Awareness. For financial advisors, building awareness doesn’t mean simply whether your prospects know the name of your company, but rather it’s how well they understand the unique capabilities you offer. Content marketing is a powerful  tool for building awareness because, unlike advertising, it packages information that your prospects want to consume and can directly benefit from. That means it can be effectively distributed through social media, email campaigns, or on your website, and its impact can be significantly compounded by sharing. Also unlike advertising, you are not engaging clients with a simple product or price statement, but rather with a rich dialog about your clients’ lives, priorities, and worries, and the solutions you offer.

 

Onboarding. Because advertising is about selling and can only tee up simplistic messaging, it often starts the conversation at the wrong place. In contrast, prospects responding to content marketing will arrive better informed about your company’s unique offerings, creating the opportunity to develop deeper, more trusted relationships with them from the outset. Content marketing can also inform and facilitate the onboarding process itself. For example, guides that help prospects choose the financial advisor who best meets their needs, checklists and questions they should ask, and other resources that help them understand their planning needs and empower them throughout the engagement and onboarding process can build trust and ultimately ensure you are creating an advisor-client relationship that works for everyone.

 

As an example, I oversaw the New Retirement Mindscape national investigation that helped establish Ameriprise’s brand position as a retirement resource for boomers following its spin-off from American Express. The study itself generated over 50,000,000 media impressions, and the findings were also leveraged to develop the highly acclaimed Dream Book Guide, a booklet that included provocative questions prospects should consider when planning for retirement. Over one million copies were requested by prospects during the campaign, and the booklet was extremely effective in both educating prospects and beginning productive conversations with Ameriprise advisors. The Dream Book was a success because it not only promoted Ameriprise’s new brand position, but also equipped prospects with a practical starting point when engaging and onboarding with advisors.

 

Retention. Content marketing can also increase retention through ongoing dialogue on topics that matter most to your clients—through social media, newsletters, and the continued development of research and resources that keep your clients engaged. By mining client data, you can uncover challenges many of your clients confront, and develop content that helps them understand and overcome financial obstacles. Moreover, client segmentation will enable you to send the right content to the right clients at the right time. Continuing to engage and educate your clients will build trust, keep you top-of-mind, and potentially increase wallet-share.

 

Advocacy. Content marketing can lead to powerful word-of-mouth marketing by creating valuable resources your clients want to share actively with friends and family. And, because you are demonstrating you continually educate, guide, and help clients improve their lives, you are creating a highly positive reputation that will help accelerate referrals.

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The Six P’s: a gameplan for content marketing 

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Through decades of experience working with clients to envision, design, and launch content marketing campaigns, we have identified the following “Six P’s” of successful content marketing (Figure 2).

 

Plan your content marketing campaign. Before launching a content marketing campaign, clearly identify your business objectives and metrics. Content marketing requires long-term vision, but staying grounded in your business objectives and results will help you build an initiative that benefits both your clients and your company’s bottom line. At the outset, you should identify the role content plays in your organization, what actions you want prospects and clients to take after they have consumed your content, and the value you expect your content marketing initiatives to provide for your business

  

Position around a topic that will forge a powerful personal connection between your company and your customers. What is most important in your customers’ lives? What is top of mind for them each day? What keeps them up at night? Connecting with your customers around their greatest hopes, dreams, or worries will win their minds, hearts, and loyalty. The topic must also be aligned with your company’s expertise and offerings. You should have the experience and credibility both to be a leading expert on the topic, and to create the best solutions.

 

Pioneer a differentiated way of thinking about a topic of high importance to your customers. Sometimes this requires original research that uncovers new dimensions, trends, challenges, and solutions. But often you can leverage existing research and data to develop a meaningful story for your prospects and clients. The point is to outshine your competition with a powerful narrative that is clear, compelling, and even changes the way your clients think about their lives.

 

As an example, Allianz Life was seeking to further establish its brand as a lead resource in estate planning. To help this achieve this objective, I oversaw the American Legacies initiative to understand how clients think about inheritance. We discovered that, when considering what was most important to pass on to the next generation, money was not the top priority for most Americans across all wealth levels. Instead, we found there were “four pillars” of legacy, which included (1) values and life lessons, (2) personal possessions of emotional value, (3) wishes and directions to be fulfilled, and (4) financial assets/real estate. Older adults most prioritized passing on “values and life lessons.” With this knowledge, we created content and resources that helped both advisors and clients rethink their “legacy planning,” leading to far better and more productive client engagements and discussions. The campaign was a great success because it pioneered a new way to think about an emotionally challenging topic, and provided better ways for clients and advisors to discuss priorities and develop solutions that met the clients’ top needs and wishes.

 

Promote your content to your prospects, clients, and key stakeholders, who may include company leadership, advisor team, and your partners. Many companies go right to external promotion, but internal buy-in and education is a necessary first step before external outreach. Identify, educate, and empower your advisor team to be adept with the content points. Be creative and aggressive during your external outreach, whether active social media engagement, prominent website placement, PR campaigns, or advertising that points to your content. But remember that the first rule of content marketing is to sell without selling. Never appear to be self-serving. In a content marketing campaign, you are promoting groundbreaking content to improve your clients’ lives. Done right, and customer loyalty, engagement, and sales will follow.

 

Practice what you promote. If your content marketing campaign identifies and addresses a pressing consumer need, be ready to talk to the solutions you are putting in place. If the content resources you promote uncover client passions, priorities, and beliefs, look for ways to reflect these attitudes in your company culture and way of doing business. Over time, insights from your content marketing campaigns can be ingrained into your company DNA to create even deeper understanding, connections, and communication with your clients about what matters most to them and their lives.

 

Persist. Creating thought leadership requires commitment and dedication. If your content marketing effort is perceived as brief and half-hearted, you will lose credibility with your clients. Establishing an authoritative position is often a multi-year effort and can build powerful momentum.

 

The Merrill Seven Life Priorities initiative is a great example of how persistence can pay impressive dividends. Merrill was seeking to strengthen its brand as a company attuned to the life goals and needs of its clients throughout retirement. Between 2011 and 2015 I oversaw national investigations into each of the seven life priorities of retirement: family, home, health, work, giving, leisure, and finances. By continually developing and providing new content for clients that helped them navigate their retirement life priorities, Merrill was able to create a wide range of effective resources for its advisors, and firmly establish its reputation as a resource and guide for clients’ dreams and goals.

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