If you’ve ever been involved in content marketing for financial advisors, you’ve likely heard the phrase “Content is King” and simply put – that’s exactly the truth. Producing and promoting quality content is a proven way to increase your SEO, website traffic, and ultimately convert prospects into clients. While there is a plethora of information out there on the types of content marketing and ways to create it, here are some great tips specifically for financial advisors who want to use content marketing to increase their online visibility.
Main Types of Content
Website
Static content that typically lives on your financial advisor website includes the body copy for landing pages, all of your product and services pages, about me or about us pages, and any other page that is an extension of your website.
In addition to practicing good SEO and Customer Experience, your website also helps craft the right message to your audience of clients and potential clients. If you don’t look at it as a piece of standalone content as you would a blog or other commentary, you could be missing out on valuable real estate to attract new clients and deliver great content.
Blog
While part of your overall website, your blog is an area where you should
spend a good amount of time curating and researching new content to write, edit, and publish. This is where financial advisors get a chance to speak directly to their audience. This can be in the form of market commentary, explaining products or services, or even touching base about current events and how the current economic and political climate can have an effect on the markets and thus your clients’ financial futures. Blog articles can also be shared across social media which can also help direct visitors to your website.
Video
As the fastest-growing form of new content, video is an especially effective form of communicating with your clients and prospective clients when an in-person meeting just isn’t possible. Many financial advisors are replacing in-person sales or onboarding new clients with libraries of videos that achieve the same purpose.
While nothing can truly replace a face-to-face meeting, utilizing video as the next best strategy is equally important. Additionally, video can be shared across multiple platforms such as social media, embedded in emails, and added to a catalog of videos hosted on your website as well as popular video sharing platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.
White Papers
As a more in-depth dive into a specific topic, white papers can be used to establish your position as a thought-leader or expert in your profession. White papers can live as an archive or library on your website and can improve your SEO. White papers are meant to be more specific and in-depth than an average blog post, with a title and description indicating their topic and purpose.
If you want to use white papers as a lead -generation tool, consider gating that content behind a contact form for email signup. By doing this, you’re capturing contact information for some of your more highly targeted content, which means you can already get a snapshot of this potential investor and how you can help them with their investment goals and needs.
Infographic
Sometimes information can be easily displayed visually – in which case an infographic is perfect. An infographic can be used to explain complicated or complex ideas in a way that makes it easier for non-financial professionals to understand. For example, with the global economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been federal legislation passed that affects nearly every tax-paying American.
While trying to explain this legislation and how it affects your clients, you may find it difficult to fully explain the impact in a blog post or video. However, with an infographic, you’re able to produce a visual representation of the overall concept, who it affects, and what (if any) action is required by your clients.
And because infographics can take on a viral nature, be sure you have added your company/firm name to ensure the proper credit is being given and to possibly lead more traffic to your website.
Social Media
While social media is a great way to share content from your other channels, this is also a great platform for reaching a wider audience through targeted and sponsored posts. While this will use some of your marketing budget, sponsored posts will reach people outside of your list of followers on that channel and can grow your social database greatly over time.
When boosting or sponsoring content, it’s a good idea to use one of your more popular topics that has proven to be effective in other channels, to ensure you’re getting the best content in front of this new, larger audience.
Ways to Produce or Acquire Content
When it comes to the actual content you’ll be putting out into the world, financial advisors typically stick to these main ways to produce new content.
Original Content
Just like it sounds, original content is created by you or someone on your team and is 100% original. While it can be time-consuming to create, original content is the best way to become seen as knowledgeable and capable in the markets and financial advising overall. Plus, if you are seeking SEO value, Google and the other major search engines only recognize original content. There is no SEO value for duplicate content that the search engines have already seen hundreds or thousands of times.
3rd Party Content
This is content that someone else produced, that you distribute to your audience and give full credit to the original author or creator. For example, if a major news outlet produces a highly informative article on a topic that would be of interest to your clients, you can write your own overview or take on the content and include a link directly to that content.
CusTomizable
The best way to look at this type of content is as a hybrid between original and 3rd party content. It’s similar to original content in that you can take credit for the content and brand it with your firm information, but similar to 3rd party content in that it wasn’t actually written by you. Customizable content is available through many online services and can save a good amount of time on content production, leaving you with more time to do what you do best: help your clients achieve their financial goals.
