In this roundup, we’re diving into the top five financial content marketing case studies that have successfully transformed even the most complex topics into unexpectedly captivating content.

Brown Brothers Harriman

When it comes to financial content, there are two near-universal themes: Most people are on the hunt for more money, and they’re all itching for the secrets of how to get there. But, as all marketers know, when you try to make content that appeals to everyone, you often end up with hollow content that resonates with no one.

For Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest private bank in America, tapping into the high-net-worth female market wasn’t just a stride towards gender equality in wealth management—it was about seizing an overlooked opportunity.

In an effort to break from tradition, BBH started the Center for Women & Wealth, coupled with a pioneering print magazine tailored for these women. They also launched a series of women-centric infographics, such as “Bridging the Funding Gap,” which highlighted the stark funding disparities women entrepreneurs face.

Take these learning lessons from BBH:

• Zero in on a specific audience: It’ll help you create hyper-relevant content that speaks directly to the concerns, aspirations, and realities of your chosen niche.
• Visual storytelling is worth a thousand words: Use it to simplify complex information.

Royal Bank of Canada

Ah, content creation—the challenge at the heart of financial content marketing only mounts when you realize you’re up against not just other financial institutions but also traditional publications, fintech startups, and even TikTok influencers.

So, how do you scale your financial content creation efforts? Royal Bank of Canada had an answer: Get everyone involved.

From the commercial banking team to the wealth management department, RBC tasked all interested divisions to create their own content. Today, RBC’s blog is a vibrant mosaic, offering everything from retirement guidance to educational insights.

Borrow a page from RBC’s playbook by:

• Decentralizing content creation: Empowering finance departments to produce and manage their own financial content fosters a sense of ownership.
• Building a unified yet diverse strategy: While allowing departmental autonomy, all content should still thread together to reinforce your brand’s core message and values.
• Streamlining the review process: Having only one or two key members as reviewers reduces bottlenecks in content production.

BlackRock

Content topics in the finance world can feel pretty daunting to the general public. BlackRock, an investment management corporation, struck content gold with a pivotal insight: People seek out nuanced, humanized narratives.

So they published “How the World Retires,” an interactive report that profiled the retirement journeys of six couples around the globe. Complete with vivid photography, an engaging write-up, and a nifty retirement calculator, the report has outperformed the average BlackRock post by sixfold in engagement metrics.

Draw inspiration from BlackRock by:

• Embracing the human element: The most powerful financial content marketing always has an element of personal connection.
• Demystifying the data: Balancing hard facts and real-life stories can make complex financial concepts more tangible and engaging.
• Exploring interactivity: Whether it’s a calculator, a quiz, a tool, a game, or a poll, interactive content elements can drive audience participation, action, and return engagement.

SoFi

While SoFi’s blogs were initially all SEO- and product-focused, they figured it was time for a revamp. “We had to breathe new life into our content to make it more editorially driven and wired for social distribution,” David Gardner, SoFi’s director of content marketing, explained.

And so, they began telling more intriguing stories that its millennial target audience would care about: debt management, salary navigation, and proactive investments. They even explored longer-form journalistic pieces with member spotlights.

The results? Nothing short of a transformation. The revamped content didn’t just ferry readers to SoFi’s blog; it turned casual browsers into engaged community members who frequently returned for more. SoFi’s organic Google traffic ballooned by 50%, and their overall site traffic increased by a staggering 970%. Meanwhile, total monthly conversions skyrocketed by 247%.

Add these tips from SoFi to your strategy:

• Storytelling is the new currency: Engage your audience with compelling narratives. SoFi’s shift to storytelling, with a personal touch, transformed their financial content from snoozefest to share-worthy.
• Choose the right topics: Don’t just rely on your gut—take the time to dig through engagement analytics, first-party data, and keyword research to understand what your audience is interested in learning more about.

Guardian Life Insurance

Convincing young people to engage with their finances is no easy feat. Bombarded with headlines like “Do you really need that 401(k) for the climate apocalypse?”, they’re not exactly lining up to discuss retirement plans.

Instead of fearmongering or doling out unrealistic optimism, Guardian Life Insurance launched a series of visually focused, fact-driven visuals to target this demographic. Take, for instance, their “How Solid Is Your Offensive Line?” infographic. By intertwining fantasy football with financial planning, the company translated tedious savings talk into dynamic, scroll-stopping content.

Three key takeaways from Guardian’s strategy:

• Conversions aren’t everything: Engagement metrics like likes, shares, and comments represent the pulse of your audience’s interest and interaction.
• Speak their language: To resonate with younger audiences, strike the right balance between education and entertainment.
• Visual appeal matters: In a world dominated by visual content, use infographics to break down complex financial concepts.

Feeling inspired by these content marketing case studies?

These top financial content marketing case studies remind us that even in an industry often characterized by complex terms and endless data points, there’s room to forge genuine connections through storytelling, visual creativity, and a deep understanding of audience needs.

To succeed as a financial services company in 2024 and beyond, finance marketers must strive to be more than a mere informant. Instead, as these top content marketing case studies demonstrate, try to become a trusted advisor who understands and addresses the underlying financial fears and aspirations of your audience.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs

Q: What strategies can financial services companies employ to overcome common hurdles in content creation, such as organizational silos and underfunding?

Educating business execs on the value of collaboration and adopting a more strategic approach to content creation can help decrease organizational silos, while leveraging freelance content creators can increase your team’s bandwidth and help you maintain productivity in the midst of budget constraints.

Q: How has the landscape of financial content marketing evolved in recent years, and what challenges do financial services companies face in this space?

Financial services companies are contending with a digital landscape teeming with influencers, bloggers, and fintech startups, challenging traditional marketing playbooks with compliance, organizational silos, and technological adoption hurdles. Learn more about current trends, challenges, and solutions for finance marketers.

Fuel your inspiration by diving into the best financial services email newsletters and incredible examples of content marketing from banks and the finance industry.

The financial content marketing case studies in this list are Contently clients.

The post From Bland to Brand: 5 Best Content Marketing Case Studies in Financial Services appeared first on Contently.

Email newsletters are a particularly useful tool for financial services companies, especially if you’re writing about personal finance. Many forms of financial content marketing from banks take on an advisory role, educating readers on touchy topics like debt and investments. Because of email’s inherent intimacy—it’s just you, your subscriber, and a secret list of every other BCC’d subscriber—financial services content marketing can really shine.

But building an engaged email audience takes a great deal of time. You can promote newsletter subscriptions with pop-ups on your website, advertise on social, and incentivize followers with a referral campaign. Most importantly, though, you have to make sure what’s in the newsletter is worth it for a reader to hand over an email address. If the content is good enough over time, people will come back for more.

We surveyed the best email newsletters covering financial topics, drawing inspiration from many of them. Below are the insights we were able to glean from finance content’s top contenders, from mainstays like NerdWallet down to independent bloggers who have amassed large followings of their own.

1. The best email newsletters launch a new content offering to reach new audiences

For nearly five decades, Money was a glossy finance magazine published by Meredith Corporation. Historically, reporters covered issues of great interest to America’s most wealthy: investing, the stock market, estates. When the publication shuttered its print version and went completely digital in 2019, editors and strategists were given an opportunity to reach into new markets.

That’s where Money email newsletters like Dollar Scholar come in. Written by Julia Glum, this personal finance newsletter covers topics that might have seemed too pedestrian to Money editors in the ’70s and ’80s. A self-professed financial newbie, Glum explores a different tricky finance topic in each issue, and her candid explorations have attracted a younger, less experienced audience to Money.

Executive editor Mike Ayers told me Dollar Scholar was his attempt at expanding the magazine’s target audience, and it seems to have worked. “Starting email newsletters was a growth move for us,” Ayers said. “It’s great to target each newsletter at a different subset of people, and we didn’t have current offerings for young people newer to finance.”

Not only has Dollar Scholar grown since its inception, but Glum also receives a ton of reader replies from folks who want certain topics covered. Overall, it has increased engagement in a very particular target demo that Money wasn’t serving before.

2. Keep it snappy

While generating valuable content should be a top priority for anyone exploring email marketing for financial services, it’s also important to remember that most people are just skimming subject lines and hitting the “delete” button—especially when they see a wall of text.

Luckily, one of the great things about financial content marketing is that you don’t always have to publish long-form deep dives or exhaustive investigations into complex markets. Robinhood Snacks, for example, delivers a daily bite-sized, three-minute dose of financial news.

It’s a winning formula. As of 2022, the newsletter had 40 million subscribers—a whopping 18 million more people than actual stock trading customers on Robinhood. If readers find those quick summations interesting, they’re more likely to head to the company’s homepage.

With customers yearning for easily digestible financial content, content creation becomes a much more manageable challenge. As long as you can link it back to money, you can explore anything from snappy lifestyle content to short celebrity interviews, quick personal essays to visual explainers.

3. Don’t just publish a digest

It can be a seductive idea to treat your brand’s social channels and email newsletters like an RSS feed. But you can’t just dump all your published content on your readers and expect them to engage.

Take Nerdwallet’s finance newsletter as an example. The brand publishes stories on a wide berth of financial-related topics, from budgeting to credit cards, but its email newsletter is hyper-specific to investing and company spotlights. This makes the call to action more enticing, because Nerdwallet isn’t just asking readers to opt into their entire publishing output each week. People respond well to CTAs if they’re specific because we all want our content to feel tailored to us.

4. Be honest

Financial content marketing is tough to create for many reasons. Sure, you want to encourage readers with aspirational optimism, but you should also keep their expectations realistic. Meanwhile, content creators working at banks or financial institutions ultimately want readers to trust them, which can be a tricky thing to work toward if you’re also selling products in a sensitive market.

Ellevest’s monthly “What the Elle” finance newsletter navigates this balancing act with finesse. Led by Wall Street veteran Sallie Krawcheck, What the Elle doesn’t dodge tough issues like sexism in hiring or money talks in relationships. Their all-women team champions “financial feminism,” blending honest financial advice with product promotion—namely, its platform designed to help women invest their money—without feeling like a swindle.

Yes, your readers are coming to you for sound financial advice, but they also don’t want to read a thinly veiled piece of marketing. It’s okay to point out the reality of, say, gender wage gaps while writing honestly about the helpful products your financial services company offers.

5. Keep topics personal and relatable

If you ever feel overwhelmed with the financial industry and all the topics it encompasses, bring yourself back down to earth by focusing on the stories of customers and individuals.

Refinery29’s runaway hit series Money Diaries is a perfect distillation of what can happen when a brand focuses on folks’ unique relationships with money.

The concept is simple: An anonymous woman reveals her annual salary and expenses, and she takes readers through a typical day in her life, explaining her reasoning each time she spends money. Sometimes, the prices in other cities provide shock value; other times, it’s just the intrigue of seeing how others casually spend nearly $9,000 in a week.

Feeling inspired by this type of financial content marketing?

What are the problems your customers face, and what about money makes them feel guilty, anxious, or fearful? These best email newsletters demonstrate how you can assuage common unpleasant emotions by writing about them. At the end of the day, covering a topic confirms that it’s a normal and worthwhile thing to explore. You can give your readers a sense of normalcy by approaching their worries with great content, and that kind of connection builds trust over time.

We’re here to help you navigate financial content marketing—to learn more, request a demo and chat with our sales team.

The post 5 Financial Content Marketing Insights From The Best Email Newsletters appeared first on Contently.

For the record, using clear, colloquial language in your work is good. It makes content accessible and helps audiences understand what you’re trying to convey. But marketers may be conflating conversational and agreeable, which is leading to blander stories that lack in-depth advice. This is especially crucial in financial services where people make life-changing decisions with their money.

Using StoryBook, which integrates Voice and Tone data from IBM Watson, we scored the brand voice and tone of every piece of content in our report across five traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional range, and openness. (Scores range between 0 and 1.) We found a correlation between a low agreeableness score and better-performing content, especially for stories about investing.

The new fintech companies and B2B brands, on average, are more comfortable with this style than the big banks and their consuming-facing content.

We also drilled into the data a bit more, looking at just the top 100 pieces per sector, based on most social shares. On average, the most successful stories in fintech and B2B had even lower agreeableness scores.

In this context, agreeableness refers to a person’s tendency to be compassionate, cooperative, and compromising. It also suggests a dislike of confrontation.

There’s definitely a place for compassion in marketing, but finserv audiences also benefit from hard-hitting, assertive counsel rather than vague or meek recommendations. Think of the contrarian prediction that pays off or the practical assessment that delivers honest advice. These traits are particularly important when talking about investing strategies because companies can ensure their content stands out.

Binance, for instance, pulled this off with “A Beginner’s Guide to Day Trading Cryptocurrency,” which has an agreeableness score of .04 and has been shared over 5,000 times on social media. Of course Binance’s content team hopes people will use their exchange to invest, but the guide doesn’t sugarcoat the details. It breaks down “the highly stressful and very demanding” life of a day trader and recommends follow-up resources people should consult before jumping in.

If marketers want to make their content more approachable, they should instead focus on the reading level of their content and run it through a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level analysis. This reveals what grade level would be most comfortable understanding your work based on factors like the number of words per sentence and syllables per word. (For reference, this report reads at a 9th-grade level, just about where you’d find a Malcolm Gladwell book.)

In general, marketers may have misconceptions about what they sound like and what audiences want. Many popular authors and journalists write at an elementary or middle school reading level. That’s because content written at lower reading levels are generally much more enjoyable to read. It’s also much more trustworthy. An Ohio State University study found that jargon-free content makes consumers much more engaged and eager to learn more about a product or service.

Even if your target audience is more educated, you can still benefit from simplifying your work. One thing that a lot of great content marketing has in common is the ability to make complex topics easy to understand. If the goal is to be conversational, then we should make sure there’s a system in place to have the right conversations with our customers.

Big takeaway: Study your brand voice and tone to see if there’s room to make your content more helpful and commanding.

The post Brand Voice Study: Should Your Content Be Authoritative or Agreeable? appeared first on Contently.

When you first land on Means and Matters, it doesn’t seem like a publication run by a bank. There’s longform reporting on the dramatic rise of food insecurity in America. A guide to C02 told by cats, cars, and kegs. A story titled “Lisa Simpson Was the OG Greta Thunberg.”

Yet, Means and Matters—a new website filled with “Stories of Money and Sustainability”—is run by Bank of the West, a subsidiary of BNP Paribas. But this isn’t another example of a financial services company co-opting a good cause to sell you things. Means and Matters just won two Webby Awards for a very good reason: because the incredible content on the site is backed up by the values and actions of Bank of the West.

Bank of the West is one of the most environmentally friendly banks on earth. The company doesn’t finance arctic drilling, coal-fired power plants, big tobacco, fracking, shale, or tar sands mining, among a long list of other environmental policies. It’s the only major U.S. bank to partner with 1% for the Planet, Protect Our Winters, and The Conservation Alliance. And over the next five years, it’s investing $1 billion to finance green technology.

In a world where roughly 90 percent of the money you put into your bank account is reinvested, that’s all really important.

Edelman 2020 Trust Barometer

And in a world where environmental impact is one of the most important brand attributes to consumers, it’s become a huge competitive differentiator for Bank of the West.

A different kind of financial services content

When Leslie Nuccio arrived as SVP of earned media at Bank of the West in 2018, she took note of the company’s content. “It was a very bank-y blog,” she explained. “It wasn’t differentiated. There was more to us than that.”

Nuccio and her team saw an opportunity to showcase what drew her away from the tech world to Bank of the West: the company’s commitment to sustainability and doing good in the world.

“We really are the only leading bank in the country that has these policies,” she said. “We don’t have to always be talking about banking and bank accounts. The intersection of money and sustainability is a really interesting place to explore.”

On occasion, there will be a mention of their 1% for the Planet account, or an embed of the fantastic video below, which quizzes consumers on what they think banks do with their money. But right now, the focus is to build awareness and relationships.

There was also a chance to explore other meaningful topics important to the company. Bank of the West’s CEO, Nandita Bakshi, is a woman of color and an Indian immigrant, which is wildly uncommon for CEOs in the finserv industry. (Just 3 percent of bank CEOs globally are women; women of color CEOs are so rare there’s not even a stat available.) That highlighted an opportunity to focus on how women and minorities access capital, and how the denial of access to capital is one of the most potent ways that women and minorities are oppressed.

“We really are the only leading bank in the country that has these policies,” Nuccio said. “We don’t have to always be talking about banking and bank accounts. The intersection of money and sustainability is a really interesting place to explore.”

That desire to tell a wide array of powerful stories is also what led Bank of the West to partner with Contently, which provides the technology to manage, measure, and optimize their content program, as well as the freelance talent to tell a wide array of engaging stories.

That’s allowed Bank of the West to tell both original reported longform stories, like this feature on the sustainable soul of hip-hop, and interactive stories, like this illustrated tribute to women in the pandemic.

The sleek, modern design of Means & Matters was also completed through Contently’s platform and freelance network in 2020, leading to the publication’s launch in September. While the publication is still young, the results are promising so far, and its two Webby Award wins are well deserved.

Driving results that matter

Means & Matters isn’t just about building an audience. It ladders up to higher business objectives: Inspiring conscious consumers to think about where they put their money, and why using Bank of the West would help align their finances with their values.

That requires building relationships with people who wouldn’t otherwise find themselves on Bank of the West’s website. The average reader spends 2 minutes and 30 seconds engaging with stories on Means & Matters, as measured by Contently’s Performance Analytics, which only counts active engagement. That’s 54 percent higher than the finance industry average across Contently’s Analytics.

Means & Matters is also earning loyalty. Thirty percent of its audience consists of returning visitors, even though the publication has only been around for six months. And thanks to a distribution strategy that spans paid, social, owned, and earned, their audience is growing.

“If somebody is taking the time to read your entire article, they’re probably way more likely to remember your brand than they are if they just clicked on an ad four times,” Nuccio said.

The average reader spends 2 minutes and 30 seconds engaging with stories on Means & Matters, as measured by Contently’s Performance Analytics, which only counts active engagement. That’s 54 percent higher than the finance industry average.

The other place Means & Matters is making an impact is sales enablement. For instance, Bank of the West has a large agriculture customer base. Stories like this magazine-quality exploration of food insecurity in America, which highlights BIPOC-owned businesses making a difference, gives advisors a great piece of content to share with customers. And it also allows Bank of the West to give the businesses they support some much-needed free press.

But while this content is helping sales, Nuccio and her team are deliberately avoiding the hard sell in their content.

“This needs to be of use to the end consumer,” Nuccio said. “It’s not about us.”

The post How Bank of the West Is Rewriting the Finserv Content Playbook With Sustainability Storytelling appeared first on Contently.

Most of my friends had bought a few shares of the meme stocks on Robinhood. But an hour before the markets opened, we noticed something strange: Robinhood wouldn’t let us buy any more. We could only sell. There was no explanation why.

Baffled, all we could do was turn to Twitter and Reddit, where accusations ran wild. The prevailing theory presumed that Robinhood was in bed with the hedge funds, restricting regular traders so hedge funds could avoid the disaster of their short positions.

As that day stretched on with no explanation, this theory became fact in the eyes of the internet. Users bombed the app with 100,000 one-star reviews. Thousands announced they were switching to competitors like WeBull. And everyone from AOC to Ja Rule questioned the company’s integrity. When Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev finally spoke to the media that night, he offered a confusing explanation.

As the situation unraveled, it was painful to watch. Disaster could have been avoided if Robinhood had a stronger culture of content.

The tragedy of Robinhood’s response

It turns out Robinhood had a good reason for limiting trades. As users owned more and more stock of companies like Gamestop, AMC, and Blackberry, Robinhood’s required clearinghouse deposits rose tenfold. If the market trends continued, Robinhood wouldn’t have enough cash to meet these requirements, so it stopped certain trades.

Disaster could have been avoided if Robinhood had a stronger culture of content.

Barely anyone heard this reasonable explanation. That’s because the company struggled to communicate this clearly to customers until the following Monday—four days later—when it sent an email explaining what happened. The “Robinhood is corrupt” narrative had already taken hold. Let’s look at a quick timeline of events:

Thursday morning: No explanation as rumors ran rampant.

Thursday night: Robinhood sends out an email to customers with a garbled legalese explanation. (More on that below.)

Friday: Robinhood publishes a clear, well-written blog post that explains why they had to halt trading. But the company only tweets it out, instead of emailing it to customers or surfacing the post in the app.

Monday: Finally pushed out a clear, well-written email explaining what happened and also promote the blog post explainer in the app.

As a content strategist, I’d seen this problem many times before. It’s not that the marketing and comms team sucks. It’s that the company lacked a strong culture of content.

The phrase “culture of content” may sound squishy, but it’s incredibly important. Here are four lessons we can learn from Robinhood’s mishap.

1. Get in the habit of publishing timely content

Robinhood invests in content. They have a solid library of investment content with titles modeled after long-tail search inquires to bring in SEO traffic. But to establish a culture of content, you need to be skilled at more than just publishing evergreen content.

Hire at least one person with real journalism experience, and invest in timely content that helps your audience understand how changes in your industry affect them. These stories add spice to your evergreen content mix. It gives people a reason to come to you when news breaks. And perhaps most importantly, it equips you to publish content in minutes or hours—not days—when things go haywire, written by a journalist who’s trained in simplifying complex topics so everyone can understand.

2. Set clear rules for working with legal and compliance

Given how fast the story spread, Thursday night was too long for Robinhood to email customers with an explanation. But a big reason that email failed to change the narrative is because it sounded like BS to a lot of people:

This was a temporary decision made to best continue serving you, and was not an easy one to make. We know it’s led to frustration and confusion, and wanted to provide some clarity.

As a brokerage firm, we have many financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits. Some of these requirements fluctuate based on volatility in the markets and can be substantial in the current environment. These requirements exist to protect investors and the markets and we take our responsibilities to comply with them seriously, including through the measures we have taken today.

My best guess is a well-constructed explanation from the marketing team got put through the car wash of the legal team, and an unproductive message came out the other side. This underscores why it’s so important for marketers—especially those in financial services—to have clear rules of the road with legal and compliance.

3. Develop a thoughtful channel strategy

By Friday, Robinhood also managed to publish a well-written blog post explaining what happened. It posted the explanation on Twitter but didn’t email it to customers. Crucially, it didn’t promote the content to customers through its app until Monday.

This underscores the importance of having a strong channel and distribution strategy, and knowing how and where to reach your customers as quickly and effectively as possible. As soon as Robinhood had a solid explainer in place on Friday, it should have pushed it out via email and the app to ensure as many people as possible saw it.

4. Offer comms a seat at the table

Your marketing and comms can’t be left out of the loop when disaster strikes. I have no idea if this is what happened with Robinhood, but given the lack of communication with customers, I suspect it might be the case.

In a world where narratives about your company can form in minutes, the leader of your comms team needs to be informed from the jump. CEOs who consider this an afterthought are asking for problems.

Narratives about your company can form in minutes.

It’s for this reason that I struggle to fully blame Robinhood’s marketing and comms team. Most of the team, including their CMO, has only been there a few months. A culture of content takes a long time to build—especially when the CEO may not be inviting you into the room—or Zoom—where it happens.

Robinhood will come out of this okay. It remains an addictive, intuitive app and the easiest way to buy cryptocurrency. It had the cache to get a $1 billion bridge loan from its investors on Thursday night. Many of the users who deleted the app have likely come back. But not every company will be so lucky, and like Robinhood, they may not know how important a culture of content is until they need it.

The post Robinhood’s PR Crisis Shows Why Every Company Needs a Culture of Content appeared first on Contently.

Eastman transitioned from an “artsy” four years at the University of Miami to a career as a finserv consultant after American Express made its way onto her personal list of most-admired companies. She worked her way up to VP/GM of marketing at Amex, turning around several early-stage LOBs through an advanced approach to content and digital marketing. She then went on to serve as the CMO of Behalf, a fintech startup that’s raised over $300 million in funding. Next came the managing director and head of retail marketing role at BlackRock.

Currently a free agent, Eastman visited Contently’s office to give an honest assessment of the finserv marketing landscape. She discussed the biggest industry mistakes, advice for finance marketers, and why brands need to hire journalists. Check out the video interview below, followed by a transcript of our chat.

What are a couple of mistakes you see people making in financial services marketing?

I think the biggest mistake is to have experts at something be responsible for creating the content for customers. I’ve actually seen this at every company I’ve ever worked in. There’s this chasm between the corporate story and the customer story. And the corporate story is very easy to get lost in because we go to work every day and we sit in a conference room all day long with our colleagues and we talk to each other. We have this one discussion, and it’s about: What our product does that our competitors products don’t do. It’s about what the market opportunity is. It’s about how good our technology is—etc, etc.

There’s no way for you to come up with the right story for the real humans in that conference room. So I think that’s the biggest mistake—when people who make the product or the services are also responsible for making content for the true customer.

Companies get it best when they hire people who are video editors or have journalism backgrounds. They bring that external view and expertise on how to create content that people would actually consume and look forward to. Then you can merge the artistry and the science of those experts with the internal teams that are the experts at the product. That’s the way best content gets created for customers.

Why do you think a lot of marketing teams are hesitant to bring in people with that pure journalism or editorial DNA?

Well, I think it’s uncomfortable for brands, right? We all—me included—create content on a day-to-day basis, and we’re used to doing it our way, and we also feel pretty proud of it. So it’s quite something to confront that you may have been doing it wrong all of this time. When you invite a different type of expert into your process, it’s a shakeup. Everything about their approach will be different, and you have to be willing to be uncomfortable in order to get your content to the next place with this alternative point of view.

What advice would you have for marketers at a financial services company who have trouble getting their content through compliance?

I would encourage all marketers to treat compliance as their most important partner or even their customer. If you’re thinking about your compliance colleague like you would your customer, utilize design thinking to understand their unmet needs, understand what their outlook on life is and the emotions that they’re bringing to their own job, and figure out how to problem-solve your way to yes.

In the same way you would if you’re acquiring a new customer, compliance partners are critical to the process. They’re there to keep us out of jail. You want them on your side. And it’s in all of our best interests in marketing to find a way to tell our story that also meets our compliance partners’ requirements. So I would say start earlier, schedule face-to-face meetings, explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, explain the goal of the content you’re producing. Invite your compliance partner into the process to help you understand how to say what you want to say in a compliant way.

Compliance partners are critical to the process. They’re there to keep us out of jail. You want them on your side.

Looking ahead into 2020, what are some of the big opportunities that you see in financial services?

The companies that are going to win are the ones that truly embrace customer advocacy and help regular everyday humans solve the problems that they have with managing their finances. I’ve been disturbed by how big credit has gotten in the U.S., and I’ve certainly participated myself in many aspects of building credit-oriented businesses. It’s very lucrative for a financial services company, but I personally believe it’s bad for customers.

Companies will lose if they’re going too far on credit and not going far enough on helping customers live within their means, put away money for the future, and have an emergency savings initiative, so that whatever happens to their family, they can afford to do the right thing. Whatever their dreams are—pay for college, buy a house, retire—these are things that many people are not going to be able to afford to do unless their financial services partners help them by eliminating some of their unhealthy financial behaviors.

The younger, nimble companies that are spending very little but really striking a meaningful tone and creating truly meaningful content in social media storytelling are the ones that are going to win.

Content is really important for helping people understand the way they’re standing in their own way, right? I think content is a wonderful way where you can release stories of people just like you, whoever the you is, that help make it real, and help make it human and help people be able to kind of see themselves more clearly through the eyes of others. Because one of the big behavioral economics teachings is that people don’t see themselves clearly. So it stands in the way of them making smart decisions.

What’s your big prediction for financial services marketing this year?

I think the smaller players are going to win the day. I think the large financial services players are still spending an excessive amount of time on things like Super Bowl commercials and focusing on things that mattered 10 years ago.

The younger, nimble companies that are spending very little but really striking a meaningful tone and creating truly meaningful content in social media storytelling are the ones that are going to win.

The post Hot Seat: Finance Marketing Leader Crystal Eastman On Why Brands Need to Hire Journalists appeared first on Contently.

Money affects everyone. Finances can dictate what we do, where we live, and how we make decisions. It’s a wide umbrella, spanning everything from consumer banking, investment banking, credit cards, fintech, insurance, and more. The fact that many finance organizations try to reach B2C and B2B audiences simultaneously adds another factor to the equation.

Financial services content is also incredibly complicated. Understanding how to pick the right insurance or save for a mortgage can literally change someone’s life. Companies in this space have a unique opportunity to build meaningful relationships with consumers.

To capitalize on that opportunity, finserv companies allocated an average of $23.3 million for their content marketing budgets in 2019, per Contently research. This number includes content creation, distribution, technology, and talent.

Finserv companies are doing a decent job getting a bang for their buck. However, there’s still room for improvement.

To help marketers be more efficient and effective, Contently created this new report that examines the state of financial services content marketing. The first part compares finance against other industries and highlights content benchmarks. The second part explores tips and strategies marketers can use to stand out from their biggest competitors and create content that performs.

Brands spend large sums of money on content marketing. It’s time they made the most of their investments.

[If you prefer to view a PDF version of the report that’s easier to print, we’ve got you covered here.]

Report Methodology

Data for this report was compiled in November 2019. The industry benchmark statistics in the first part of the report came from an internal dataset of 86,270 pieces of content across all industries, measured by Contently’s content marketing platform. Of that sample, 25,544 pieces of content came from financial services companies.

Data in the second part of the report came from StoryBook, Contently’s content strategy tool, which measured top-performing topics, formats, social shares, and more for 2,292 pieces of content from financial services companies.

Key Findings

For visual learners, here’s a high-level breakdown of what we found:

Part I: Financial Services Benchmarks

Competition for attention has never been higher in content marketing. Legacy firms are battling against each other while trying to hold off a surge of new fintech competitors and startups. Consumers, meanwhile, want financial guidance; they’re just not sure who to get it from.

According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, financial services ranked last out of 15 industries. On a positive note, trust in the industry is on the rise, increasing 8 percentage points since 2014. This means there’s an opportunity for finserv companies to step up and support their customers. Content is a key tool in those efforts.

Financial services vs. all other industries

Recently, finserv companies have made noticeable progress with content performance. In 2018, audiences spent an average of 1:26 seconds with financial services content. A year later, average attention time jumped to 1:51 seconds, which marks a 29 percent increase

Over that same stretch, though, average engagement rate (the percentage of people who spend at least 15 seconds with a piece of content) and finish rate held stagnant. On one hand, the average finish rate in our data set is impressive in comparison to Chartbeat’s scroll depth benchmarks for all content. Brands are creating longer content, but there’s still room to improve the finish rate.

Financial services companies also took strides compared to brands from other industries. Average attention time for all other industries in our data set only moved from 1:32 seconds in 2018 to 1:34 seconds in 2019. However, the other industries like travel, technology, and healthcare boasted a better average engagement rate (70 percent) and finish rate (60 percent) in 2019. Finish rates in fields like travel and tech may be higher because their topics aren’t as technical as those found in finance.

Consumer Finance vs. Institutional Finance vs. Wealth Management

Next, we examined engagement benchmarks for the three of the biggest subcategories in financial services content: consumer finance, institutional finance, and wealth management.

Consumer finance covers personal money tips and financial literacy, like this Bank of America article about getting the most out of your checking account.

Institutional finance content spans B2B coverage about investment banking and global markets, like this Goldman Sachs report on geopolitical risk.

Wealth management concerns individual portfolios and investing, like this Morgan Stanley profile of a female financial advisor’s philosophy.

To compare the effectiveness of the three subcategories, we looked at average attention time, average finish rate, and average social shares.

Consumer finance, unsurprisingly, dominated the social metrics with an average of 2,046 shares per story. When done right, helpful budgeting and saving tips can go semi-viral because they’re more universal than content from the other subcategories.

However, personal finance advice is also a saturated space. It’s harder to stand out with unique advice since many companies recycle the same topics, headlines, and themes. That may explain why average attention time registers at just 1:18 seconds, almost a minute shorter than the average benchmark for institutional finance.

The success of institutional finance content goes to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be dry or boring. There’s a real need for that expertise. And generating 190 shares, on average, is very respectable for B2B content of any kind. These numbers suggest that companies cornering the institutional finance beat are finding creative ways to tie their analysis to relevant news and trending topics people care about.

Lastly, we see that wealth management has room for improvement, particularly the 38 percent finish rate. Marketers creating content about wealth management may not need to drive a lot of social shares, since it’s tailored for a niche audience. Yet there’s still an opportunity to create more fluent and accessible content that holds people’s attention and builds trust.

With that in mind, let’s move to the second part of the report and explore ways financial services companies can build better trust and drive more engagement.

Part II: 5 Keys to High-Performing Financial Services Content

The benchmark data raised a few big questions. First, what are the most valuable financial services companies doing to differentiate themselves? Second, what tactics can financial services marketing pick up from them, regardless of budget? And third, what recommendations could we offer to help finance marketers improve in areas they weren’t doing so well?

To answer those questions, we used Contently’s Storybook technology to analyze 2,292 pieces of financial services content from Fortune 500 brands. Here are our biggest takeaways.

1. Create social videos and infographics
2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook
3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions
4. Focus on employee education and advocacy
5. Get creative with compliance

1. Create social-friendly videos and infographics

Marketers default to creating written content because it’s easier and cheaper. But brands that rely on churning out generic blog posts are failing to give people what they want: visual content.

Our industry analysis found that videos and infographics outclassed other content formats in terms of average social shares. In fact, video drove eight times as many shares as articles. Infographics, meanwhile, saw twice as many shares as articles. (We’ll get to social distribution trends in the next section.)

(Note: Our dataset excludes LinkedIn shares, because LinkedIn has closed off their API from all third-party analytics tools.)

Most people working in marketing today understand there’s value in video, but many are hesitant to invest in the medium.

When done well, it’s worth it. Visual content is the most effective way to simplify complex technical information, especially for visual learners. One of the most budget-friendly tactics is to produce short explainer videos optimized for social channels. Mint, for example, launched the WTFinance series a few years ago, breaking down major personal finance concepts in 45-second clips that are easy to digest.

If you get the green light for video, the last thing you want to do is stock your YouTube page with clips of two people talking on stage for an hour. To produce videos that resonate with your audience, pay attention to these three areas.

2. Invest in paid distribution on Facebook

Reports are Facebook’s demise are largely overblown. It still attracts over 2 billion people every month, and remains the most effective social distribution channel for both B2C and B2B content.

According to Instapage, the average CPC on Facebook for financial services ads is $3.72—more than double the average ($1.72).

However, this pales in comparison to the CPC on Google for top finserv keywords.

Using SEMRush, we found the average CPC for 10 of the most popular content-adjacent search keywords in financial services for comparison:

Here, we see an average CPC of $16.39 for paid search, meaning Facebook is almost five times cheaper. Not only does referral traffic from social posts help organic search rankings, but you’re also likely to drive additional traffic from the “social lift” of people resharing that content on Facebook.

3. Develop buyer enablement content to drive conversions

When done right, content marketing impacts the entire customer journey. To tie content to revenue, your stories should eventually spark an action—filling out a form, opening an account, signing up for a credit card. In other words, your work assists the customer until they’re ready to make a smart decision related to your company.

We used StoryBook to analyze the most shared content by topic. The most engaging topics—such as reducing risk, insurance 101, and tax planning—tie back to buying decisions. Some news content related to mortgages and insurance also finished near the top of the list.

It’s fitting that content about risk and planning resonated enough for people to share. This kind of advice tends to be practical and applicable to a large audience. State Farm, for instance, drove thousands of shares by packaging together “a collection of articles to help your teen be a safe driver.” The series includes insurance advice for students, info on the costs of certain driving violations, and tips for driving in different conditions. State Farm also includes a calculator tool at the bottom of every article to get a quote, creating a clear path to purchase.

Focusing on enablement content helps brands invest in evergreen financial tools like calculators. These tools empower buyers, letting people navigate a complex decision without explicitly selling to them.

For example, Bank of America built a dedicated page to hold 25 user-friendly tools and calculators that cover retirement, investing, college planning, and personal finance. Creating this kind of content typically doesn’t require a lot of money or time. Take a look at the after-tax return calculator above, which only asks users to fill out two fields before giving them a personalized report.

4. Focus on employee education and advocacy

The success of financial content depends on trust. A blog post full of uniquely insightful 401(k) tips can miss the mark if it doesn’t come from the right source.

The National Foundation for Credit Counseling found that only 25 percent of U.S adults would turn to a bank or credit union if they needed financial guidance, a number on the decline in recent years. However, 35 percent of adults would have no problem trusting a financial planner or accountant.

The same study revealed that 76 percent of U.S. adults said they could “benefit from advice and answers to everyday financial questions from a professional.” The data highlights a sizable gap of people who may not receive the answers they need simply because they don’t trust big financial organizations.

When looking at share of voice results from our research, a related trend caught our eye.

State Farm was dominating in terms of social shares, driving 70 percent of all social shares among 10 companies including Goldman Sachs, Fannie Mae, and Wells Fargo. Did State Farm have some incredible content marketing secret weapon?

It turns out the answer is yes—although when we started to look around, we saw it wasn’t much of a secret. A lot of their social activity was seeded by company’s insurance agents. For most of the last decade, State Farm has used a tool called Hearsay Social to make it easy for thousands of agents to find and post relevant content on Facebook. This system led to a snowball effect for social sharing.

Marketers love to talk about personalization, but their plans fall flat because of logistics. It’s hard to justify spending a lot of money to create content for a specific audience. That’s how finserv companies end up with general listicles meant for a general audience.

State Farm, meanwhile, incentivized agents to share content by arming them with specific stories that could subtly remind people of the benefits of being insured. According to our research, a short interactive article titled “Frozen Pipe Losses Up in 2018” has generated almost 13,000 Facebook shares.

The article offers clear tips for avoiding frozen pipes and calls out the states with the most frozen pipe water insurance claims. It’s not going to win a Pulitzer, but it’s a helpful piece of content ideal for increasing share of voice.

5. Get creative with compliance

Marketers find few things as grim as compliance. So before we get to the keys of compliance, let’s talk a little bit about death. (Trust me.)

When a famous person passes away, The New York Times can publish a detailed, reported obituary immediately. When Steve Jobs died in 2011, the Times had a 3,500-word article up within an hour. The obituary writers don’t possess other-worldly typing speed; they’re just well prepared. While covering Jobs’s death, for instance, the writing started in 2007. When the time came to let the story go live, all they had to do was give the article a final check.

Mastering the content approval process isn’t as fulfilling as writing an important longform article, but it’s important nonetheless. And with some creative thinking, it doesn’t have to be a headache that gets in the way of your job. You can still publish content at the speed of news.

In highly regulated industries like finance and insurance, you can’t just publish whatever you want, whenever you feel like it. Brands have to deal with oversight groups like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). You can, however, work with your compliance team to find reasonable solutions instead of always treating them like a nuisance.

In financial services, savvy companies tweak their workflows to avoid approval timelines that can last upwards of three months. If you meet with compliance at the start of the project, they’ll at least be aware of what you’re working on and can flag potential issues ahead of time.

An adjusted workflow might look something like this:

Marketers have started to figure out how to build better relationships with compliance teams. If you’re looking for more efficiency, here are a handful of help exercises that can help you increase productivity.

As a final piece of advice, it helps to use some sort technology platform when figuring out compliance. Given that compliance issues often result from a lack of transparency or communication, relying on manual processes doesn’t always work. Technology can handle the logistics, freeing up marketers to focus more on the creative parts of their job. Additionally, it’ll automate certain things like record-keeping, version control, and workflows if you need to review anything down the road.

Conclusion

In 2020, capturing attention is only going to get more competitive in the financial services industry.

The good news is there’s still an opportunity for companies of all sizes to create meaningful content and build long-term relationships with customers. People need financial advice. They crave that expertise. They’re just looking for it to be delivered in a thoughtful way.

The companies that want to stand out and lead the industry need to concentrate on the entire content lifecycle. They have to put as much energy into content distribution, compliance, and sales enablement as they do the creative process. It takes time to build a high-performing content program, but if they put in the work now, their investment will pay off.

If you’re interested in creating high-performing content, click here to set up a free consultation with one of our content experts.

The post Financial Services Content Report: Industry Benchmarks & 5 Keys to Success appeared first on Contently.

“We’re speaking to a more diverse audience now,” said Mike Ayers, executive director at Money, “but we still want readers to feel that they’re getting sound financial advice. That’s been at the core of our brand for over forty years. The difference is that it’s now approachable. I don’t think friendly is the right word, but I’ll say conversational. It’s like being in conversation with a trusted authority.”

Part of that conversation includes email newsletters. Money Magazine expanded its email program under Ayers’ leadership, now offering three newsletters: a daily content update, biweekly retirement advice, and a weekly personal finance project called Dollar Scholar.

This last newsletter is the brain child of Ayers and reporter Julia Glum, and it lives exclusively in the inboxes of subscribers. Each issue begins with a few paragraphs of Glum explaining her newest financial lesson—one she’s teaching herself at the same time. The emails end with a goofy celebrity purchase from the news. There’s also a line asking readers to tell Glum what they think.

“I really do get responses from people all the time,” Glum said. “They’ll request that I explore certain topics, or they’ll gently give me context I was missing.” Glum’s Dollar Scholar is an educational tool, but Glum herself is a student alongside her readers. “We’re owned by Meredith, of course, and Meredith does so well focusing on younger women. When I started Dollar Scholar, I thought, well, I’m a woman and I know what I like to read and don’t like to read. I just write honestly from that place in Dollar Scholar.”

It turns out Glum isn’t alone. The newsletter isn’t just cut and dry money advice—she has covered Spencer Pratt from The Hills, WeRateDogs on Twitter, and Amazon. As long as it touches on financial a topic young people should learn more about, Glum will consider any topic.

Ayers is pleased with the newsletter’s open and engagement rates. Unlike the other two Money newsletters, he doesn’t require a click through for Dollar Scholar. “Dollar Scholar is its own product,” he said. “As far as success metrics, we’re just looking at subscriber numbers and response rate. In the future, we’ll try out a forwarding campaign and have [Julia] ask her readers to send an issue along to folks who might need it.”

The question of needing Money’s content is what seems to keep the magazine’s digital strategy alive. Unlike other mainstream publications, Money is an educational tool. Though reporters may cover entertainment or pop culture from a financial lens, most of what they’re writing about applies directly to the audience.

Money Magazine has become a little more empathetic in recent years, covering Black Friday deals with as much gusto as it covers Wall Street. This shift was intentional.

“I want us to cover both the aspirational and anxiety-inducing parts of money,” Ayers said. “Aspirational content is great when it’s done well, but anxiety-focused stuff is more relatable. We tap into both mindsets, and a lot of what we’re doing is calming the anxious readers and validating the aspirational ones. And we’re going to stay relevant that way. There’s a recession coming, right? What should you do, stay the course, change up your saving strategy? We’ve got calm, level-headed advice on all of that.”

The post How an Email Newsletter Helped Money Magazine Reinvent Itself appeared first on Contently.

The request made sense, but the moment was still a little perplexing. I never thought I would pay my rent the same way I pay my friends to split dinner. As someone who recently graduated college and is surrounded by friends worrying about their loans, I’m starting to see the evolution of banking and finance everywhere I turn.

On that front, Efma and Infosys Finacle partnered on a detailed 2019 report that explores digital innovation leaders in retail banking. A big takeaway from the report was that a wave of new competitors (like Venmo) are starting to pose a threat to legacy companies in the financial sector. Banks are aware of the changes and expect many of these challengers to “be leading innovation in the banking industry.”

This shift is taking place for a few key reasons. Non-traditional competitors have figured out how to use technology and data to improve customer service. Just think back to my Venmo example, which highlights the need for better customer experience in banking.

Some companies are building trust and retaining customer loyalty by creating useful content like budgeting templates and savings calculators. The most creative brands in the industry have developed engaged audiences by expanding outside of strictly financial content. Money overlaps with all areas of life, so companies that tie core topics to angles around entertainment, health, sports, and more are building lasting relationships with customers.

Traditional financial services companies have the expertise and resources to step up and compete. To their credit, some are. The chart above shows that 14 percent of these companies consider themselves innovation leaders in the industry. But for most banks, they’re somewhere in the middle, only eager to change when they see a new approach start to work.

Remember that creating a sleek app or publishing cool content is not enough on its own. The financial services companies that ultimately become pioneers will serve customers accessible resources and information that educates and entertains. That’s true whether you’re trying to reach landlords, people with student debt, retirees, or anybody in between.

The post Report: Only 14 Percent of Financial Companies Consider Themselves ‘Innovation Leaders’ appeared first on Contently.

Even though the release is eagerly anticipated, the budget document, which is several hundred pages, isn’t read by most. The public relies on media outlets and financial commentators to provide high-level analysis that helps everyone understand the budget’s impact. However, to control the timing of when and how the information becomes available, the government embargoes reporters together until the late afternoon.

So for seven hours, a group of 300 journalists waited for access to the document. They sat together in a single room—without their phones—taking notes by hand to craft their stories.

Once the embargo was lifted and mobile devices were returned, reporters from Canada’s largest news outlets, such as the National Post and Toronto Star, submitted their takes. But there was also another journalist working on deadline, this one commissioned by an unlikely financial publisher: Tangerine, Canada’s leading digital bank.

Breaking news without breaking the bank

To cover the Department of Finance’s announcement, Tangerine turned to one of its trusted freelance reporters: Doug Watt. A financial journalist who get his start in 1995, Watt was among the reporters locked in the House of Commons, filing through the thick report to craft a story for the bank’s readers.

“Despite the initial stress and panic, there are so many angles you can choose from,” Watts said. “You just have to figure out what’s right for your audience.” By the time WiFi was restored and electronics were returned, the writers rushed to file their stories. For Watts, that story went to the editorial team at Tangerine.

On the other end was Darin Diehl, director of content and shared services, who described on-the-ground reporting as a great way for Tangerine to “be more intentional” about its editorial content.

“There are occasions, like this one, when we want to react in real time to breaking news,” Diehl explained. “The difficulty is as a financial services company, we’re in a highly regulated industry, and we have multiple stages of review. Whether it’s an article, infographic, a video, or a quiz—we can’t skip those stages.”

While traditional outlets can post news immediately, Tangerine can’t be that fast. To combat the lengthy approval process, Diehl and his team had to devise a plan. “What we do is get the buy-in from all of the legal and compliance folks and anyone on our marketing team that’s part of the collateral review process,” Diehl said. “People are warned in advance.”

Once the concept gets approved and the necessary approvers book time for material review on their calendars, the editorial team moves swiftly.

“We’re able to customize those review chains so we’re sure the right people see it.”

“With news reporting, the workday goes a little bit longer than the normal nine-to-five, but people are prepared for that,” Diehl said. “We’re able to have that story filed, go through all of the stages of editing and approval, and publish in less than a couple of hours. For financial services, that’s lightning fast.”

Contently’s custom workflow helps assist this speedy review process. According to Diehl, the ability to tailor a documented review across multiple departments on a per-story basis is incredibly valuable when managing the company’s blog.

“An investment story requires different reviewers than, say, a story that’s more connected to saving or mortgages or checking,” Diehl said. “With Contently, we’re able to customize those review chains so we’re sure the right people see it.”

In addition to custom review, Tangerine relies on Contently’s editing tool for version control, which keeps a record of changes for every draft and approval. “The review process along with the calendaring tool helps us stay organized,” Diehl said.

Not just a bank website

If you head to Tangerine’s blog Forward Thinking, you won’t find a stodgy financial services website with humdrum explanations and overt self-promotion. Instead, the site—framed with the brand’s signature orange color scheme—takes you to a series of articles, videos, infographics, and quizzes meant to help users become savvier spenders and more thoughtful savers.

While the main focus is on topics related to banking, the stories also tap into the more emotional aspect of money management. For Mother’s Day, the bank posted a roundup of bloggers sharing stories about how their mothers helped shape their views on money.

In the video section, independent financial advisor Preet Banerjee has a series of interactive clips that cover lessons like how to tell the difference between secure and unsecure debt, and ways families can budget for their kids’ education.

The site also hosts quizzes such as “Do You Have an Old-School or New-School Money Style?” and publishes infographics for all ages, including this one on financial literacy for kids.

Tangerine aims to produce content that educates and engages Canadians, with the end goal of relating financial topics and news back to the digital bank’s services. Part of this utility is ensuring both English and French readers find the material accessible and relevant.

For every story written in English, Tangerine decides whether it makes sense to translate. But the content team doesn’t just translate articles from one language to the other—it goes through a process the French services team refers to as “transcreation.”

“In Canada, we have two official languages, but it’s not just about the language,” Diehl explained. “The province of Quebec, which predominantly speaks French, has a different culture there.”

The French services team translates the story while making alterations to ensure it is culturally sound. Because stories that go through this bilingual process have added layers of production and approval, Tangerine relies on Contently’s calendaring tool to stay on track.

The content-to-sales pipeline

Overall, Tangerine has already seen encouraging results on how the content inspires readers to become customers.

“We’ve found that if that new client’s journey through the website includes the consumption of our content, then the enrollment completion rate is 22 percent higher,” Diehl said. Completion, in this case, is not finishing a story, but enrolling as a bank client or—if you’re already a client—opening a new account.

In 2016, Tangerine decided to dig deeper into the relationship between content and business results, testing how Forward Thinking impacted brand sentiment. Diehl and his team surveyed both subscribers to the blog and non-subscribers to see if there were any noteworthy insights that could show the ROI of content. It turns out that brand perception and sales were 18 percent higher for frequent readers (people who looked at up to four pieces per month).

“We found a delta when it came to brand perception and sales—the actual drivers of trust were higher with frequent readers than with readers, and [the same] from readers to non-readers,” Diehl said.

As the bank moves forward in helping Canadians make smarter decisions with their money, it plans to keep using content as a means to bolster consumer confidence and brand awareness. For Tangerine, the more content can empower citizens, the better.

“Our content marketing is designed to help readers take direct action,” Diehl said. “It’s about teaching people how to do things themselves.”

The post Contently Case Story: How Tangerine Streamlines Approvals and Publishes Breaking News appeared first on Contently.

In response, financial brands turned to a new strategy to boost community engagement and redefine their image: They told stories. By 2015, 95 percent of financial companies were using content to market their products and services, with 90 percent confident that content marketing would become even more important to their organization in the next 12 months.

And while these stories have fared well—the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer reported that financial services were on the path to trust—some companies still struggle to inspire engagement, demonstrate brand lift, and ultimately prove a positive ROI, all while complying with stringent legal regulations.

When Contently hosted the Executive Finance Summit last week in New York City, the goal was to give financial services marketers a place to openly talk about these issues. They learned about exclusive analyst reports and heard case studies from leading brand publishers.

While attendees mingled after the panels, I caught up with a few marketers to discuss their greatest challenges.

American Express

“Our biggest challenge is measurement because there is an overemphasis on trying to nail down one number you can track. Content marketing is about more than one metric when done right. If you chase just one metric, you can game it, but you’re cutting out so much value to yourself and your audience.”

—Courtney Colwell, director of OPEN Forum and content marketing

Citi

“The first challenge is developing curated, personalized content—a reasonably manageable calendar and a robust pipeline of content. On the execution side, it’s [building an] infrastructure and having the resources to do it.

“So for us, it’s personalization and curation, it’s the pipeline, it’s execution, and it’s placement. We want personal, curated content with a robust pipeline that promotes the brand, speaks to the customer, and also speaks to our involvement in the community. We’re going through measurement and KPIs right now.”

—Nathaniel Halsey, senior vice president of digital services marketing and infrastructure

Bank of America

“The biggest challenge in marketing is an evergreen one—how to get really good metrics, how to get key learnings on a repeat basis so you are consistent with your analytics and can give insight back to the business on how content is performing and why it’s valuable to the brand.

“As far as metrics go, are they going deeper in your funnel with your content? Do you have an opportunity to retarget them? It’s engagement first, but are they furthering their consideration of the brand?

“One of the things that content marketing can do if it’s done well is satisfy the need in financial services for trust. If you do it right, you’re giving your client, customer, and your prospects something that they need—and that inspires trust.”

—Bob Mirales, director of content development and delivery

The post 3 Finance Execs Share Their Biggest Content Marketing Challenges appeared first on Contently.