Updated on: November 3, 2023

With all the digital outlets at consumers’ disposal, people are increasingly turning their attention online to educate themselves on personal finance and to find qualified professionals to help. In fact, a recent survey found that 41 percent of respondents turn to digital sources for financial advice, including social media platforms, blogs/vlogs, podcasts, and other online sources.¹

Financial professionals with a robust, content-oriented digital presence can capture these prospects who are looking to expand their financial knowledge and get financial advice. Content marketing is an ideal marketing strategy for nurturing new relationships online and for supporting existing marketing strategies.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through what content marketing is, why it’s a key component of any financial advisor marketing strategy, and the steps you can take to add content marketing to your digital marketing strategy.

Content Marketing for Financial Advisors

Content marketing is an essential marketing strategy for financial advisors in today’s world of digital engagement and interaction. It is very different from traditional, outbound marketing, which takes a more sales-focused approach by business owners attracting attention through ads, endorsements, and partnerships with media agencies. With its inbound marketing philosophy, content marketing will help you connect with prospective and existing clients in entirely new ways.

In simple terms, content marketing is the creation and distribution of written and visual material to build trust in your brand and generate leads online. The content you create as part of your content marketing strategy can take many forms. Blog articles, ebooks, videos, infographics, podcasts, and webinars are all examples of content you can develop as a financial advisor.

Through creating and sharing online financial content, you demonstrate to your prospects and clients that you have expertise and experience to help them address their concerns—things like saving for retirement, funding a college education, or even taking the vacation of a lifetime.

The goal of content marketing isn’t to sell yourself or your products and services. It’s to build trust by educating your target audience, without expecting them to act.

The Benefits of Content Marketing for Financial Professionals

One of the primary benefits of content marketing for financial services providers is that it fulfills the modern investor’s desire to educate themselves and research solutions on their own.

But there are many other benefits as well, including increased visibility, trust, and business growth. Content marketing isn’t just for prospects, either. It can be used to improve client onboarding, engagement, and retention at the same time.

Increase Your Visibility in a Crowded Marketplace

When you consistently produce quality, educational content that truly informs people and answers their important questions, search engines will start to serve your content in their search results.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key aspect of content marketing and can dramatically increase the visibility of your blog, videos, podcast, or other types of content, bringing in traffic organically to your firm’s website.

Producing content in this way expands your digital footprint over time, creating a multitude of ways in which prospective clients may end up in your digital domain. As more people view your content, it’s more likely to be shared across social networks, which increases your firm’s visibility even further.

Establish Your Expertise and Start to Build Trust

People cite age, experience, and credentials as the most important factors when choosing a financial professional.² This clearly signals their desire to work with someone who’s knowledgeable, someone who can prove their expertise, and sympathize with their individual circumstances. These are all things that content marketing can do.

Content marketing in and of itself is proof of your commitment to people’s well-being and your knowledge of financial planning topics. When you can answer people’s questions and teach them important aspects of personal finance, you establish your expertise and begin to build the foundations of a trusted relationship.

The content that you author can help make a powerful case for your expertise, knowledge, and ability to serve that prospect better than anyone else.

Generate Leads with Better Return on Investment

Content marketing can be a highly efficient way to generate leads for your business. In fact, content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62 percent less.³

Educational content helps prospective clients progress through their buyer’s journey—and towards the solutions you offer—as they learn about their need for advice and the value of your services.

One powerful aspect of content is that it can be evergreen in nature. Unlike advertising that you must keep paying for, once you write a blog it is live until you unpublish it. This means it can continue getting views, nurturing prospects, attracting attention, building your brand, and bringing in business over its entire lifetime for the same initial cost of writing the blog.

Content marketing lets you nurture relationships with potential clients you have yet to meet, effectively working around the clock to draw in prospects to your digital domain with a high return on investment.

Onboard, Engage, and Retain Your Clients

Financial content marketing isn’t just a tool for gaining new clients—it can also be used to support client onboarding, engagement, and retention. You can seamlessly onboard your new clients by sending a series of welcome or orientation emails with instructions or guides that explain what to expect next and content that answers frequently asked questions.

Using content marketing as a strategy with your existing clients will also help you stay top of mind. You can remind your clients of your expertise, continue to build trust and loyalty, and set everyone up for more productive meetings by proactively educating them about the financial topics they’re interested in throughout the year.

Reassure New and Existing Clients During Periods of Market Volatility

Economic crises accelerate the need to educate prospective and existing clients. In times of uncertainty, people want reassurance that their financial plan is on track. Some believe there is a widening knowledge gap among investors, brought on by volatile market conditions.

For planners, content marketing is the perfect vehicle for delivering this reassurance to retain existing clients and bring on new clients in search of financial guidance.

For example, content that puts economic performance within a broader context of plan progress, or even explaining the ways in which a Monte Carlo analysis takes extreme market conditions into consideration, can go a long way in helping people understand their finances.

How to Get Started with Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for financial professionals. It helps you keep up with people’s shifting preferences to educate themselves and find service providers online. It can offer your business several bottom-line benefits as you try to generate leads online.

To get started with content marketing, there are a few steps you can take to help ensure you’re creating the best possible content for your audience.

1. Identify your target audience and develop buyer personas. In a world where people are being bombarded with different types of content every day, understanding who your prospective clients are will be the key to developing content that attracts their attention. As you get started, your first step is to get to know your audience. Who are your ideal clients? What do they (or don’t they) know? What are their fears, motivations, goals, pain points, and common questions? All this information will help inform your buyer personas, which will in turn help you create content that resonates with them.

2. Make sure your website is up to date. Your content will direct people to your website, so it’s important that you continue to offer a good experience on your website so there are no barriers for anybody to reach out to you. Also, if your website is old and slow, search engines will be hesitant to rank you in top positions, hindering your content’s ability to be seen right from the start.

3. Create an editorial calendar. Think about the most important things your personas are asking. Generate a list of financial content ideas based on those things and consider how you can educate your prospective clients about them in your own unique way. In addition to writing traditional blog articles, white papers, and ebooks, you can experiment with other types of content. So if you hate writing, don’t worry. There are other content marketing methods that you can use to build your digital presence. Infographics, webinars, videos, podcasts, and other forms of multimedia content can help you catch the attention of your prospects and increase engagement. Content is all about the long-term gains, so plan your publishing schedule a few months in advance, start slow, and stick to a consistent schedule.

4. Assign content responsibilities and start creating. You know what you want to educate your prospective clients about. Now you need to determine who is going to write or record it. There are several options for content creation, one of which is writing blog articles yourself and recording your own videos, webinars, and podcasts. You can also hire freelancers to write, record, or create content for you or purchase licensed content from a financial advisor content library. For those who are just starting out and have limited time, it may be best to rely on a licensed library of pre-written content that you can then quickly personalize to make your own.

5. Ensure your content is optimized for SEO. The Internet is full of articles that provide financial advice. Content that is optimized for SEO will be ranked higher by Google than content that is not. To help your content rise to the top, it is important to follow SEO best practices when writing. That includes using headings throughout your articles, including the keywords that people are searching for, and writing quality, readable content.

6. Publish and promote your content. Once your blogs are published, you can use them to fuel your other marketing channels. Since content can get lost in the noise online, it’s important to distribute it far and wide by pushing it out on the digital platforms available to you. Sharing your content on your personal and company social media accounts, as well as including them in emails/newsletters to your existing clients, are great first steps.

7. Track your efforts. Evaluate the effectiveness of your content with Google Analytics—a free analytics platform—to see which posts people tend to enjoy and which ones aren’t getting much traction. Analytics are the key to refining your approach over time to continue delivering better and better pieces of content.

Start Content Marketing as the Foundation of Your Future Digital Marketing Strategy

Content marketing can have impressive long-term results at a low initial cost. It impacts nearly every aspect of digital marketing, from SEO to social media and even advertising. Starting your content marketing initiative now will help prop up all your other marketing efforts as you scale and grow.

Learn more about launching a full-scale digital marketing operation by reading our ebook, The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Digital and Social Media Marketing and see how content can be one piece of your overall strategy.

Sources:

1. Intelliflo survey, March 2022, n=2,067 U.S. adults ages 18 and older.

2. 2020 eMoney Consumer Marketing Survey, September 2020, n=2,000

3.“Content Marketing Infographic.” Demand Metric n.d. https://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic.

DISCLAIMER: The eMoney Advisor Blog is meant as an educational and informative resource for financial professionals and individuals alike. It is not meant to be, and should not be taken as financial, legal, tax or other professional advice. Those seeking professional advice may do so by consulting with a professional advisor. eMoney Advisor will not be liable for any actions you may take based on the content of this blog.

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