Traditionally, B2B marketers target a “Buying Committee” for example in ”cloud services” this includes the IT Decision Maker (ITDM) at the center surrounded by their team.

However, research by LinkedIn’s The B2B Institute and Bain & Company shows this approach is incomplete.

They identified there are two types of B2B buyers in a buying committee:

1. Target Buyers: Product experts (e.g., ITDM, engineers).
2. Hidden Buyers: Process experts (e.g., procurement, finance, legal).

Why are they called ‘Hidden Buyers’?

Because they don’t engage with B2B content.

The Head of Ops isn’t attending your Cloud Summit webinar; and Deal Desk aren’t downloading whitepapers on Cloud Infrastructure. 

Hidden Buyers aren’t interested in the product solution like the Target Buyers are.

This means they are more-or-less hidden from signals B2B brands use to report campaign effectiveness.

Yet, Hidden Buyers are powerful.

They have almost equal amount of decision-making power in a B2B purchasing decision as the ITDM.

With a business case, the Target buyers (ITDM) do the vendor shortlisting for the solution and need the Hidden/Process buyers to agree to the purchase. However, about 50% of B2B deals get killed by these hidden buyers.

Why?

While Target Buyers care most about the products “advanced features”, “transformational potential” and “innovation”; Hidden Buyers care most about “reliable brands”, “peace-of-mind”, and “vendors that are trusted by my peers”.

Hidden buyers don’t kill the deals because the product is not innovative or transformational for the business; they don’t care. 

Instead, deals frequently fall through because Hidden Buyers are risk-averse and unpersuaded. They kill deals because they are in charge of mitigating risk in the company and if they don’t know the vendor, they won’t likely take a chance on them.

This is important because about 40% of all B2B deals don’t go ahead because of lack of agreement. Deals collapse because it was too hard to persuade Hidden buyers to agree.  

In fact, the study found Hidden Buyers are 70% more likely to reject vendors that are not well-known to them and their peers.

What should B2B Marketers do?

1. Understand the B2B buying Committee is larger than first thought. Expand your targeting to include both Target and Hidden Buyers.
2. Invest in marketing your Brand, not just your Product. The study found deals are done more often and faster with vendors who were well-known across the whole buying group than those that were only known to the ITDM.

Investing in that reputational air cover with the hidden buyers ensures that when the deal comes across their desk they say “Yes, I know this company, I’m aware of their reputation”.

Check out the study here: https://lnkd.in/gNyKHxZM

[**Full disclosure: The views and opinion expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not reflect the views or opinions of any organisation or entity.]

The post Reaching hidden influencers of B2B buyer groups appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The effectiveness of gated content formats

91% of marketers say lead generation is their most important goal. Despite this, only 5% of marketers ‘always’ gate content, 34% ‘sometimes’ and 25% ‘often’. While gated content shouldn’t be your only lead generation strategy, it should feature prominently in your content marketing plan. But what makes a good gated content strategy?

At the end of the day, if your gated content isn’t of interest to your audience then they won’t subscribe and provide their contact information. Additionally, recognising different mediums require different strategies is key to ensuring your gated content strategy is a success.

Gating whitepapers is highly effective for financial marketers as they offer in-depth analysis of complex financial topics. These cater to the sophisticated needs of potential clients seeking comprehensive insights and can establish your finance brand as a thought leader. This helps attract high-quality leads and potential clients.

Webinars provide an interactive platform for financial marketers to showcase expertise. The real-time nature of webinars allows for immediate engagement and clarification of complex financial concepts. Additionally, the follow-up opportunities post-webinar are strong, making this format a robust lead-generation tool.

E-books are versatile and can cover a broad range of topics in detail, making them a valuable asset in your brand’s content arsenal. They’re particularly effective when addressing the lifecycle needs of clients, from retirement planning to investment strategies. E-books can be easily shared, increasing the likelihood of capturing additional leads through referrals.

Each of these content formats serves a unique purpose in the lead generation funnel and their effectiveness can be amplified when used in combination. For instance, a whitepaper can lead to a webinar invitation, which can then promote a related e-book, creating a cohesive journey for the prospect.

Best practices for creating valuable gated content

Gated content should be well crafted to resonate with sophisticated financial audiences. Here are some best practices:

• In-depth research and insights: Financial advisors and their clients expect content that goes beyond surface-level information. Comprehensive research, market analysis, and proprietary insights can differentiate your content. This not only attracts high-quality leads but also establishes credibility.
• Personalisation: Tailoring content to specific client segments can significantly enhance its effectiveness. For example, an e-book on retirement planning for millennials should differ from one targeting baby boomers. Personalised content shows an understanding of the unique needs and challenges of selected client groups.
• Engaging formats: While the depth of information is crucial, the presentation is equally important. Infographics, charts, and case studies can make complex data more digestible and engaging. Interactive elements in webinars, such as Q&A sessions and polls, can also enhance the user experience.
• Clear value proposition: The gated content should clearly articulate the value it offers. A compelling description highlighting the benefits and key takeaways can entice users to provide their contact information.
• Compliance and accuracy: Financial content must adhere to regulatory standards and ensure accuracy. Misinformation can not only lead to legal repercussions but also damage the firm’s reputation. Collaborating with compliance teams during the content creation process is essential.

Metrics for measuring success

Advisors should track metrics aligned with lead generation goals to evaluate the effectiveness of gated content. Key metrics include:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who provide their contact information to access the gated content. A high conversion rate indicates the content is perceived as valuable.
• Lead quality: Assessing the quality of leads generated through gated content involves tracking their progression through the sales funnel. Metrics such as lead scoring, engagement level, and the rate of leads turning into clients provide insights into content effectiveness.
• Engagement metrics: For webinars, metrics like attendance rate, duration of participation, and engagement during the session (e.g., questions asked, and poll participation) are key indicators. For e-books and whitepapers, download rates and time spent on the content can provide valuable insights.
• Return on Investment (ROI): Calculating the ROI of gated content involves comparing the costs of content creation and distribution against the revenue generated from converted leads. This helps determine the overall financial impact of the content strategy.
• Feedback and adaptation: Gathering feedback from leads and clients who accessed the gated content can provide qualitative insights. This feedback can refine future content, making it more aligned with client needs.

Gated content can significantly enhance lead generation when executed strategically. By leveraging diverse content formats you can attract and engage high-quality leads. Monitoring key metrics ensures content remains effective and drives meaningful engagement and conversions.

The post How to use gated content to capture qualified leads appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The importance of SEO

In today’s fast-paced digital world, SEO is more than just a trendy buzzword—it’s a critical component for any finance brand looking to stand out in the competitive online landscape. According to research by First Page Sage the number one SEO agency in the USA, after 3 years of effective SEO, financial services can expect to see a 1031% ROI.

So, why is SEO crucial for financial marketers? Let’s explain.

• Enhancing visibility – By incorporating relevant keywords, excellent content, and solid backlinks into your SEO plan, you raise your chances of ranking well in search engine results. You can draw potential customers’ attention by increasing your visibility to people looking for financial services.
  Build trust and credibility – An effective SEO strategy can help you establish and enhance clients’ trust by improving your online reputation. Potential customers view your finance brand as credible and reliable when your website consistently ranks in the top search results.
• Improve traffic and leads – SEO acts as a magnet, attracting visitors who are actively seeking financial information or solutions. By strengthening your SEO strategy you can draw in a targeted audience more likely to convert into clients or leads.
• Expand market reach – SEO opens doors to a wider audience, allowing your finance brand to expand its reach beyond geographical limitations. By targeting specific keywords and incorporating local SEO techniques, you can tap into regional markets and reach potential clients who are searching for financial solutions in their area.
• Increase brand awareness – By staying up-to-date with the latest SEO best practices, algorithm updates, and user preferences, you can adapt your online presence to meet evolving client expectations. This agility ensures your finance brand remains relevant, competitive, and visible amidst the ever-changing tides of the digital world.

What not to do

Not repurposing content

Your finance brand’s overall marketing strategy may suffer if you ignore the importance of content repurposing in the world of search engine optimisation. In addition to limiting your audience, failing to reuse content reduces your chances of achieving higher search engine ranks.

By transforming current content into new formats, such as infographics, videos, or podcasts, you can give it new life while taking into account the preferences and platforms of a variety of audiences. By repurposing material, you raise awareness of it, draw in new audiences, and promote engagement across media. Repurposing material can also result in beneficial backlinks, social media shares, and an increase in website traffic, all of which help to establish a stronger SEO presence.

Over-optimising your keyword strategy

Despite the fact that keywords are essential to a successful SEO strategy for finance brands, it’s necessary to prevent over-optimisation. It might be detrimental to your search engine optimisation strategy to overstuff your website with keywords or to target the same ones repeatedly.

The ability of search engines to identify genuine and valuable material has grown, and they now penalise websites that use keyword stuffing or other unnatural keyword usages. Instead, concentrate on producing engaging and informative content with important keywords woven throughout. Finding the appropriate mix will help you increase website visibility, boost user experience, and achieve long-term SEO success.

Not creating a mobile-friendly website

In an increasingly mobile-oriented world (in 2021, there were 7.1 billion mobile users), failing to optimise your finance brand’s website for mobile devices is a grave oversight. In fact, Adobe’s 2021 Digital Trends: Financial Services & Insurance in Focus report found 54% of financial services and insurance firms surveyed had reported unusual growth in mobile visitors in the six months prior to the survey. At the end of the day, search engines penalise websites that provide a poor mobile experience.

To ensure a smooth user experience across all devices, your finance brand must prioritise responsive design, fast loading times, and intuitive navigation. By embracing mobile optimisation, brands can maintain their relevance and navigate the SEO landscape more effectively.

Improving your SEO strategy

To thrive in the competitive digital landscape, your finance brand must learn from common mistakes and implement effective SEO strategies. By avoiding these pitfalls, your brand can enhance its search engine rankings, increase online visibility, and strengthen its digital presence.

Your financial brand may maximise the effectiveness of its online marketing initiatives and find lasting success in connecting with its target market by using a strategic approach to SEO.

The post The SEO strategies holding your finance brand back appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The ins and outs of paid advertising

As algorithms change and people spend more time online, it pays to get your paid advertising strategy right. Paid advertising is a method of marketing where you pay for an ad to be displayed on relevant online platforms. Known as pay-per-click, paid advertising methods drive traffic to your site.

As Tara Cimino, Head of Social Media at The Dubs, states, “To decide on the most suitable strategy, it’s essential for finance brands to identify a key outcome.” She continues, “This will set out clear KPIs which will impact the content created, the channels used and budgets allocated.”

According to one study, paid advertisements have a 200% ROI. A paid advertising strategy can help you reach beyond your organic following and target new clients. But it has a number of other benefits:

• Increase brand awareness (ads can increase brand awareness by 80%)
• Improve leads
• Drive higher engagement
• Target specific demographics or geographic locations

There are several different types of paid advertising strategies including:

• Social media
• Paid search
• Display ads
• Native ads

Social media advertising

81% of financial marketers have picked up new leads via social media advertising, making it a great paid media marketing strategy. A paid social media strategy can be effective in amplifying your social content, enabling you to reach your target audience and nurture them down the customer acquisition funnel.

Ensuring you create content right for each social platform is where a successful social media strategy gets tricky. Remember to cater the content and ad to the platform and the audience you’re targeting.

Pros and cons
Social media advertising is a great way to improve brand performance online and reach beyond your organic following. With over 4.9 billion people in the world owning a social media account, it pays to have your brand’s ads visible to them.

Tara explains, “There are many pros to paid advertising, such as enhancing your organic following, generating new leads and scaling to as many markets as possible.”

However, while social media advertising is an effective marketing tactic, there are some areas of concern. If your target audience isn’t on social media or your campaign doesn’t resonate with them it can be a waste of time.

“On the other hand, if the content isn’t resonating with your target audiences or your strategy isn’t well produced or delivered, it could be costly for the business, with low ROI,” shares Tara.

Paid search advertising

Paid search advertising (AKA search engine marketing), is when you pay to have your ad show up on search engine results whether that’s Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. It’s one of the most common types of paid advertising strategies and one of the simplest to set up.

While SEO remains critical to any financial marketing strategy, paid search advertising can be beneficial to gaining those necessary clicks. PPC has been seen to generate twice the number of visitors compared to SEO.

Pros and cons
The best aspect of paid search advertising is you can effectively target the right audiences. A great example of this is the ability to remarket your site and brand to people who have previously visited your website, helping to nurture leads and improve brand awareness.

Another aspect is you always are one of the first options in search engine rankings. This can improve your leads and gain traffic to your website. In addition, paid search advertising offers easy analytics so you can track its effectiveness and make the necessary adjustments.

Paid search advertising isn’t perfect, however, and there are drawbacks to consider. The lack of visual accompaniments means your ad can sometimes not be seen of generate the same brand awareness or impact. Further, they can be costly and you have to pay each time a user clicks your ad.

Display ads

Display ads combine text and images that link to a URL where users can find out more information about your finance brand and services. While text with images is the usual go-to for display ads, they can also feature moving images and videos (also known as rich media ads). The most common form of display ads is banner ads.

Pros and cons
Display advertising can ensure your finance brand gets noticed and enable you to connect with prospective clients. It offers precise targeting, reaching the right audience based on demographics and interests.

Further, it increases brand visibility and awareness by appearing on relevant platforms. In addition, it also offers creative flexibility to your finance brand enabling you to showcase your unique value propositions.

Display advertising for finance brands has a couple of caveats to consider. Ad fatigue and accidental clicks are potential challenges, but with engaging creatives and clear visuals, these can be overcome. Ad blockers can also pose some hurdles.

Native ads

When done well, you may not even notice when you’ve seen a native ad. Native ads are designed to blend into the content they are surrounded by. So, if this is on a social platform, they will pose as a regular post while continuing to promote users to click and follow through to your site.

The aim of a native ad is to look organic helping to make it look more authentic and grab the attention of users.

Pros and cons
One of the strongest aspects of native advertising is that by their nature, native ads aren’t intrusive but they can still capture your audience’s attention. Their visual nature and targeted content also enable greater click through rates and audience impact.
“Native advertising can drive better campaign performance when compared with other ad formats, helping drive conversions,” Tara explains. “Native ads can also be contextually targeted towards target audiences, meaning there is a higher chance of interactions and engagement.”

One drawback is it can be difficult to monitor and evaluate their effectiveness. Tara notes, “However, measuring performance can be complex if your campaign goals and audiences are not considered properly from the start.”

The bottom line of paid advertising

In a study by MailChimp, it was identified digital advertising would soon make up 75% of all media spending by 2025. As digital advertising is increasing in importance it’s critical your finance brand understands how best to measure if it’s working.

Tara shares, “To optimise and measure your paid media strategy, you need to consistently analyse your social and website metrics.” She goes on, “Look past platform metrics such as likes, but identify how your media strategy influences web conversion rates to understand what is successful about your strategy and what isn’t.”

Just like with any marketing strategy, it requires constant monitoring to ensure it’s optimised for your KPIs and targets.

The post How to choose the right paid advertising strategy appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What Google’s changing

Rather than rewarding content that’s overly SEO purpose-driven, Google’s new update will benefit content that’s human-first and provides a satisfying user experience. This means your financial marketing content needs to be created for people, rather than search engines.

This update should start rolling out at the beginning of September and will identify content that’s unhelpful for web users. If your site has a large amount of unhelpful content, then it will be pushed further down search engine rankings. Currently, this update will only affect English-speaking content and countries, with it being planned to expand in the coming months.

So, what does a people-first approach mean? And how can you make sure your financial marketing content isn’t penalised by Google?

How financial marketers can respond to Google’s update

While Google may be changing the algorithm of how sites can get to the top spot in search engine rankings, your content shouldn’t need to alter drastically. If your finance brand has been creating value-driven content that’s tailored to your target market (which it should be!), this content will remain beneficial, despite the changes taking place.

To ensure your finance brand remains high in search engine rankings, you need to remove all unhelpful content as this is less likely to perform well. If you’re not sure what content is deemed unhelpful, ask yourself:

• Is this content created for search engines or for people to find relevant information?
• Is this content duplicated across your site with the hopes of it performing well in search?
• Is your content adding value or repeating what others have said on a topic?
• Does your content answer people’s questions?
• Do people need to continue searching for further information after reading your content?

Key takeaways for financial marketers

At the end of the day, this algorithm change will only affect content that’s unhelpful or has only been created for SEO purposes. What your finance brand needs to do is to create content that’s tailored to your target audience and adds value. This can be achieved by:

• Presenting timely information in an easy-to-understand way
• Answering people’s search queries
• Creating content with the end-user in mind
• Creating value-driven content that includes useful data and research
• Having a purpose (content can’t just be created to hopefully rank on Google, it needs to be targeted and helpful)
• Presenting educational content that will improve user’s financial skills and knowledge

By ensuring your content has been designed to benefit end-users and written in a personable and ‘human’ way, you can maintain or improve your spot in search engine rankings. If your finance brand isn’t yet creating helpful content for people, it’s time to change your marketing content strategy.

The post Make way for Google’s new people-first SEO update appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What is organic search traffic?

Organic search traffic is the number of visitors that visit your website through search engine results. With 90.63% of pages getting no organic traffic on Google, gaining organic traffic isn’t a given – your finance brand must have a strategy in place.

Focusing on improving your organic traffic is pertinent as it’s the only type of channel that can produce long-term results. In other words, there’s no end date to the results you can gain from organic traffic as people are always searching, unlike a paid media campaign for example.

With the average organic click through rate (CTR) for web pages on the first page of Google’s results being 32%, it pays to have a good marketing strategy. Content marketing is the best way finance brands can improve their search engine rankings and organic search traffic.

What benchmarks should finance brands be aiming for?

According to Conductor, a benchmark for finance brands’ organic traffic should be around 33%. Most finance brands aren’t hitting these benchmarks for organic traffic.

Below are the current average organic search traffic results for specific finance industries and indicate a need for improvement across the board:

• Insurance 32.8%
• Banking 27%
• Asset managers 25.9%

So how can finance brands improve their organic search traffic?

How content can drive your organic traffic

Content marketing is your finance brand’s secret weapon for improving organic traffic. This is because content marketing can strengthen your SEO strategy by providing you with the opportunity to include more keywords, gain backlinks and enable reshares of your content.

With every keyword, backlink and reshare, your content becomes more valuable and improves your position in search engine rankings, improving your ability to gain organic search traffic.

When it comes to perfecting your content marketing strategy to improve organic traffic, it’s critical your finance brand’s content matches what your target audience is searching for. The number one way to create content that drives organic traffic is by keeping the end user front of mind at all stages of content development.

Tips and tricks

Content marketing can help gain you the top spot in search engine rankings. But how can you optimise your content to ensure this happens? Here are our top tips to ensuring your finance brand creates content that improves your organic search traffic:

• Utilise longtail keywords
• Find and remove non-performing content
• Maximise your social media content and have a strong presence
• Create engaging video content
• Don’t forget about metadata
• Optimise website performance such as improving the speed of your site and useability
• Create regular blog content
• Always use internal links and try to gain backlinks

At the end of the day, organic traffic should be a priority for finance brands. By improving your organic traffic, your finance brand can generate more visitors, nurture leads and convert clients.

The post The financial marketer’s guide to organic search traffic appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The nuts and bolts of SEO for finance brands

Put simply, search engine optimisation, or SEO, is about getting your finance brand to appear at the top of search engine results. Ranking on the first page is critical to generating meaningful leads, with the first five results of searches accounting for 67.06% of all clicks.

While paid advertising has a time limit, SEO doesn’t. Improving your search engine optimisation strategy can ensure your finance brand continues to generate leads, build brand awareness and strengthen your credibility for years to come. This strategy is known as evergreen content, as it’s timeless and will capture the attention of interested consumers even once your paid advertising is over.

Improving your SEO strategy is simple

Improving your SEO strategy may seem daunting, but it can be as easy as:

• Repurposing old content to maintain the top spot in search engine rankings, by updating the information to keep it fresh and relevant
• Producing high-quality and informative research
• Gaining backlinks
• Creating an always-on content marketing strategy that aligns to target audience search queries

By applying these four key strategies, combined with utilising keywords and phrases, your search engine optimisation strategy can be improved significantly.

Still don’t believe the importance of search engine optimisation? Here are some key statistics to highlight just how game-changing SEO can be for your finance brand.

The post Benefits of SEO for finance brands appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Everything you need to know about Google MUM

Powered by AI technology, MUM is here to help users with complex search queries. Today, users have to provide thoughtful search queries to find the right answers. For example, a user looking into investing for the first time will have to individually search each question like ‘the difference between ETFs and a mutual fund’ and ‘the best asset manager in the UK’. In real life, a person looking into investing could ask an expert ‘what do I need to know as a first-time investor?’ and be provided with a thoughtful and illuminating response that takes every question into account. This is what Google MUM is recreating.

The entire premise is Google wants it to take less time and effort for users to get the answers they need. Using the T5 text-to-text framework, MUM is trained across 75 different languages and tasks enabling it to provide a more comprehensive understanding of information and global knowledge. To add to this, it’s also multimodal, meaning it can understand the information in images, with the aim of it being to also understand audio and videos too.

But what does this mean?

While it’s a complex technology to understand unless you’re a tech guru, there are a number of things MUM will change in regard to search engine mechanics. Now, Google will be able to provide more accurate and complex answers to your questions by identifying keywords. In the above example, Google MUM will identify the words ‘ first-time investor’ and understand the many different questions somebody like that will have and provide a pool of answers.

Secondly, MUM will have access to even more information with the ability to translate over 75 languages. This means if there’s key information about investing written in German, Google will provide this as an answer to an English-based query.

At the heart of it, Google’s new update will be able to better understand language to provide clearer results to more complex search queries.

What does this mean for your financial marketing strategy?

The good news is Google MUM won’t mean you have to suddenly reinvent your marketing strategy. However, there are some important things to note:

• There will be less reliance on written information – Which means your finance brand should expand its content strategy to include images, videos, and audio. Taking a multimodal approach to your content strategy will be vital to remain relevant and competitive.
• More competition for search engine rankings – It will be more important than ever to develop and strengthen your SEO as well as provide valuable content across your website.
• Must keep end-users at the forefront of content – As MUM is set to benefit the end-users search results, to continue to appear high on search engine rankings your content needs to be designed with them in mind. As exact responses are beginning to be scrapped in favour of users’ intent, it’s important your content reflects this shift.

At the end of the day, your finance brand will remain competitive after MUM launches if you continue to provide value-driven content. With no date in sight for MUM’s launch as of now, there’s no time like the present to begin creating exceptional, multimodal content that will give you a competitive edge in the future.

The post Make way for Google MUM appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The ins and outs of SEO for asset managers

At the core of it search engine optimisation or SEO is the process of getting your website higher in the rankings. To do this, you first need to understand what your clients are searching for so you can optimise your content to reflect these terms and keywords. Recognising the questions and information your potential clients are seeking, and then addressing them through relevant and useful content is the foundation of best practice SEO. If you’re uncertain how your website’s SEO performs, check out our SEO website audit tool.

Unlike paid advertising, if you continue to invest in and strengthen your SEO content strategy it can benefit you for far longer. While paid advertising has a time limit, SEO can continue to help generate leads, build brand awareness and strengthen your credibility for years afterwards. This is known as evergreen content as it’s timeless and will continue to capture the attention of interested investors long after your paid advertising strategies have run their course.

Finding the right keywords and phrases

SEO for asset managers can be improved by simply understanding what your target audience is searching for. Asset managers need to have a deep understanding of what clients and potential clients are searching for, which comes down to their interests and needs. Creating SEO optimised content that aligns with what investors are after gives your asset management firm a prime opportunity to capture the attention of a wider market segment. However, in our research with Dianomi, there is a large information gap between what investors are searching for and what asset managers are providing.

By filling this information gap with SEO optimised content asset managers can capture investors based on the queries and concerns they’re actually searching for/interested in. Some of the most under-supplied areas asset managers must fill in order to capture the interests of their target audience include:

• ETFs
• Cryptocurrency
• Equities
• Commodities

Understanding the keywords your target audience are searching for is the first and most critical step of strengthening your overall SEO content strategy. A great starting point would be to identify key research, like our study with Dianomi, or your personal web analytics which identifies areas that investors are interested in. Further, looking to Google Trends will enable you to identify the search popularity of keywords and phrases, helping to inform your content and SEO strategy. There are also a number of SEO tools every finance marketer should have in their arsenal.

How asset managers can maximise their SEO strategy

SEO should be a priority but it can be hard to know how to strengthen your strategy. Other than ensuring your asset management firm is utilising the same keywords and phrases your target audience is, there are a couple of other strategies that can help:

• Repurposing old content
• Publishing authoritative data and content
• Gaining backlinks

Repurposing old content

Search engines favour fresh and relevant content placing them at the top of the search engine rankings. As years go on, your old blogs and content can become outdated and therefore not worthy to be displayed on the first page of results. Simply going back through your old content, updating it and ensuring the right keywords and phrases are being used can ensure you remain at the top of search engine rankings.

Become an authority

Ensuring the content you produce is high-quality, informative, and filled with important information that interested investors want is key to ensuring you rank high in searches. While you could have the most keyword heavy content, this is useless if you’re not a valuable resource for users. Focusing on creating content that’s useful and important for interested investors will improve not only your search engine rankings, but help you to generate meaningful leads, build credibility, and form trust with clients. In fact, high-quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website for search.

Gain backlinks

Put simply, gaining backlinks to your website is one of the best ways to improve your SEO strategy. This is because search engines notice that other webpages are referencing your content, improving the authoritative nature of it. Producing high-quality and valuable content will enable your website to gain backlinks and improve your overall credibility. In fact, the top results on Google’s first SERP have 3.8x more backlinks than those below them.

SEO should be a priority

At the heart of it, SEO is one of the most important ways to ensure your asset management firm can be discovered organically. Not only that, it can help build credibility with clients as you’re seen as one of the first options for potential clients looking for your services. SEO should be a core part of your overall marketing strategy as it needs consistent attention to remain strong and effective. If your asset management firm is looking to capture the attention of interested investors then look to your SEO strategy as one area for improvement.

The post Why SEO Should Be A Priority For Asset Managers appeared first on Financial Marketer.

A simple bit of SEO hygiene that’s worth doing

Optimising your SEO strategy for Google is an intelligent marketing decision. With around 86% of the world using Google on their desktop computers, ensuring your content marketing appeals to Google’s algorithm is essential. A My Business listing is a simple way of optimising your SEO content strategy for Google specifically, strengthening your position in the search engine’s rankings. On average, 56% of actions on Google My Business listings are website visits, displaying how it effectively generates further traffic to your website. Put simply, people are using My Business listings to generate leads, and not having one could mean you miss out on a range of potential customers that otherwise wouldn’t click on your website.

A simple bit of SEO hygiene, a Google My Business listing helps to put your finance brand in the best position possible to be discovered organically. Google My Business is a database of business’s information that can be used to benefit people searching for certain products and services. Google uses this information to create its search engine rankings and to populate Google Maps results. Put simply, a My Business listing is a sign of your brand’s legitimacy that also acts as added insurance to prevent your finance brand getting pushed down the SERPs.

Tap into additional analytics

A Google My Business listing also offers additional insights into how your overall content marketing ecosystem is resonating with your target audience. A My Business listing can provide you with analytics on:

• views
• what keywords are getting you discovered
• engagement
• website clicks
• audience

By utilising this information, in conjunction with your advertising and website analytics, it can ultimately help you alter and strengthen your SEO content marketing strategy.

How Google My Business boosts your reputation

Google My Business listings aren’t just about ranking higher on Google search results, they also act as a simple marketing tool to strengthen your presence and reputation online. Customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable if they have a My Business listing. With the ability for people to leave reviews, see who you are and get to know your business before even clicking on your website, a Google My Business listing is an important extension of your organic SEO content marketing strategy.

People are using Google My Business listings every day as another method to find financial products or services. Compared to Google ads, which have a click through rate of 1.55%, Google My Business listings have a high average conversion rate of 5%. This makes it a simple step finance brands can take to boost their visibility, complementing the other core elements of your content and distribution strategy such as SEO content, social media distribution and paid advertising.

The post Why all finance brands need a Google My Business Listing appeared first on Financial Marketer.