financial advisor content marketing throughout the year.
You can even create evergreen content in advance and have it ready for those times when producing something new simply isn’t possible. Another area that should remain consistent is your financial advisor firm branding. From your logo and colors down to the font you use, consistent branding can go a long way to support your content marketing efforts.
