Before diving into a new content strategy, don’t miss the first blog in this series here -- where we explore the four obstacles facing finance marketing departments, preventing them from truly performing to the fullest potential.When one typically thinks of finance companies, a few key terms may come to mind – traditional, convoluted, and money-making. These associations are often not far from the mark regarding both the industry as a whole and how their marketing departments are typically run. Social media, technology, inbound marketing strategies and blog content strategy, along with countless other tools and tactics, have changed the game and most finance companies are a foot behind in the race – leaving qualified leads and money on the table, up for grabs elsewhere.The finance and, more specifically, investment industries are known for basing their buying and selling decisions on data and analysis. So why wouldn’t we create a marketing content strategy based on that same framework? Why continue throwing content at the wall and seeing what sticks? Why continue to market content solely based on what specific information we want to bring to the customer, rather than thinking about what information the customer is seeking, then offering ourselves as a resource?Here is a way to build out a content strategy for the new year to drive traffic to your website, along with helpful tools and resources at your disposal:
Keyword Planning
Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to both generate keyword ideas centered around a topic/relevant keyword, as well as identify the average monthly search volume. This helps us build out a list of keywords to use in relation to the topic we are attempting to cover.Things to Avoid:
- Using the same exact keywords more than once. Websites don’t rank, pages do. Try to build out the best pages possible for each keyword and attempt to create cornerstone content.
- Using keywords with low average monthly search volumes. We want to bring the web traffic to us, don’t waste time and energy building out a web page on a term that only receives 90 searches a month.
Topic Generation with Answer the Public
As a digital marketer, creative associate, PR pro, or content creator, if you haven’t used Answer the Public, you should! It’s a free online tool brought to you by the minds of Google and Bing. If we plug in a keyword and the country/region we would like to target, it produces a plethora of top queries people are searching for in relation to that keyword. This provides insight into what the general public is searching for and helps determine what blog topics we should focus on.For example, if I plug in “retirement,” I receive a plethora of inquiries broken down by a pronoun. Use the queries for our content strategy that apply to our consumer base, products, and services.[caption id="attachment_11435" align="aligncenter" width="975"]
Source:Answer the Public[/caption]
Theme Seeking with Google Trends and think with Google
Use the free tool that is Google Trends to our advantage. It provides insight into search trends, geographic elements, and so much more. Attempt to seek out the related terms and any industry trends that should be relevant to what our consumer is seeking. For example, when plugging in “finance” as a search term and changing the metrics to the last twelve months in the U.S., we can see that both felony and futures contracts have risen the most in terms of search volume. The former most likely due to the Wells Fargo scandal but it’s important to note that futures contracts took a steep curve up. Our consumer is seeking that information so why not produce content to satisfy that request.Another great resource aligned with Google Trends is Think with Google, a think tank blog of information on industry trends, tools, and more topics that surmise data-driven insights relevant to a vast number of industries. Take note of the infographic Think with Google produced of topic finance-related searches throughout the calendar year. Use the below image to build out content themes on our blog posts and digital content to connect customers to our site. If people are seeking this content with query searches, be their answer.[caption id="attachment_11434" align="aligncenter" width="975"]
Source: think with Google[/caption]
Top to Bottom Content Creation
Now that you have the free online tools, put them to work for you in the new year. Attempt to gain insight into your consumer’s need and inquiries to create compelling content. Gone are the days of Mad Men marketing; in the digital age, use all of the resources at our fingertips to make the most of a content strategy and, ultimately, drive traffic to our website.Stay tuned for Part 3, in which we explore how to measure the success of a new content strategy and tactics to benchmark yourself against competitors. Lisa ZanchiMarketing Analyst[cta]
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
