Assessing the strategy

Wells Fargo’s Diverse Businesses content marketing strategy is a testament to the power of audience-centricity. It has created a specific blog devoted to a singular audience: diverse small business owners.

At its core, its approach revolves around three key pillars: Running Your Business, Growing Your Business, and Money and Your Business. These pillars are designed to address the immediate needs and concerns of small businesses, offering practical, valuable information.

Audience-centric pillars: Wells Fargo’s success lies in its keen understanding of its audience, primarily small business owners. The content pillars are structured to provide solutions to common challenges faced by these businesses. This strategy showcases the importance of tailoring your content to your target demographic’s specific needs and interests.

Customer feedback as a guide: One of the cornerstones of Wells Fargo’s content strategy is being informed by customer feedback. This customer-centric approach ensures the content remains relevant and useful. It’s a shining example of how finance brands can benefit from continuous feedback loops with their audience to refine and improve their content.

Diversity and inclusion: Wells Fargo’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is evident throughout its content. It embraces a wide range of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences, making its content relatable to a broader audience.

Assessing the execution: content and delivery

While the strategic underpinning of Wells Fargo’s Diverse Businesses content is stellar, there’s room for improvement in the execution, especially regarding content style and delivery.

• Engaging delivery: The content’s style leans towards the traditional and somewhat dated. Incorporating more visual, interactive content into the mix such as video content, podcasts, or infographics would help drive engagement and also open up opportunities to build retargeting pools using video. Adopting a variety of content methods can inject new life into your finance brand’s content, hooking audiences in on an engaging story.
• Easy-to-understand content: One of the strong suits of Wells Fargo’s content is its simplicity. It effectively breaks down complex financial concepts into digestible pieces, making it accessible to a broad spread of business owners. However, it could still be enhanced by incorporating more multimedia elements like animations or interactive tools to further demystify financial jargon. Infographics are a fantastic way of delineating complex financial information with studies showing visuals can improve learning and retention by 400%.

Distribution strategy

An integral part of Wells Fargo’s content marketing success lies in its distribution strategy, ensuring its valuable content reaches its target audience effectively.

• Cross-platform approach: Pushing potential clients through the consideration phase is about delivering valuable content often while ensuring every interaction is a positive one. Wells Fargo achieves this via a variety of distribution channels, including its website, social media, email marketing, and partnerships with business organisations. This comprehensive approach ensures its content is shown and accessible everywhere its target audience spends their time.
• Content personalisation: The content is tailored to cater to different segments of its audience. Wells Fargo understands not all businesses have the same needs, and by offering personalised content it increases the chances of engaging its audience effectively. Wells Fargo has done this effectively by creating separate dedicated blogs and sections of its website. In this instance, Diverse Businesses offers value-driven information that’s specific to diverse small business owners that can often be overlooked.

What else Wells Fargo did well

Beyond its delivery and distribution strategy, Wells Fargo’s Diverse Businesses offers several noteworthy lessons for financial marketers.

• Consistency is key: Consistency in delivering valuable, relevant, and accessible content is a crucial factor in maintaining audience engagement.
• Transparency and trust: The finance industry relies heavily on trust. Wells Fargo’s content prioritises transparency and a genuine desire to help its customers. Its video series ‘Amplifying diverse small business voices’, offers diverse small business owners a voice to share the challenges and difficulties facing small business owners.
• Cultural relevance: Wells Fargo’s embrace of diversity and inclusion not only makes ethical sense but also strengthens its brand. Specific articles like ‘Resources to help Black, Asian-American, and Latina women entrepreneurs’ showcases challenges facing minority communities and offers support and solutions. By not delivering generic information for small business owners, Wells Fargo recognises the differences in communities and offers proactive content to benefit them.

Ultimately, Wells Fargo’s success is a testament to the power of content marketing when executed with precision and authenticity.

The post Strategies in the wild: Wells Fargo appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What’s the deal with client retention?

While generating leads and onboarding new clients is an essential aspect of financial marketing, something that’s overlooked is client retention. Retaining clients is an important investment for finance brands and is critical for growth. According to a study by Bain and Company, a 5% increase in customer retention produces a 25% increase in profits.

According to research, the average customer attrition rate among retail financial institutions per year is 15%. While not as high of an attrition rate as other industries, the more clients you retain the greater your bottom line.

How content marketing has helped MoneyMe succeed

According to Richard Bray, Chief Marketing Officer at MoneyMe, content marketing has been an effective strategy to retain clients. For Richard, “MoneyMe’s customers are youthfully ambitious and digitally-savvy, meaning they want to be equipped with the right tools, knowledge and decision-making power to make smart financial decisions.”

“To us, content is king as it provides our customers with the knowledge to understand things like credit score and how this impacts their borrowing capacity and even their interest rates,” Richard says.

A core tenet of MoneyMe’s content strategy is assuming their clients aren’t financially savvy and always prefer the long approach to clearly explaining the process and financial terminology. While the financial advisers dealing with HNWIs may consider their clients more financially literate, Richard explains, “Making things easy, intuitive, informative and giving the customer a sense of knowledge empowerment is critical to our overall approach.”

An important way to retain clients through content marketing is by ensuring communication channels remain open and your finance brand focuses on delivering useful content to clients.

Richard says this approach to content marketing has been extremely effective. “We have seen amazing results with free tools such as our credit score tool which helps people understand their financial position.

“We currently see around 10,000 people checking their score each month which is a mix of both new and existing clients.”

When asked whether content marketing has helped MoneyMe retain clients Richard confirms, “Yes, it makes MoneyMe a trusted adviser and brand they can rely on as a go-to source for information.”

He explains that MoneyMe began a customer newsletter specific to real estate agents that offers three to four relevant articles. “We started a customer newsletter around 6 months ago and continually see open rates above 21% and opt-out rates below 0.3%.”

“After getting feedback from the real estate agents, they find value in these conversation starter topics and broader knowledge on global and national real estate topics that are outside their local real estate knowledge is valuable.”

By creating content that’s relevant, informative and value-driven MoneyMe has found that clients continue to keep their brand front of mind and remain working with them long-term.

Three ways content can help retain clients

When it comes to creating a content strategy that retains clients, there are three questions you should ask yourself:

• Is your content educational?
• Are you utilising an omnichannel approach?
• Is your content personalised and providing value to your current clients?

At the end of the day, educational and personalised content is king. If your content’s not providing value or offering information on relevant issues, then clients will no longer feel seen by your finance brand.

According to Richard, the content that performs best for MoneyMe is content that is useful and provides them with tips, tricks and hacks.

“The world of finance can be seen as somewhat boring so keeping it short and sweet is best,“ Richard says.

Often, the key to effective financial content marketing is not to try and sell your brand to clients but instead inform, educate and entertain them in order to build brand trust and awareness. By providing your clients with useful information you continue to serve them and cater to their needs.

Another important aspect of effective content marketing is ensuring you adopt an omnichannel approach. Not every client will be receiving your content on one channel. Rather, clients are spread across various communication channels, whether that’s social media, email or website. Owing to this, it’s important you cater to your clients wherever they find you.

Tailoring your content to the platform it’s being presented on is an important aspect of omnichannel marketing and one that will make or break your content strategy. Consider who your target audience is on each platform. Often, those who view your X may be different from your audience on Instagram and so on.

For Richard, MoneyMe utilises a variety of platforms to present its content.

“80% of our D2C users use our app, so we are now putting more content there so they can click and read in that environment rather than having them leave to a blog environment.

“We have recently invested in Braze, a marketing automation marketing platform. This allows us to send communications via emails, SMS, push notification, webhooks and more. We are still using a lot of email and SMS marketing, too.”

Final words

If your goal is to retain clients (and it should be), your content marketing needs to support this. Remember to provide value-driven content that’s educational, informative and catered to your audience.

A word of advice from Richard on what finance brands should remember: “Relevance, relatability and writing from personal experiences are ways in which to nail your content marketing strategy.”

When done right, content marketing is an important tool that can be used to support client retention.

The post How to use content marketing to retain clients appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Best Podcast: UTI International

Podcasts are an ideal platform to distill complex information in an easy-to-understand format. The best podcast produced by an asset management firm in 2022 was the Inside India podcast by UTI International.

What did it do right?

Hosted by Ben Hayward, Inside India is a podcast that explores the new and modern India through conversations with global economic and business leaders. With each episode around 30 minutes long, this podcast provides expert insights into the growth opportunity that is India.

Here’s why this podcast won the top spot:

• Delivered insightful information from experts in the industry
• A well-produced and highly professional podcast production
• A charismatic and intelligent host that audiences can connect with
• Provide easy-to-understand educational content on complex subject matters
• Released on a consistent schedule that enabled audiences to look forward to each new episode released each month

Best Blog: Momentum Global Investment Management

Momentum Global Investment Management delivers a diverse range of editorial content for every type of investor and client. It offers a specialised section of materials designed for professional investors, that covers the more complex side of investment management. Conversely, it also offers a diverse range of editorial, video and audio content tailored towards the everyday investor.

Overall, Momentum Global Investment Management’s blog series is so successful because of the well-produced and insightful content that’s published weekly. The wide variety of topics, expert economists and business leaders, and diversity of content make its blog series one of the best out there. By dividing its content between the different type of investors it caters to a broader client base and ensures content remains relevant to everyone.

Here are the top five reasons why Momentum Global Investment Management’s blog series is so successful:

• Its site is easy to navigate and content is clearly divided between more experienced investors and the everyday investor, making it user-friendly and accessible
• Prioritises educational and timely content that’s easy to understand for all types of clients and investors
• Provides a diverse variety of content ensuring information is always presented in a fresh and innovative manner
• A mixture of long-form and short-form content is incorporated (alongside audio and visual content) to cater to all types of users
• Each piece of content is written and produced by a team of industry experts

Best Website: AXA Investment Managers

This year, AXA Investment Managers won the best website in the asset managers’ marketing campaigns awards. With accessibility at the forefront, AXA Investment Managers has created a dynamic and innovative website that helps nurture and convert leads.

What did it do right?

Utilising stunning visuals and an easy navigation bar, AXA Investment Managers’ website enables a simple user journey that pushes investors down the customer acquisition funnel.

Here are the top five reasons why this website won the top spot:

• Visually appealing with strong branding across the site
• Optimised for mobile use
• A strong SEO strategy across the site that prioritises critical keywords
• Incorporates a mixture of content mediums, from video to editorial content, catering to a wide variety of investors and clients
• Information is easy to find with a functional design and clear call to action throughout

What the top three asset managers’ marketing campaigns got right

Overall, what these top three asset managers’ marketing campaigns got right was prioritising highly professional and well-produced educational content. All marketing materials were easy-to-understand and catered for a variety of investors and clients.

Simple-to-navigate designs alongside fresh and interesting content, made these campaigns stand out from the crowd and win the top spot in the 2022 Investment Marketing Innovation Awards.

The post Top 3 asset managers’ marketing campaigns 2022 appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The basics of financial content marketing

To nurture and convert leads, your finance brand needs an informed and strategic content marketing plan that addresses your audience’s concerns. To keep your content fresh and engaging, you also need to produce a variety of it – infographics, short-form videos or editorial content.

At the end of the day, it’s imperative you produce content your target audience wants to see. Whether you’re trying to gain the attention of high-net-worth investors or young first-time investors, your financial content marketing strategy should reflect what they want to see. Utilise your performance metrics across your social media platforms and website to find what content works and who’s looking at it.

Omnichannel marketing is your friend. Producing and distributing content across a variety of channels will enable your finance brand to reach more people and gain leads. Make sure your financial content marketing is tailored to the platform it’s being distributed on, look at the trends, consider the demographics and ensure every interaction a consumer has with you is a positive one.

Stripe’s educational guide and content hub

Stripe has created an educational content hub and multiple guides, to help make it easier for consumers to navigate not only its products and services but also to gain insights into global events.

From industry updates to business insights, Stripe provides a diverse range of content that’s easy to understand and simple. In addition, all articles are written by industry experts helping to ensure the content is accurate and cements Stripe as an authority. Finally, the design of the content hub makes it easy to navigate, enabling users to find information quickly and without fuss.

What can we learn?

• Produce content your audience actually wants. Consider using existing data and customer surveys to establish what topics are of interest
• Produce a range of content that provides value-driven information sourced from experts
• Ensure your website and content hub is easy to use and mobile-friendly

Aberdeen’s thinking aloud

Aberdeen’s Thinking Aloud content hub provides the latest insights and opinions about issues that affect the industry. Relatively short in length, between 2-5 minute read time, these articles provide research-backed analysis on key topics clients and industry experts want.

An easy-to-navigate website, each article is clear in its topic and targeted toward global investors. Each article clearly explains each topic, with infographics, charts and graphs included to make things easier to understand. In addition, articles are published daily helping to keep the content not only fresh and engaging but also timely.

What can we learn?

• Produce editorial-quality content covering a range of topics, including macroeconomic themes
• Utilise internal experts who know the subject matter like the back of their hand
• Produce a mixture of short-form and long-form editorial content
• Create an always-on content program

Schroder’s infographics

Schroder creates informative infographics that tackle complex topics to make them easier to understand for investors. Colourful, easy to navigate and simple to understand Schroder’s infographics are a unique way in which to help investors gain a snapshot of timely topics and useful insights.

What can we learn?

• To create content that’s eye-catching and utilises high-quality graphic design
• Provide easy-to-understand snapshots of complex topics for investors to gain timely insights quickly

What you can learn from these financial content marketing examples

Overall, these three financial content marketing examples highlight not only the importance of creating content specific to your target audience, but also creating content that’s easy to understand. Focusing on simplifying complex topics and providing accurate and timely information is an important component of any financial content marketing strategy.

The post 3 examples of great financial content marketing appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Creating dedicated content for financial advisers is a way your super fund builds meaningful relationships with finance professionals with significant influence. While traditionally super fund content has been focused on clients, creating content for advisers provides an opportunity for you to nurture and convert wholesale leads. By converting one adviser, you’re also engaging with their current and future clients, so targeting this niche sector should be a strategic priority.

At The Dubs, we have performed desk research on Australian super companies to get a picture of which funds are creating adviser content effectively, and how they can improve. From Australian Ethical Super to Colonial First State, we have analysed three of Australia’s major super funds to help you improve and execute adviser content that converts.

Based on our analysis, we noted most super funds creating content specifically for financial advisers are retail funds. This highlights a gap in the market for industry super funds to take advantage of and build cred with advisers. By filling this information gap, industry super funds can capture the attention of advisers and generate leads, trust, brand awareness and growth opportunities.

While targeting financial advisers is a niche demographic, delivering value-driven content that provides timely and useful information is a great way to capture their attention. Articles, thought leadership, social media posts, webinars and videos that align with advisers can improve your reputation and generate brand awareness. Aiming for an always-on content strategy can enable your super fund to generate meaningful leads that can be nurtured and encouraged to create long-lasting relationships between you, the advisers and their clients.

Australian Ethical Super

Overall, Australian Ethical Super’s ‘Adviser Insights’ section delivers tailored and valuable editorial and video content that can benefit audiences.

What is it doing right?

Aside from the content hub being easy on the eyes, Australian Ethical Super’s impressive array of content formats between short form and long form videos, webinars and editorial content, helps to ensure its content remains fresh and engaging. It also provides a mode of delivery that’s suited to a wide variety of clients.

Its videos are professional and deliver content primarily in a Q&A format with senior industry experts that makes it easy for users to follow along. Speaking with industry experts helps Australian Ethical Super to appear as an authority and gain trust with audiences.

In terms of editorial content, it’s written with clarity to make the content easy to understand for all levels of advisers and focuses on education. Information is timely and focuses on a broad range of topics to provide variety to audiences.

Where can it improve?

While still in its infancy, with the first piece of content being published in December 2021, it could improve the frequency of content. An always-on content program should be the aim, with a variety of content being produced weekly. This would increase SEO performance, as well as place it front of mind with audiences. It also could make content easier to find by categorising it, either by topic or format to make the site more user-friendly.

Overall score: 11/12

MLC Super

Overall, MLC Super’s ‘Insights Series’ can improve its adviser content by producing a wider variety of content, rather than just solely focusing on webinars.

What is it doing right?

MLC’s ‘Insights’ section on its website is easy to find and navigate, with each of its webinars laid out to make it easy for users to sign up or watch previous ones. Focused on providing advice to advisers, its webinars are tailored and personalised to its target audience. Each webinar is presented by senior industry experts and is interactive in nature, helping to foster trust and brand loyalty, cementing MLC as an authority that advisers can turn to.

It also provides the option for advisers to chat directly to MLC, offering an omnichannel method of communication and helping web users find the information they need easier.

Where can it improve?

MLC should consider producing a wider variety of content such as editorials, short form videos, infographics and interactive charts. MLC also could look to repurpose current webinar videos, to be used not just across the site as short video content, but also on social media channels such as LinkedIn.

Additionally, it could use imagery throughout the ‘Insights’ section to make the webpage more engaging for users. It should also aim to increase content frequency, striving to create an always-on content program.

Overall score: 4/12

Colonial First State

Overall, Colonial First State’s ‘Adviser Hub’ is a great example of a super fund doing adviser content well.

What is it doing right?

Colonial First State has a wide variety of tailored content, from webinars to videos to thought leadership, that’s published a few times a week. Producing multiple content formats helps to keep audiences engaged and content fresh. Additionally, its adviser content is categorised on its homepage making it simple and easy for users to navigate to the information they need.

Colonial First State is the only super fund to create adviser content for social media. Colonial First State’s dedicated LinkedIn adviser hub is a great way for it to create authentic connections with users and improve engagement, by making it easier for users to access the content it produces.

Where can it improve?

While Colonial First State is the super fund with the most frequent content, it could still look to improve this area by adopting an always-on content program. This could be achieved by repurposing content, such as webinars to create bite-sized videos, and producing shorter form content like infographics and interactive charts. This style of content not only helps to improve frequency, but also engagement by delivering short, easy-to-digest and valuable information that’s tailored to advisers.

Overall score: 11/12

Scoring: This is a comparative scoring system.
‘Imagery quality’, ‘Frequency of content publishing’, ‘Number of content categories’ and ‘Number of content formats’ were all scored against each other. For each criteria the worst performer scored ‘1’ and the best performer scored ‘3’. This gives a total score out of 12 for the 4 criteria ranked.

The post 3 Australian Super Funds Creating Content for Advisers appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Sparks, a video mini-series by DBS

DBS Bank’s mini-series focused on storytelling over trying to sell a product or service. The mini-series began with the idea that it was unfortunate most of the general public didn’t understand what bankers do or their daily lives. So, Sparks was produced to share this with audiences.

Creating emotional connections was a strategic priority for the DBS team and enabled it to form authentic customer relationships. This worked in its favour, with the series being attributed to 10% of leads for loans, SME products and wealth products. In addition, the series also garnered 230 million views, became one of the top 10 ads watched on YouTube, and led to a 159% uplift in brand interest and a 46% recognition score in awareness and advocacy.

Karen Ngui, Head of Strategic Marketing and Comms at DBS explains: “We were very surprised because 10% is actually quite a healthy percentage. Ngui adds, “It goes to show that people, while being very promotion sensitive, really want to bank with someone who shares values that they can identify with.”

Facebook in-stream video ads

While the focus on storytelling and its high production value contributed to its overall success, DBS also utilised several other marketing techniques. While producing great video content is a crucial component of a successful financial marketing strategy, your finance brand must also consider content that supports its success and generates awareness.

DBS saw great success utilising Facebook’s in-stream video ad campaigns. Facebook in-stream video ads, is content that appears as ad breaks in longer-form video content. DBS Bank’s in-stream video ads showed a 15-second snapshot of a Sparks episode and was targeted towards 25-44 year olds.

The simple goal was to increase brand awareness of the second season of its Sparks mini-series and attract more viewers, which they achieved. By utilising this style of campaign, DBS gained a 39-point lift in ad recall, a 9-point lift in brand awareness and a 6-point lift in action intent.

The ‘phygital’ experience

Alongside the mini-series, DBS launched an in-person campaign called Sparks Studio. This is an interactive space where consumers can visit and learn about recycling and reducing waste consumption (the major storyline in season 2 of Sparks).

By seamlessly combining the digital experience of the Sparks mini-series with a physical experience, DBS can form stronger connections with consumers and reach different demographics. Research by Forrester has suggested that providing a phygital experience may result in a 17% increase in conversions, 16% increase in revenue and a 20% increase in customer satisfaction.

While a mini-series won’t be a content strategy that aligns with every Singapore finance brand, DBS’ success highlights the importance of producing high-value, creative content that’s supported by a range of marketing strategies.

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Lions Global Investors: nailing Facebook content

Facebook is a great social channel to connect and provide valuable content to investors for Singapore asset managers. With over 92% of Singapore’s population using the internet and 4.02 million on Facebook, your asset management firm can build a solid audience if you design a tailored digital marketing strategy.

Lion Global Investors’ Facebook page produces engaging and easy-to-understand digital content. Its focus on educational content alongside market updates provides value to the everyday investor or soon-to-be investor.

The best part about its educational content is it uses different formats, enabling investors to gain information in new and fresh ways. This can also help ensure you capture an interested audience as your content remains dynamic and engaging. Utilising photos, blog posts and short videos, Lion Global Investors creates a range of digital content for its audience.

Fidelity Investments: winning over audiences on YouTube

YouTube is Singapore’s favourite social media platform, with over 5.08 million users. In fact, 9 out of 10 people in Singapore visit the platform on a daily basis. Creating content people want to watch can be a massive competitive advantage for Singapore asset managers. Building an audience and gaining strong engagement can enable your asset management firm to nurture leads and increase client acquisition.

Fidelity Investments Singapore is one Singapore asset management firm that’s doing YouTube content well. Having joined in 2021, they already have over 2.6 million YouTube views, with their market update videos gaining the most engagement.

Fidelity Investments’ YouTube videos are focused on easy-to-digest, short-form educational content that not only explains the investment market but also how to invest. Its market updates are performed by its investment specialists, helping to build trust and credibility. In fact, 63% of consumers view technical experts as being credible enabling your brand to be viewed as an authority in the industry.

Its educational content is fun, short and engaging. Created using animation, the content is easy to understand and targeted to first-time investors or those wanting to learn more. Understanding your audience and what they want to know is key to creating great educational content.

UOB Group: dominating Instagram

Instagram is one social platform not many Singapore asset managers have taken up, making it a prime opportunity for your asset management firm to build an audience. There are about 3.2 million Singapore users on Instagram and around 21.8 million visits to the social platform a year. Unlike Facebook and YouTube, Instagram has a young audience with around 85% of Singapore users being between the ages of 16-24. This means your content needs to reflect this and should be targeted at a younger demographic of a majority of first-time investors.

One Singapore asset management firm doing content well and has amassed an audience of over 27.8 k followers, is UOB Group. While it produces educational content that’s tailored to first-time investors, what makes its profile different is it has a focus on ‘Telling the ASEAN story, one tile at a time.’

Rather than solely focusing on financial content, UOB Group shares life in Southeast Asia, travel tips, programs users may be interested in, and stunning photography. This dynamic range of content means UOB Group caters to a wider audience, not only people interested in investing but everyday people living in Southeast Asia or wanting to explore it. This broader audience enables UOB Group to generate and nurture leads from a broader section of the Singapore and Southeast Asian community building strong brand awareness.

What Singapore asset managers can learn

At the end of the day, social media is where a majority of Singaporeans spend their time. In fact, 70% of Southeast Asia research and explore new products or services on mobile. To generate and nurture leads, Singapore asset managers must be producing value-driven content across a variety of social channels.

The first step to producing great content that builds an audience is understanding your target demographic. The next step is to produce educational content in a broad range of formats, to ensure content remains fresh, engaging, and interesting.

Gain a competitive advantage, nurture leads and push clients through the customer acquisition journey by joining social media and producing high-quality digital content.

The post Singapore Asset Managers: What they’re doing right appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Chase Bank launches charity initiative across the UK

Chase Bank is looking to improve children’s literacy levels in underserved communities, with 1 in 4 (27%) 11-year-olds in England leaving primary school unable to read well. Partnering with the National Literacy Trust, this program is a part of Chase Bank’s new ‘Chase Rewarding Futures’ venture.

Initially focusing on improving schools’ accessibility to resources, Chase aims to continue this program by empowering families and carers with the skills to improve their child’s literacy levels. This is the first part of their overall plan to invest back into underserved communities across England.

Why finance brands should promote their philanthropy

Finance brands can make large, positive changes for communities by aligning with and creating philanthropic initiatives. Additionally, aligning your finance brand with a charity can benefit your overall marketing strategy.

Benefits include:

• Loyalty – Charity and philanthropic initiatives can increase brand loyalty when practiced genuinely.
• Gain a Millennial and Gen Z audience – Millennial and Gen Z audiences are wanting their finance brand to represent their values and to do good. In fact, 81% of millennials say they want to support brands with corporate citizenship.
• Convert leads – Aligning with a charity and making your initiative a part of your overall content strategy can help generate and convert leads. With 71% of consumers saying they prefer to buy from companies that align with their values and shoppers under the age of 40 preferring to give back through where they shop, charity can help your finance brand acquire a new client base.

The key to aligning your finance brand with charitable initiatives

It’s not quite as simple for your finance brand to choose a charity and donate money to it. It’s critical that your finance brands’ philanthropy is genuine and aligns with your overall values. A finance brand choosing to align with an environmental organisation while simultaneously investing in large-scale mining is a contradicting charitable initiative and won’t have the desired effect.

Integrate your charitable initiative into your content strategy and showcase the progress you have made and contributed to in that space. For Chase Bank, they have a dedicated section on their site detailing their initiatives and it will soon become a space for the impact they have created. They have also made it a feature on their social media, sharing updates and events alongside the hashtag #ChaseRewardingFutures.

At the heart of it, your charity needs to align with your overall values and resonate with your target audience, if you want it to become a successful part of your overall marketing strategy.

The post Chase Bank proves the merit of charity for finance brands appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Mastercard: utilising emerging technologies in their content marketing

In November 2021, Mastercard strengthened its commitment to inclusion by launching an AR campaign across Snapchat. The AR feature enabled users to virtually walk down Acceptance Street in New York. This is the site of a sign Mastercard created in 2019 that has flags saying ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’, ‘queer’ and so on, to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community and showcase Mastercard’s commitment to inclusion. This sign was also a winning move by Mastercard in 2019, resulting in a 3000% increase in positive sentiment on Mastercard’s channels.

When the pandemic hit in 2021, Mastercard took a new approach and launched the Snapchat AR Lens so anyone can experience the sign, anywhere in the USA with equally great success. This content marketing strategy garnered over 50 million impressions and it exceeded Snapchat’s playtime average of 7-12 seconds to have an average use of 14.75 seconds.

What can we learn?

Mastercard’s unique content marketing approach was a hit. By providing content that’s interactive, engaging and customer-centric, Mastercard gained a reach of over 1.6 million people nation-wide. AR technology that’s part of social media is a great opportunity for your finance brand to improve brand awareness and build connections, by offering fun content consumers want.

Mastercard’s message of equality and inclusion is another indicator that marketing your ESG commitments can help you gain brand loyalty, with 71% of consumers saying they prefer to buy from companies that align with their values.

SoFi content calculation hub

SoFi describes itself as a ‘one-stop shop for your finances offering banking, investing, insurance, loans and crypto in the one place. As it’s solely digital, SoFi relies heavily on its content to provide consumers with answers quickly and easily. Owing to this, their resource centre relies heavily on calculators which enable users to understand their finances better.

Calculators are a great way of providing educational and interactive content that can help consumers understand their finances better. As they are easily accessible, they cater for SoFi’s current consumer base and potential clients simultaneously. With 55% of adults agreeing they would trust a bank more if it produced helpful content, SoFi’s calculators are a great method of generating leads and funneling them through the acquisition channel.

What can we learn?

Consumers want educational content that’s easy to understand and useful. SoFi has taken the usual loan calculator one step further by adding calculators for almost anything from investment calculators to loan calculators to savings calculators. At the heart of it, financial math can be confusing. SoFi does it for consumers, helping to build strong relationships and trust amongst users.

Morgan Stanley’s big ideas

While most financial content marketing is tailored to the general public or consumers looking to build their financially literacy, Morgan Stanley’s Ideas blog caters to those with extensive knowledge in technology, finance, politics and media. This blog is data driven and handles larges topics such as ‘Mapping Geopolitical Uncertainty’, helping to cement Morgan Stanley as an industry authority.

Each day a new piece of content is released in varying formats, like audio, visual or written, helping to make the content fresh, interesting, engaging and digestible.

What can we learn?

While creating content tailored to financial education remains a critical element of content marketing, the success of this blog highlights the importance of tailoring your content to specific audiences. By offering different ways to consume the information (audio, visual, written), their engaging content marketing approach makes the information interesting and digestible.

As each article is written by an expert, it helps to build trust amongst consumers, as Morgan Stanley centres themselves as an industry authority. In fact, 62.96% of readers consider blogs with multiple authors trustworthy.

Lessons from the best USA content marketing examples

Overall, Mastercard, SoFi, and Morgan Stanley highlight the importance in providing fun, interactive and engaging content to generate leads and acquire new customers.

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Westpac: Educating consumers through finance content marketing

Westpac has created an educational content hub, known as the Davidson Institute, that’s designed to empower people and businesses to build financial confidence. Balancing snackable bite-sized content with webinars and longer-form pieces, Westpac has created a platform that’s accessible to all consumers wanting to improve their financial literacy.

Educational content should be a part of all finance brands’ content marketing, whether they’re from Australia or not, with 62% of the world being financially illiterate. Understanding your target audience and creating educational content tailored to their concerns is paramount to creating a strong content program. Additionally, content needs to be easy to understand and easily accessible with a user-friendly design.

What can we learn?

What Westpac has done differently is provide relatable content to a wide variety of consumers, from young adults to retirees. By creating a content hub that utilises a hub-and-spoke model, the information they create remains easily accessible and tailored to specific audiences.

A hub-and-spoke model not only helps Westpac’s SEO it also structures the site in a way that can cater to a wide range of audiences. Users can click through to the section of the site specifically tailored to their circumstances, such as ‘retirement planning’ or ‘Growing your business’. This enables Westpac to become an authority in financial education helping to build trust, with 55% of adults agreeing they would trust a bank more if it produced helpful content.

Up Bank: Catering to the younger consumer

Digital banking app, Up Bank, has utilised transparency and a unique brand voice within their content marketing strategy to great success. While often banks and finance brands will be secretive around their new product and updates, Up Bank has flipped this on its head by sharing the brand’s progression through blog posts, interactive infographics (‘The Tree of Up’), and monthly emails. Rather than just simply presenting this information as bland bullet points, they have integrated humour and an engaging tone of voice, which they carry across the brand’s platforms and content.

What can we learn?

The transparent content Up Bank release enables consumers to be taken on a journey. Rather than alienating and scaring consumers, this transparent finance content marketing strategy has seen great success, with Up becoming one of the fastest-growing banks in Australia. It’s also built a loyal and trusting consumer base, with 94% of customers being more likely to show loyalty to a brand that offers complete transparency.

Taking a different approach to the usual professional tone of voice many finance brands take, Up Bank’s fun, personalised and engaging style and unique graphics captures audiences’ attention and speaks to the Millennial and Gen Z consumer. Up personalises every aspect of content they send out and always writes in a way that’s easy to understand. This makes their content relatable and distinctive helping to build brand awareness, with 72% of consumers saying they only engage with personalised messaging.

HBF: finance content marketing tailored to dads

HBF, an Australian health insurance provider, has taken a unique approach to its finance content marketing by targeting a micro-niche audience. Their Direct Advice for Dads, is a web page housing content written by dads for dads, about a range of topics (not just financial ones). With minimal branding across the site, HBF has focused entirely on producing high-quality, educational, and valuable content for consumers.

What can we learn?

While there’s a lot of content designed and tailored to mothers online, HBF saw a gap in the market in providing advice for fathers. This became a great opportunity for HBF to stand out from the crowd and reach a market that lacked tailored and personalised content. Lacking considerable branding, HBF has instead focused on delivering value to audiences adopting a customer-centric approach, helping to create authentic connections with consumers.

Overall, HBF showcases the importance of tailoring finance content marketing strategies to niche audiences and delivering value to consumers.

Learning lessons from Australia’s top finance content marketing examples

Content marketing plays an important role in capturing the attention of audiences, nurturing new leads, and building both brand trust and loyalty. Westpac, Up Bank and HBF, all highlight the importance of a tailored content marketing strategy. By creating valuable content that’s easy to understand and engaging, your finance brand can build a captivated audience and form authentic relationships for years to come.

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