Each industry has unique pain points when it comes to content marketing. While the foundational challenges can be similar — content ideation, lack of resources, inefficient workflows, and consistency in publishing — financial content marketing has its own set of problems.
If your enterprise content team needs to remove barriers and fine-tune processes to ensure that content marketing delivers the returns it should, then you’ll want to keep reading!
The Financial Landscape and Content Marketing: Existing and Emerging Challenges
Content marketing in financial services isn’t as mature as in other industries. It’s an old industry that’s been slow to evolve in how it presents content. Additionally, it’s a highly regulated industry. Adding to all this complexity are the major changes in how buyers choose and use financial products due to the pandemic.
According to a recent study on the state of content marketing for financial services, marketers outlined these top challenges:
- Reaching the right audience
- Generating traffic from new customers
- Keeping up with the competition
Image: BrandPoint
When asked in the survey about challenges they expect to face, some of the answers were a lack of resources, the inability to measure the effectiveness of content, and not having adequate budgets.
All these pain points are a true thorn in your side and can lead to inconsistent publishing, not delivering the right message, and not being able to learn from content analytics to improve. Based on this analysis and our experience working with financial content marketing teams, we’ll guide you through the top challenges and how to address them.
Getting It Right with Audiences
The biggest problem in financial content marketing is not connecting with the right audiences or having multiple personas you need to attract. Financial products aren’t short sales cycles, and the decision may involve numerous influencers. As a result, you need to map out the customer journey of each one and the type of content they need at each phase — awareness, consideration, and decision.
Before you can do that, you’ll have to lay the groundwork for understanding your audience. Here are the key ways to solve this pain point:
- Know your audience through feedback and research. You can use the data you have on existing customers as a starting point. That would include information from sales, customer support, and product teams. There’s also data that resides in your applications about how they use your products. Supplement that with surveys and focus groups. Add in elements from industry groups and associations as well.
- Refresh buyer personas. You likely have some personas available, but it’s time to dust those off and consider the changes these buyers have made in what’s important to them and what influences their decisions in buying financial products.
- Define key topics based on what you learned in the first two steps, and you’ll be able to complete your customer journey exercise. From there, you’ll want to prioritize pieces based on their value to the audience.
Broken, Disrupted Content Workflows Prevent Consistent Publishing
It’s difficult to run a content marketing team when there are so many barriers in your workflows. Being in a regulated industry, compliance and legal teams often must review content before it’s ready for publication. Things pile up in their queue while your team waits and waits.
You can’t eliminate the need for these reviews in some of your content, but there is a solution to help you escape review purgatory:
- Set expectations: The best thing you can do is have conversations with legal and compliance regarding content. Get clarity around what types of content need their stamp of approval. If you’re proactive in the process and everyone understands their roles, you have a better chance to collaborate effectively.
- Provide them with easy access to review tasks: Technology is your friend when it comes to content workflows. With a content marketing platform, legal and compliance stakeholders can use the system to see their tasks and due dates. If you’ve explained to them how it works and agreed on timelines, technology helps you streamline everything and have complete transparency.
The Content Marketing ROI Conundrum
Demonstrating content marketing ROI is a challenge for every industry and organization. It requires several things to work seamlessly — determining what to measure and how to do so. Additionally, you need all the backend pieces in place that calculate how users interact with your content and if it converts them.
The most valuable metrics for content marketing ROI include:
- Website traffic
- Keyword position ranking
- Conversion rates, which can involve different types of conversions, from demo requests to downloading long-form content to purchases
- MQLs (marketing qualified leads)
- Engagement rates related to content (e.g., social media, email marketing)
- Content production costs
All of this data lies in different places, but a content marketing platform can combine and aggregate them, providing you with a dashboard and easy report creation. Content marketing ROI is an ongoing initiative, and you’ll need to keep refining this and connecting the dots to prove how content marketing contributes to the bottom line.
Resource and Budget Limitations
Organizations of all sizes must do more with less every day. Content marketing has many specialized roles, from strategists to content creators to operations. Some of these people may have to wear more than one hat and, above all, must work as a team to meet goals and objectives. The best solution when you face these challenges is to turn to technology that provides you with the support you need, including:
- Content automation for creating workflows, calendars, publishing, and more to remove manual tasks from processes so people can be more productive.
- Complete visibility with content calendars so that all parties know each project’s status without the need for meetings or email trails.
- Centralization of assets in a platform, so everyone knows where everything lives.
- Content planning tools to help with managing campaigns.
Solve Your Financial Content Marketing Challenges with DivvyHQ
For your content team to run effectively and efficiently, you need the right people, processes, and tools. DivvyHQ supports your staff with features that make a difference in their everyday work and the big picture. It’s a key asset for financial content marketers. Experience how it works by starting a free trial today.