A Complete Guide to Content Marketing for Financial Services

Winning the trust and attention of financial services (FinServ) buyers is becoming more challenging. There are currently over a million FinServ companies in the US alone₁ – and the increased competition has made finding, nurturing and converting leads a major hurdle for marketers. 

But with limited time and budgets to build a relationship with buyers, how can FinServ marketers generate measurable ROI? 

The answer is through content marketing for financial services – and this article provides everything you need to do it, including: 

• The average cost of a B2B financial services lead 
• What kind of content the average FinServ buyer consumes 
• A comprehensive framework to develop a winning content marketing strategy 

Financial Services Content Marketing 101 

What is FinServ Content Marketing? 

Financial services content marketing aims to attract, engage and convert financial services buyers using high-quality marketing content. But let’s start by clarifying a few of those terms: 

• Financial Services Buyers are individuals within an organization responsible for researching and negotiating the purchase of financial services or products. For example, a group of people within the finance department looking for an external accounting firm would be classified as financial services buyers. 

• Marketing Content is any content produced by a company to engage buyers. This ranges from blogs and organic social posts to whitepapers, emails, checklists and infographics.  

Why Should Financial Services Companies Produce Marketing Content? 

There are three primary roles content marketing can play for financial services marketers: 

1. Lead Generation 

Every B2B marketer wants to increase lead generation. However, research suggests that the average cost of financial services is roughly $653, which is more expensive than any other industry except higher education and oil and gas. 

Content marketing helps to attract fresh, high-quality leads across multiple channels, including SEO and gated content like whitepapers or organic social. This offers several benefits: 

• Cost-Effective: The total cost of producing and distributing marketing content is relatively small, especially compared to other popular lead generation methods, such as attending exclusive industry networking events or running ads on LinkedIn. This is particularly true if you effectively repurpose content and use it across multiple channels. 

• Authority Building: Content also gives FinServ marketers a great opportunity to build authority and show off their industry expertise. This means new leads are immediately warmer because they can see that your business is trustworthy.  

2. Lead Nurture

Financial services buyers take a long time to finalize a deal. Given that many have fixed windows within which they are allowed to onboard new vendors, it could take up to 12 months for a deal to be completed – and buyers are often researching on and off for the entire cycle. 

This puts a heavy emphasis on lead nurture for marketing teams, but many FinServ companies struggle with high lead churn because they simply cannot sustain the engagement. Content is the perfect way to nurture and maintain contact with leads throughout the long buying cycle. It allows you to build authority, slowly introduce your product or services over time, and gently move leads through the funnel. 

3. Customer Education and Retention

Financial services are highly dynamic, with market forces and regulatory updates routinely changing what is required from a FinServ vendor. While many companies will update clients directly through meetings, it is often more effective to produce content that explains new tax laws or macroeconomic factors. 

This serves two purposes:  

1. Simplifies Communications: Rather than scheduling 50 meetings to explain the latest regulatory changes to every client, you can produce one-to-many comms that solve the problem in one fell swoop. 
2. Increases Retention: Customers feel they can trust you to keep them up to date on the industry and their requirements. As a result, they are more loyal to your company and even expand their engagement with you. 

Simply put, high-quality content helps financial services marketers at every phase of the funnel. But to really understand the value of content marketing for FinServ, we need to understand who the content is aimed at. 

Understanding Financial Services Buyers 

What Do FinServ Buyers Care About? 

Many B2B buyer teams are highly diverse, including individuals from a wide range of departments. Marketers often have to create content that appeals to operations, HR and finance – which means the product positioning is complex. HR wants to know about your product’s impact on employee engagement; operations wants to know how it will impact daily operations; and finance wants to hear about the bottom line. 

This is not generally the case with financial services marketing. FinServ buyers are almost exclusively focused on two things:  

1. The financial impact of your product 
2. Regulatory compliance 

While some companies may offer other benefits, such as saving the buyer time, the overwhelming focus is likely to be on the bottom line. This may mean your marketing content can be narrower and could make it easier to plan topics. But it also places more pressure on you to provide a hard, rational case for your product or services – and back it up with reliable facts and figures. 

What Do FinServ Buyers Want from Content? 

The average FinServ buyer has very little time to consume content. A recent analysis showed that B2B buyers take over 31 hours between downloading gated content and reading it – suggesting even when they actively seek out content, it is a battle to find the space in their schedule to consume it. 

As a result, FinServ buyers are only interested in content that serves their immediate needs. This means that, in order to appeal to buyers, financial services content must offer: 

• Thought Leadership: Enable buyers to learn about new solutions or approaches to financial challenges. This helps them understand the industry and start to perceive your organization as an expert in the market. 
• Useful Data: Provide reliable information that will help them build a business case, improve their bottom-line performance or save time. 

However, there are other factors to consider, such as: 

• Authority: Does your content present your business as a trusted source? 
• Readability: Does your content make it easy for the buyer to get what they need quickly? 
• Connection: Does your content show that you understand FinServ buyers’ challenges and care about helping them? 

What Kind of Content Do Your Buyers Consume? 

It’s important for FinServ marketers to remember that their audience consumes a wide variety of content – and most of it is not produced by a prospective vendor. Let’s consider just a few channels through which buyers might find information relevant to your offering:   

• Industry News: Many FinServ buyers read trade publications, and this can become a key part of their research process. They learn about what others in their industry are doing and may also be influenced in their purchasing decisions by related industry news. 

• Third-Party Reviews: From Clutch to Gartner, there are many trusted websites that either curate user reviews or create their own expert reviews of FinServ companies. This is a powerful source of insight that the average buyer is likely to trust more than vendor-generated content. 

• Social Media: Buyers tend to trust their friends and peers to provide impartial insight and help them understand the problem they are trying to solve. Social media is the most prominent space where this happens, and it is not uncommon for a buyer to ask their network to recommend a reliable vendor. 

The key point here is simple: buyers would almost always prefer to get information from a neutral, third-party source. The only exception is when they get toward the end of their buyer journey and need more detailed information about specific vendors’ offerings. However, FinServ marketers should not simply wait until the bottom of the funnel to get buyers’ attention. Instead, they must consider how their content can provide value buyers can’t get from other channels. 

This can be achieved through a few different formats: 

• Whitepapers and eBooks: A great way to provide industry thought leadership and offer a level of detail and insight most other channels lack the time or incentive to produce. Are the trades really likely to devote 20 pages to understanding complex tax laws or investment strategies? 

• Infographics: A perfect way to offer high-value information that is easy to digest and does not demand too much time or attention from busy buyers. 

• Webinars: A powerful way to present your business as an authority figure and offer buyers the opportunity to speak directly with an expert – which they may never otherwise get to do. 

• Blogs: A great way to earn organic traffic and beat third-party information providers. Many financial services companies can produce high-quality, search engine optimized content that will rank higher than other news or trade publications – making them the default authority on the subject. 

• Social Media: A great way to get involved directly in the ongoing industry conversation. Many FinServ companies build a strong social media presence and actually become the vendors that buyers are recommended by their network. 

How to Develop a FinServ Content Marketing Strategy 

3 Make-Or-Break Elements of a Content Strategy 

Every FinServ marketing team should have three key pieces of the puzzle in place before they start planning content: 

1. Audience Motivations 

Financial services buyers are time-poor and only interested in content that provides them with tangible value. But what does that mean for your specific audience?  

Marketers should undertake deep research to understand their buyers at two different levels: 

• Rational Motivation: What do your buyers explicitly want or need from a vendor like you? How do they rationally justify a purchase? 
• Emotional Motivation: What are the attendant fears and aspirations related to choosing a vendor? What are the specific pain points and problems they face? 

This will help you choose topics that resonate with both heart and heart, ensuring they not only provide demonstrable value - but also trigger the audience’s sense of urgency.  

2. Valuable Insights 

Imagine seeing an eBook title that appeals to both your rational and emotional motivations before spending 10 minutes of your busy day reading it – and finding that it was full of vague fluff. This is the experience of many B2B buyers, and the experience actively puts them off your business. 

Marketers should, therefore, begin their content strategy with a deep dive, interviewing internal subject matter experts (SMEs) and looking at the latest relevant research to ensure they have plenty of genuinely original, interesting and useful information to build their content around. 

3. Alignment with Sales

Marketing content has the potential to not only generate and nurture leads but also help the sales team close more deals. However, most marketers overlook this key factor and fail to get buy-in from sales on their content marketing strategy and messaging. This severely limits the overall impact content can have on revenue – and can lead to friction between the two departments.  

Marketers should consult with sales about the kind of information buyers commonly request and how marketing can add force to the sales push. This not only increases the impact of your content, but it can also lead to valuable insights that make the content itself more useful for buyers. 

Once these three factors are in place, you can begin to develop a concrete strategy that guides content production and distribution. 

5 Steps to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy 

1. Map Your Funnel

Your content strategy should be built around multiple different phases of the marketing and sales funnel, ensuring you influence buyers at every stage of their journey. But in order to do that, you need to know exactly how your buyers move toward a purchase. 

Map your funnel to identify clear stages, working with sales to create a shared language and definitions. This should represent your ideal buyer journey; in reality, B2B buyers tend to move back and forth between funnel stages multiple times as they compare vendors and learn more about the product or service for which they are looking.  

2. Choose Your Channels

Next, use a combination of historical data and strategic intuition to determine which channels will have the most impact at each stage of the funnel. While most marketers will use a range of channels at each phase, there should be logic in how you focus resources on lead generation, lead nurture, and sales enablement.  

For example, financial services buyers are most likely to discover vendors through Google search or LinkedIn, which means heavy investments in SEO, pay-per-click advertising, and organic social media are likely to produce the highest benefits. However, once you are nurturing a lead, email is a great option to deliver high-quality, low-cost content at the scale and frequency required to engage time-poor financial buyers. 

3. Identify Topics 

The next step is to determine key topics for each phase of the funnel: 

• Top of the Funnel: These should be topics that appeal to a casual buyer who is not invested in your company yet. Focus on industry trends, information about the specific problems your buyers face and eye-catching data that is likely to attract buyers early in their research. A key focus here is curiosity: from common accounting mistakes to the impact of new technology on finance departments, buyers are more likely to be lured in by novel information.  

• Middle of the Funnel: These topics must begin to position your product as the solution without being too sales-heavy. The goal is to deepen the buyer’s knowledge and provide more detailed information, which means technical information is more likely to be relevant. For example, an accounting firm might provide detailed information about recent changes to tax compliance, which will help your lead gain a deeper understanding of their accounting requirements. 

• Bottom of the Funnel: These topics should really push buyers toward sales, with persuasive product explanations and lots of proof points. The topics should still be focused on the buyer’s problems, but they can be more directly connected to your product at this point.  
   

4. Produce and Distribute Your Content

You should now plan exactly how content will be written, designed and distributed. There are two important factors to consider here: 

• Production Delays: Whether you struggle to find the right copywriter or simply get hit by project management issues, content production often gets delayed. That is why you should produce work at least one month in advance, giving yourself a buffer to ensure content is still published at a consistent rate.  
  • Note: Most financial services marketers will want to balance longer-term planning with the capacity to produce content quickly. This will help you reduce the risk of delays while also being able to produce highly relevant content that speaks to trends in the stock market, new regulations or economic announcements. 
• Content Repurposing: Consider how the content you produce could be repurposed. For example, while a whitepaper or infographic may appear a heftier time investment than a 500-word blog, they are often far more cost-effective in the long run. You can generate multiple blogs, social posts and other forms of content from the same piece of initial work – making your budget go much further. 
   

5. Optimize Your Campaigns

• Data Gathering: Do we have the right systems in place to generate reliable data from all channels (including your website, social media accounts, and all paid channels)? 

• Optimization Cadence: How frequently will we review performance data and make changes to improve content performance?  

• RevOps: Do we have strong enough processes to review leads, align our strategy with sales and ensure content has the largest possible impact on our bottom line? 

Generate, Nurture and Convert More Financial Services Leads with ProperExpression 

With expertise across both financial services and content marketing, we offer a full-stack service to help ambitious FinServ marketers deploy best-in-class content that builds trust and drives profits. 

One recent client saw a 466% increase in inbound generated revenue in a single year – and we have a proven framework to help you do the same. 

Want to learn how it would work?

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