Updated on: July 26, 2021

Current and prospective clients have a keen interest in educational content that helps them reach their financial goals, and they expect you to provide it for them. The pandemic also has driven clients’ appetite for quality content relevant to what’s happening to them today, causing them to eschew evergreen content.¹

A recent eMoney poll supports this, showing that 84 percent of Americans say personalized content is important to them.²

So, an effective wealth management content marketing strategy means broadly sharing your expertise or thought leadership. Content can be the heart of your marketing efforts, but a supporting digital ecosystem will take your lead generation to the next level.

Establish a Strong Foundation

You’ve come as far as you have with your marketing by understanding the fundamentals and building a strong marketing foundation. You’ll want to do the same with content development and digital marketing.

It’s essential to rely on the expertise of those with experience in digital marketing for financial services. They can assess your current digital marketing presence and determine where your firm needs improvement. Your marketing team can help you clearly define your target audience with buyer personas and create a clear message to resonate with this audience.

They then should build a formal digital marketing plan with goals that support your firm’s overall business development strategy. These should be “SMART” goals, which means they’re specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, “We want to increase our email subscribers 25 percent by June 2021.”

Get full firm leadership support and establish a budget that realistically funds the marketing plan you create. With a budget and SMART goals defining the scope and direction of your marketing efforts, you can expand into new tactics with confidence.

Repurpose Content in Varying Forms

While the focus of this post is on performing digital marketing tactics around the content you produce, it’s worth mentioning that your existing content can be effectively repurposed. Once you start allocating more time and resources to other types of marketing, it’s important to be as efficient as possible in content production.

Oftentimes, a single piece of content can be recreated to work across many platforms. For example, you could make a white paper or ebook into a blog post series, which then becomes several stories for your email newsletter. A client presentation could get turned into a script for a video, webinar, or individual social media posts. Content with many statistics or sequential instructions can become an infographic.

Be creative and consider what you know about how your audiences consume content when you use this tactic. Just as they want content relevant to their reality, they want to see it in forms they prefer.

Understand and Embrace Social Media

Social media platforms change constantly and can be resource intensive to maintain. Each platform targets different investor types, often based on the audience member’s age and stage of their financial lifecycle. Because each has its own culture, they also have varying parameters for use, so it’s important you research and understand those before engaging.

But the pandemic has made financial planning a virtual-first business environment, accelerating the use of social media.³ So, now it’s more important than ever to be visible on and engaging across the social networking channels your clients use.

For example, in 2020, more investors under 45 with $500,000 in investable assets researched financial services providers online than by asking for referrals.⁴

Social media helps you build credibility as a thought leader and top of mind awareness with prospects. By sharing your content and re-sharing content produced by others, you’ll increase your brand recognition and engage with and expand your audience. That should grow your website and blog traffic and increase email sign-ups. All this, when done authentically, can increase audience loyalty to your brand, build trust, and introduce new clients to your firm.

Master Search Engine Optimization

Using the right keywords, updating your content, and creating new content are crucial elements of search engine optimization (SEO). Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand—with the right focus on optimizing your content for search engines, you can dramatically increase the organic traffic to your firm’s website by improving your visibility in search engines.

Also, knowing the difference between owned (content you own, like websites and blogs), earned (attention you earn with organic marketing activities), and paid (advertising) media, and how they affect SEO is crucial. If your target audience can’t find your content using search engines, it won’t drive traffic to your social media or website.

Know How and When to Advertise

It turns out that high net worth Millennials are not averse to digital ads for financial planning services like older HNW investors might be. Of those under 45 with investable assets of more than $500,000, 62 percent have engaged with Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram ads compared to 18 percent of those over 65.⁵

Digital ads are far less costly than traditional ones, so your firm should leverage them with audiences who will engage in them.

Putting It all Together

Building a fully mature digital marketing operation can be a complex task. Producing wealth management content is a great start, but developing the digital marketing tactics that surround your content can truly jumpstart lead generation.

To learn more about all the different components of digital and content marketing, read our recent eBook “The Financial Advisor’s Guide to Digital Content and Campaigns.”

Sources:

1. Martin, Asia. “Evergreen Is Out, Timely, Relevant Content Is In During Pandemic.” WealthManagement.com, 2020. July 31. https://www.wealthmanagement.com/marketing/evergreen-out-timely-relevant-content-during-pandemic.

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

3. Berman, Jeff, and Janet Levaux. “Janney Reports Big Jump in Advisors’ Use of Social Media, Texts.” ThinkAdvisor, 2020. October 21. https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2020/10/21/janney-reports-big-jump-in-advisors-use-of-social-media-texts/.

4. Boswell, Steven. “12 Benefits of Social Media for Financial Advisors.” WealthManagement.com, 2020. November 11. https://www.wealthmanagement.com/marketing/twelve-benefits-social-media-financial-advisors.

5. Nichols, Kevin. “Are the Affluent Receptive to Digital Advertising?” WealthManagement.com, 2020. October 15. https://www.wealthmanagement.com/marketing/are-affluent-receptive-digital-advertising.

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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