Content Marketing has been identified by Smart Insights as The Most Inevitable Trend In Marketing. Marketing is a practice littered with superlatives and it may be tempting to disregard their view as another exaggeration. You should not! Content Marketing is indeed Inevitable. It is also perfectly suited to Financial Services.
We sell complex products that are difficult to understand or by time-poor, disengaged customers. Our customer service has retreated behind phone lines in faraway countries, making it very difficult for customers to relate and engage at the point of sale. Years of price-led advertising have turned our products into commodities in the mind of a consumer we’ve educated not to look beyond the price: points about technicalities over a creaky phone line are disregarded by prospects immersed in all that advertising noise.
Content Marketing gives us an opportunity to change all that. Blogs and guest Articles, eBooks, videos featuring our experts or customers, etc can all help us remind the public (and ourselves) that financial products can indeed be very different and that there can be a smarter choice than the cheaper choice.
Our organizations are full of experts that can talk all day about the elements of our customer proposition, the value of a certain additional service, the benefits of loyalty. Those messages are seldom heard beyond the walls of our offices, stifled by pressures we impose on ourselves: there’s no space for education on a 30-second TV ad.
eBooks are a great example of the opportunities open to us in the new world of Content Marketing. A good eBook is easy to produce and distribute. eBooks are full of information people are actually willing to pay for. It can provide much more engagement than any TV campaign will ever do, and can take on a life of its own through email and social networks as new brand advocates spread the word on our behalf. You can track who gets it, where does it go and how many people come to you after using it.
Content Marketing must become the next big line in your Marketing plan. It will require test and learn and if you’re serious about getting results you will need to resource appropriately, as the quality of your content is the key to its success. Done well, investing in it could be the best the decision you ever took. What are you waiting for?
