Get started or get strategic: Content marketing for financial advisors

In a digital world, content is king. Content can attract prospects and draw them to your business. It can help you build authority and trust. It helps you communicate with your ideal clients and express the ways in which you can serve them. And it provides a way to help solve everyday problems for your existing clients. What’s more, it’s relatively inexpensive to create and can be repurposed for use on multiple channels.

As a financial professional, you are a specialist in the type of subject matter that has the interest of many people: money. Search engines classify this as “Your Money, Your Life” content, and it’s highly valued if you can do it well. It can result in increased online traffic, a potential source of qualified leads.

But how do you get started creating content? Or, if you’ve already attempted content (with mixed results), how do you get to the next level? Whether you’re a beginner, a regular blogger or a big-time thought leader, here are some ideas to help you create, distribute and promote your content for digital marketing.

Get started: Steps to launching your first pieces of content

The initial decisions for a beginner include what type of content to create and which topics to cover. While “content” can mean many things — from infographics to whitepapers to webinars — beginners often start with articles. Educational or informational articles in particular offer a great way for advisors to start creating content.

1.     Realize you already have content marketing topics for financial advisors

When considering topics to cover, an easy entry point is answering the questions you hear most from clients. After all, you are trying to attract prospects who are like your clients. It stands to reason that they have similar questions. Your inherent understanding of these topics can make you a problem-solver in a way that’s tangential to the real work you do with clients. That’s the basic idea behind content marketing: offering added value to prospects and clients for the sake of getting noticed and building your brand.

Here are some categories to help you start brainstorming:

Frequently asked questions: As a first step, answer the questions you hear most from clients and turn it into articles on your website. These types of questions provide an easy bridge to content creation, because you already have the answers you provide every day. Even if the answers are complicated, the questions can be simplified to appeal to a broad audience of investors. For example, is it better to save or pay off debt? How can I retire early? Should I lease or own? Are there ways to reduce my tax bill? What are individual retirement accounts (IRAs)? How do Roth IRAs work? If there are questions that appeal specifically to your ideal client, start with those as a way of developing yourself as a subject matter expert.

News and market commentary: Particularly during times of economic uncertainty and volatility, creating illuminating content can help address your clients’ greatest concerns. Even when there are no straight answers, a thoughtful take or historical context can offer some perspective on current events. And it may reduce the need for more time-consuming, one-on-one conversations.

Financial education or enlightenment: In general, web searchers are looking for answers or inspiration. Financial fundamentals may help you attract both, with hard facts (e.g., retirement account contribution limits) and new ways to think of money (e.g., the power of compounding savings). You may be able to find ways to build exciting content on essential financial planning, retirement planning, and tax and estate planning topics.

Storytelling: From simplifying financial topics to illuminating the ways financial concepts impact our everyday lives, stories can be an engaging way to get a point across. Some advisors use stories from their daily lives and connect them back to clients. For example, one advisor in Las Vegas brings her love of yoga to her brand and her practice’s digital marketing. She creates videos and blog posts that align with stories of financial wellness designed to educate clients.

Offers or promotions: There may be opportunities to create content around a specific service you are trying to promote, or where you want to use an offer or promotion to gain client contact information. Prospects are more likely to share data if the content is robust and has value; for example, you might offer a college savings playbook for parents or a guide to home equity lines of credit. 

For more on formatting, creating urgency and developing strong headlines, see 6 tips for writing content that drives immediate response.

2.     Get your content found in search

Once you’ve brainstormed or created content around FAQs, you can also be thinking about the ways people might look for your content in search engines. This is the idea behind search engine optimization (SEO). You want your content to be there to answer the questions web searchers ask most. And you want to rank as close as you can to the top of page one of the search results page. You can attempt to do that by incorporating the most regularly searched phrases (or keywords) into your content in a strategic way. 

Take your beginning steps by using free keyword tools to find the most popular ways to phrase your FAQs. Tools such as Keysearch, Google’s Keyword Planner or the Ahrefs Keyword Generator can help you brainstorm, find related terms and new ideas for content, and give you a sense of a term’s popularity in search.

Keep in mind there can be a lot of competition for the most popular terms. As a strategy, you may decide to target less-popular terms that are related to your business or ideal client. For example, advisor James Comblo targets keywords with less than 2,500 monthly average searches. The length of the article is not as important as the depth, quality and relevance.

3.     Distribute your content on multiple channels

The more you have content on your website, the greater the opportunities to promote it through other digital channels. Traffic to your site through social media platforms, email and other websites can help your website gain traction in search. It also helps get your brand and message seen by different audiences.

In fact, if you think of digital channels in terms of a marketing funnel, content can help guide prospects from awareness to conversion — helping your practice get found in search, drawing visitors to your site, and engaging clients and prospects on social media and email. 

Get strategic: Develop an ongoing content plan

1.     Consider resources to help create the content

Financial advisors who have a way with words may have no trouble sharing their thoughts in a blog post, video or other type of content. But if you are looking for a long-term strategy, you may want to find someone else to create the content.  Here are some resources to consider.

Junior associate: Depending on your team, you may already have potential in-house resources. Current associates may be looking for a way to share their affinity for social media messaging or talent for writing, or you may look for these skill sets when making a new hire. It may seem cliché to assume that individuals in their 20s, 30s and early 40s (yes, millennials are 40 now) are more comfortable with content sharing, but they have lived with it most of their lives. Adding a content writing or social media marketing position may be a way to bring in next-gen team members.

Freelance writer/designer: If you aren’t sure whether you need in-house help, contract workers can help you get started. Freelance creative types typically have experience creating online content and may even help broaden the scope of your plans. They are often paid by assignment, which allows you to test and learn with little to no long-term commitment. There are plenty of ways to find individuals online. Sites like Fiverr, Upwork, Contently and others are platforms designed to help businesses find writers, designers and other creative talent that may fit your needs.

Digital marketing agency: If you are serious about your content plan and willing to invest some marketing dollars, you may want to consider a creative agency. Some, such as FMG Suite, Indigo Marketing Agency and Paladin Digital Marketing, work exclusively with financial advisors and can provide ready-made content ideas and even templates and guidelines.

Artificial intelligence (AI): And then there is the opportunity to do it yourself with AI. Many firms have banned the use of open AI programs such as ChatGPT, and for good reasons. While it can be used to create rudimentary content at virtually no cost, that content is not likely to help you improve your search results. Search engines are said to be filtering out low-quality content generated by AI.

The main content characteristic that search engines, clients and prospects are looking for is quality. Cranking out mediocre content might satisfy your monthly quota, but it could ultimately hurt your efforts. Just as relevance and trustworthiness can help lead to higher rankings, the lack of those elements may lead to low rankings in search.

2.     Explore sources for new and ongoing ideas

Once you are a regular content creator, try mapping out your content plan with an editorial calendar. Taking a yearlong view can help you come up with regular topics to cover. For example, you can think seasonally: tax topics and retirement account contributions in the early part of the year, college planning and education topics during graduation months, health care selection during the fall, and so on.

While building your editorial calendar, consider other sources of content ideas that may appeal to both clients and prospects:

Third-party analysis: If you regularly receive updates from asset managers, insurers or other third parties, you may be able to repurpose the ideas and create your own version of the content. At Capital Group, much of our content is designed for financial professionals to share with their clients. Generally, as long as you receive copyright permission from the original creator to repurpose their content, this is an easy source of shared data or information. (Note: Depending on the firm, there may be exceptions to this. Check with your compliance group to understand the rules of your organization.)

Subject matter experts: Whether you follow industry peers or people who have influence over your ideal client, you may be able to pull ideas and inspiration from someone who specializes in a given topic. Depending on their field or area of expertise, you may want to engage experts in a Q&A. These subject matter specialists may even be willing to contribute content they have written to your site, in an effort to help build their own brands.

Digital metrics: As you build more and more content, you can track performance of different pages on your website to see what works. Look to your content management system or Google Analytics for website statistics, including number of visitors to your site, page views for each article, and channels that are bringing in the most visitors. If a single piece of content seems to drive a ton of traffic, use it everywhere. Cut it into smaller pieces, creating multiple pieces of content. Drill down on ideas covered in your most popular content, create individual pieces for each idea or related idea, and link to them from the most popular page. Each of these strategies may help improve the site experience for users and could help search engines get familiar with your content.

3.     Experiment with new content types

In an increasingly mobile-first world, content is no longer just about blog posts or online brochures. It can include a social media post, an infographic, a podcast or a video. Alternative content types may help you reach different types of audiences — building your brand while exposing your ideas to a new world of prospects.

You may start by covering essential topics in article form, for example, then decide that you can offer more of your own take using a quiz or worksheet. If you have created a lot of content around a particular topic, you can link those pieces together to create a more substantial “guide” or playbook. 

For example, the second-largest search engine next to Google is YouTube. Many advisors have been adding video content to take advantage of this increasingly important channel. Video can also help establish trust and reinforce your authority, which is a crucial component in SEO. And with attention spans on the decrease, videos can be easier to consume than articles and are easily watched and shared by mobile phone users. InVideo can help simplify the process of editing and presenting a broadcast-quality product. Renderforest offers a free online video maker tool, and there are many other user-friendly editing tools to consider (some at low or no cost), including Flixier, Descript and iMovie.

Going viral

If you happen to create something completely unexpected or unique, you may even go viral and gain some prominence. This is a good thing. All links back (aka “backlinks”) to your site are equally helpful in building your profile in search engines. It’s one reason why sites link to other sites within their content or on their blogs. The more you link, the likelier you are to get backlinks.

Another way to get backlinks is to become a recognized specialist or thought leader in your field. When online journalists or bloggers use you in their stories, they typically include links to your site. These can help you increase your authority in search, as well as your public relations profile. Keep in mind, if you do it too well, being a “financial expert” could become a full-time job. It’s not for everyone, and it’s not a requirement for building your practice’s digital brand. But commitment and consistency are necessary, and it helps to have the willingness to experiment on the way to finding what works.