3 Key Challenges Impacting Financial Content Strategy

Today, we analyze three challenges that are peculiar to the financial service industry, show you how they impact content strategy and uncover some ways to overcome them.

To do so, we caught up with Schalk van der Sandt, Head of Digital at PHD Media, during our first Finance Masterclass in Sydney. Schalk worked directly with ANZ (Australia & New Zealand Banking Group) on the award-winning Equal Future campaign and comes from a finance marketing background himself, so we had a thing or two to learn from him.

Watch what he had to say:

With the FSI industry facing some unique challenges, here’s how are they impacting content marketing strategy and how should brands overcome them…

Challenge #1 – Identifying the Conversion Point for Longer-Cycle Campaigns

• What’s the best point of conversion when you’re selling a financial planning product?
• How do you use content to get the initial interest?

It all starts by identifying your point of engagement. Considering that not many people will fill out a form online to apply for a home loan, they will still opt for a face-to-face interaction.

What role can content play then?

Content is part of the complex matrix of touch points in the client lifecycle – it provides education and helps people choose your product. Try adding a softer CTA to your content landing page. For example, a form users fill out to book an in-person appointment with advisors, using gated assets to collect lead information.

Challenge #2 – Consumers Lacking Trust

In the past 20 years, we’ve moved from a few people having a megaphone and everybody else having to listen, to pretty much everybody having access to a megaphone through social media. Negativity and cynicism seem to have gained popularity as a result, and FSI brands recognize that.

With content, you have an opportunity to highlight stories that can help you counterbalance the negativity and build trust by creating stories about your customers and how your brand has and will continue to help them.

A great piece of inspiration is the NAB “Small Business Campaign,” which launched earlier this year included short videos featuring success stories about how they helped small-business owners achieve lifelong dreams:

Westpac’s content hub, The Cusp is another great example:

Challenge #3: Leveraging Data

In a highly-regulated environment like Finance, an effective content strategy and having various pieces of content in different formats allows you to segment your audience granularly by looking at what they’re most interested in and how they interact with each piece of content.

With the right infrastructure in place to analyze data, you can develop the right niche and audience segments. In turn, data allows you to deliver extremely complex messages, tailoring them to specific buying personas.