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:
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.
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.
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.
So, what are some of the most essential requirements that impact your visibility on Google?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.