An important truism about marketing is that to be effective, the marketer’s message needs to connect with the audience it intends to reach. Traditional forms of marketing used by financial advisors – including networking with one’s friends and family members, cold-calling, and paid advertising – have been effective at reaching a ‘typical’ client base of older, wealthy retirees. However, for advisors looking to reach a different type of client – such as those in younger generations like Millennials, who often have an aversion to such straightforward sales tactics – finding a message that resonates often requires a more tailored approach that speaks to the specific audience and what they are going through.
One way to provide such a message is to create educational content, in the form of a blog, podcast, or social media posts (or a combination of the three), on topics that are relevant to the financial lives of the types of clients the advisor is trying to reach.
In this guest post, Thomas Kopelman, financial planner and co-founder of AllStreet Wealth, writes about the keys to becoming an effective content marketer, including building skills at creating multiple forms of content, repurposing content to use in multiple ways, and tracking progress to gauge the performance of content over time.
While good educational content can be a powerful way to generate interest from potential clients, it comes with its own challenges. Because not only does the advisor need to keep up a steady stream of content to engage with their audience, but the content also needs to be good – that is, to be relevant and interesting enough for the audience to want to come back for more. Furthermore, with the sheer number of available outlets for content marketing, it can also be easy for advisors starting out with content marketing to try producing content in too many places at once, ultimately spreading their resources too thin and failing to hone their skills with any one form of content.
A better approach may be to introduce each form of content one at a time – in other words, to initially focus solely on one form of content long enough to build up skill and confidence in that medium, then add another form and learn to do that one well, and so on. Not only does this approach help advisors ensure they have a solid grasp of each form of content before moving on to the next one, but it can also build up a sizeable foundation of content that can be repurposed in the future (e.g., reposted or reshared on social media). This can maximize the potential return on the time and effort it takes to create each blog post, podcast, or newsletter.
Ultimately, what’s important to remember is that it often takes time for the effects of quality content marketing to come to fruition, meaning the most important lesson is to stick with it. A good piece of content, whatever its form, might not immediately convince someone to become a client… but what it can do is cause the advisor’s name (and expertise) to stick in their head so that when they do come to a pain point that requires an advisor’s expertise, they know who to reach out to.
