What is content marketing? This is a relatively simple question with a relatively complex answer. In the simplest sense, content marketing is a series of articles on financial topics that are published on your blog site.
The goal of most strategies regarding content marketing for financial advisors is to bring investors to their websites where investors can view the advisors’ content (print, video, both). The roles of the content are to build credibility and trust in productive ways that produce high-quality conversions (website visitors into leads and contacts).
What better way to prove you are a financial expert than by producing high-quality content that acts as evidence of your expertise?
Use this complete guide to content marketing for financial advisors.
The key points for this article include:
- What is the best content?
- How important is the title of the article?
- How important are Google’s rules for content?
- How does content quality impact online visibility?
- What are pillar pages and why are they important?
- Can blog articles be promotional?
What is the best digital marketing content?
The very best digital marketing content can be articles that solve serious financial problems – let’s call them pain points.
For example, let’s assume an ideal type of client is a couple who is three years or less from their retirement date. What is one of their biggest financial concerns? Perhaps they are concerned about running out of money late in life when they need it most. At this point, one or both of them could be in an assisted living or skilled nursing facility, and they are concerned about the thousands of dollars of monthly expenses.
Producing a pillar page and blog articles targeting these concerns could create the online visibility you seek – pages one, two, or three of Google and the other major search engines.
How important is the title of the article?
The ideal title or headline will capture the investor’s attention. This is similar to the strategic headline strategies of newspapers that are almost obsolete.
Perhaps you have heard the old newspaper headline: “If it bleeds, it leads.” A story about a catastrophe tends to get people’s attention, so they will spend valuable time reading the article.
It also pays to remember that the titles of your articles are competing with other digital content that your competitors produce. Therefore, your headlines have to be competitive with their headlines.
There is one other important consideration. The keywords investors use to find your content should be embedded in your headlines. Again, if you write articles on pre-retirement planning, you want to be sure these keywords appear in the titles of your content.
How important are Google’s requirements for content?
If your goal is listings for your content on the first three pages of Google, then understanding its requirements and following them are absolute necessities.
Yes, Google is this powerful. A failure to follow its rules can relegate your content to such a deep listing that it is invisible. You may produce great content, but if you don’t follow the rules, you will not get the visibility you need to produce traffic for your website.
So, what are some of the most essential requirements that impact your visibility on Google?
- The length of the content is controversial – anywhere from 500 to 2,500 words. Some Google engineers say length does not matter. And yet, research shows Google favors longer articles that contain more content. One thousand words is a relatively safe minimum.
- If you are using content marketing for SEO, you will have to publish original content. Downloading from libraries does not work. That’s because the search engines have already seen the content – perhaps hundreds of times. There is no SEO value for duplicate content.
- Blog article content should be linked to pillar pages on financial advisor websites. They may appear as Guides in the Resource Center.
- Consistency is crucial if you want Google to perceive your firm as a dependable source of high-quality content.
- And last, but certainly not least, is quality. Google can measure how many people open and read your content. There is no SEO value if no one opens and reads your content.
How do personas impact online visibility?
Generic financial content will get lost on the Internet. That means you are competing with major media (Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Kiplinger, and Motley Fool) for the attention of investors. They have huge staffs producing generic financial content for their followers.
How do you compete with that? You don’t.
Instead, you identify the primary types of financial concerns that impact your ideal classes of personas. Then you provide information and solutions for those specific types of concerns. You might say, the more your content targets the critical concerns of your primary personas, the higher the probability they will open and read your content.
What are pillar pages and why are they so important?
A pillar page is a Google convention that establishes your authority for a particular financial subject matter. For example, you want Google to perceive your firm as an expert on pre-retirement planning. The best way to do that is to write a 2,000 to 3,500-word pillar page that documents your expertise on that subject matter.
Whereas specific articles are published on your blog, in this case, pillar pages are published on your website – usually under a Resource Center. Then the blog articles are linked to the pillar pages.
Keep in mind that this is a Google convention. Ignore it at your own peril.
Can blog articles be promotional?
Think of it from a Google perspective. It wants to match the interests of investors with the financial information or services they seek. The need for information is usually the driving force of the search.
For example, some investors do search for information about financial advisors. They are rolling assets out of 401k()s and into IRAs, where they will have their first experiences working with financial advisors. They want to learn more before they start interviewing advisors.
In this case, you can use information about financial advisors to describe your firm, which could be considered promotional. In other instances, displaying your knowledge about a financial topic is promotional enough.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a critical part of an effective digital marketing strategy. It can create online visibility and website traffic while at the same time it produces credibility and trust. All four are critical for building a solid presence on the internet that produces high quality leads and contacts for your firm.
