Starting a new year is a good time to hit refresh on processes in place – including your brand’s content marketing strategy. If you’ve been using the same approach for some time (or you don’t have a strategy in place at all), it might be time to assess what content marketing your brand is currently doing and how you can change it to be more aligned with business goals.
If you missed it, we broke down what content marketing is here. You may want to glance at that post before you dive into how to create a strategy in this blog post.
What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
A content marketing strategy is the use of valuable content to reach business goals. Content can come in many forms: audio, visual, and written. Examples of different types of content are:
- Blog posts
- Social posts
- Infographics
- Video
- Podcasts
Financial brands may think that a content marketing strategy is something that comes at a later point, but we would argue it’s the foundation of modern marketing. Creating and sharing valuable content is key to building trust between your brand and your target audience. Plus, it’s a way to provide education to your customers on the importance of products and services.
Content marketing provides a reliable way for financial brands to drive traffic and generate leads while being cost-efficient. After a strategy has been implemented, there will be more flexibility to experiment with other paid marketing tactics.
If we haven’t convinced you yet of the importance of a content marketing strategy, there are 70% of marketers who are investing in their content marketing strategies that might be able to.
How to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy
Now that we know the importance of content marketing, let’s start building out a framework of how you’ll implement your strategy.
1. Set Clearly Defined Goals
Your content marketing goals should be directly aligned with your business goals. After all, content marketing is a way for your brand to generate new leads and that is directly tied to the growth of your financial brand.
Plus, if you have clearly defined goals in the beginning, you’ll have an easier time planning the type of content that is aligned with those goals.
2. Know Your Audience
It’s crucial to know who you’re creating this content for your strategy to be successful. Start with identifying who your customer is today. It’s best to be very specific when thinking about your customer – even going as far as to give them a name and an avatar. This is often referred to as creating a buyer persona.
Next, you’ll need to define who you want your new customers to be. Do they look the same as your current customers? How are they different? Start building a buyer persona that is very specific on what your target customer looks like. Hubspot has a free tool to help build your buyer persona and the option to save it and share with your team.
After you’ve built out your buyer personas, it’ll help guide your content creation in the future. You can ask yourself questions like: How will my buyer persona see this? Does this answer questions they might have? How does this provide value to them?
3. Take Inventory of Your Current Content
If your brand has created content in the past, don’t be quick to scrap it! Instead, look at any metrics or KPIs you have for each piece of content. How well did it perform? What topic did it focus on? Is it still aligned with new goals?
After reviewing your current content, it will be easy to identify where there are gaps, what can be repurposed, and brainstorm future content.
4. Brainstorm New Content
Now it’s time to think about what types of content you want to create based on your new goals, your buyer persona, and what current content you have in your database.
When it comes to creating content, there are many options to choose from. It’s important for your financial brand to truly know what platforms to be on that would directly align with business goals and where your target audience is at. Does it make sense for your brand to be on TikTok if its buyer persona isn’t on TikTok? Most likely not.
Think about where your target audience is at (what are they searching for online, what social media platforms are they on, will they download ebooks or read blogs, do they listen to podcasts, etc.) Meet them where they’re at – but also where it makes sense for your brand.
5. Plan and Publish Your Content
Planning what types of content you’ll create in advance will help you be ahead of the curve and be able to bring in the right team members to help you execute the plan. Using software to plan and publish content can help streamline your processes. In fact, 57% of financial marketers said that they used software to manage their content strategy.
Planning your content on Social Assurance goes beyond just promoting your new content on social media channels – it helps you stay organized and collaborate with other team members. You can plan, create, and edit content amongst your team members through our platform.
When it comes time to run another content audit, you can easily download a report to review. It’s especially helpful when your compliance officer needs to review marketing activity at year-end.
We recommend planning out content on a monthly basis – to make content relevant enough for current events but give your team enough time to create and edit your content.
6. Measure Success
Social Assurance’s marketing platform can help you out here as well. After you’ve posted your content, it’s best to check in to see how it’s performing. How much engagement did your posts receive? Did someone check out your website from your Facebook page? Maybe someone asked a question in your direct messages (DMs) that needs an immediate reply. Use information collected in this stage to drive your content strategy in the future.
Pro Tip:
Outsourcing content creation can save your marketing team time and resources – Reach out to us to learn more about our Custom Content Creation services!
A content marketing strategy isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s a need-to-have. For any content marketing strategy to be successful, you must start with clear goals and data. Once you have that you can start planning your 2022 content calendar by downloading our free content calendar template!
