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.

However, this explosion of resources presents a mounting challenge for financial services companies that have relied on tried-and-true content marketing playbooks for years. No longer is their competition confined to traditional industry players—82% of financial services marketers actively use content marketing—but they now find themselves vying for attention in a digital space crowded with influencers, financial bloggers, and fintech startups.

So, what should content marketing for financial services look like in 2024? How can financial services companies surpass hurdles to successful content creation, like compliance, organizational silos, technological adoption, and company culture?

JB King, a veteran in the field, is no stranger to these financial content marketing questions. With over a decade’s experience in the industry—including roles as Director of Marketing and Communications at EY and Global Head of Content at Marsh & McLennan—King has had a front-row seat to how content marketing for financial services has evolved. Here are her top insights.

You’ve worked extensively in content marketing for financial services companies. What are some of the biggest hurdles you’ve faced?

A big one is when the marketing and communications department is viewed as a service bureau. It’s very common to have organizations where the client-facing and revenue-generating professionals come to internal marketing and communications staff at the 11th hour when they want materials created, often for a one-time event.

This is the point when the marketing communications person, who wants to be responsive, begins the hoop-jumping process required to deliver a reasonable facsimile of the item requested. Quality is often compromised and rush charges incur because the timeframe is simply unreasonable.

This “order-giver, order-taker” mindset creates a dynamic in which the revenue generators lose confidence in the marketing staff, who, in turn, become demoralized. It also does a tremendous disservice to the company from a brand-building and marketing perspective.

Another big hurdle is underfunding, which leads to a scattershot approach where too few dollars are spread across too many marketing initiatives.

How do you get past them?

In the case of the service bureau mentality, you start by partnering with the business execs and educating them on what the marketing and communications staff needs from them to produce the kind of high-quality materials they expect and the company deserves.

You also have to coach the marketing staff on how to function like a consultative professional service that brings value to the entire marketing and communications process. That means learning to ask questions about who the target audience is and what you want that audience to think, feel, do, or say as a result of seeing a particular piece of content. It involves understanding the touch points and stages of a sale or engagement, and where the prospect or client is within the lifecycle. It includes planning and anticipating when content needs to be developed and delivered, as well as what form it should take. It’s a much more strategic approach.

When I was running creative services at Lehman Brothers, we established a model where there was a designated relationship manager for each business unit—i.e., fixed income, equities, investment banking, etc. Their job was to get to know the business. This enabled us to begin a dialogue with our internal customers much earlier in the process, plan for periods of high demand, make informed recommendations on the most effective approach, and help them develop a yearly strategic marketing roadmap.

Helping the business players deepen their understanding of the marketing discipline is also integral in the case of underfunding. The scattershot approach tends to happen because there are multiple business lines that are all competing for a share of the limited marketing budget. Attempting to allocate the funds across all of the requests often results in so much dilution that none of the marketing activities has any real impact.

Rather than spreading the troops thinly across the entire battlefield, a more effective strategy is to take a page from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and concentrate your forces (or resources, in this case). Developing fully integrated, multi-channeled marketing campaigns on one or two big business issues carries a much greater punch in terms of building your brand and achieving your business objectives.

In your mind, how does financial content fit into the larger content marketing mix?

For financial and professional services companies that trade on intellectual capital, content is how they distinguish themselves from competitors. Unlike a consumer products company that sells something tangible, financial and professional services companies sell ideas and help clients solve problems. Good content is the manifestation of their “product” because it shapes the client’s perception of who the smartest person in the room is. In that regard, content is hugely important.

What are your go-to methods for demonstrating the business value of content marketing for financial services?

Definitively measuring the value of marketing investments is the holy grail. When you’re selling services and talking about six-figure engagements, it’s even more challenging. There isn’t any one single thing that ultimately leads to closing a deal that was months in the making, but rather a combination of many things that starts with brand awareness.

Years ago, McGraw-Hill ran an ad picturing a curmudgeon sitting at a desk scowling. The caption read something like, “I don’t know your company and I don’t know you. So what is it you want to sell me?” In my experience, business people either intuitively accept this truth or they don’t. If you’re in marketing, it helps to work for someone who gets it.

When it comes to metrics, the C-suite wants to see monetary value—not pageviews, downloads, shares, or other engagement stats that excite marketing professionals. So if you can’t demonstrate revenue generation, one route that’s gaining traction is cost savings. The proliferation of digital, social, and mobile media has increased our ability to reach desired audiences with less waste and greater accuracy for a fraction of the cost of traditional media. Try shifting some funds from traditional channels into content marketing. Run a test pilot or two, then see what kind of business case you can make.

You’ve worked with a lot of CMOs and CEOs to find innovative solutions to marketing problems. What are some of the biggest challenges you hear?

Increasing speed to market. Differentiating a brand from competitors that offer parity products or services. Achieving more with less. In addition to these age-old challenges, CMOs and CEOs have the added challenges of keeping their brands relevant, moving from the web to mobile, and figuring out how to advantageously use social media—while the attention span of audiences is shrinking.

It can seem overwhelming at times because of the rapid pace of change and the proliferation of new tools and technologies, but the fundamentals of marketing, including the need to create an emotional connection with the customer, remain the same.

What’s the biggest mistake people make when it comes to content marketing for financial services?

Not milking an asset for all it’s worth. Lots of companies develop original content by investing in a proprietary study or partnering with a think tank, launch it via a press release and maybe a client mailing, and then move on to the next thing. In doing so, they’re not reaping the full benefit.

What do you want to see the industry do more of in 2024?

Less is the operative word. Less content creation and fewer acts of random content. Various sources estimate that between 60 and 80 percent of content created today never reaches its intended audience. It’s not more content that’s needed but more skillful and sustained distribution of content the end users find valuable.

JB King is a strategic marketing and communications leader focused on targeted, innovative content marketing programs that engage high-level audiences through digital channels. King can be reached via email or X (formerly Twitter).

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs

Q: What role does content play in distinguishing financial and professional services companies from their competitors?

Branded content is intellectual capital for companies, shaping clients’ perceptions of their expertise and setting them apart from competitors by increasing their thought leadership and share of voice in the market.

Q: What is a common mistake made in content marketing for financial services, and how can it be avoided?

Companies often fail to fully utilize their original content by effectively using cross-channel promotion to create value at specific points across the customer journey to ultimately reach the intended audience effectively.

The post How To Unlock the Potential of Content Marketing for Financial Services: Q&A With an Expert appeared first on Contently.

Believe it or not, financial content for a bank can be fertile ground for creativity. If you’re working on content marketing for financial institutions, you’ve been asked to fulfill a particularly bright promise: Not only do you need to establish a trusting relationship with your audience, but you need to develop a voice entertaining enough to make your bank stand out.

After all, the actual content of bank marketing stays largely the same from institution to institution—there are finite ways to approach writing about, say, a checking account or a credit card. But just like bottled water, it’s the packaging that counts.

Here are some of our favorite examples of branded content marketing from banks and financial institutions in the last couple of years.

MD Financial’s Medical School Cost Calculator

MD Financial’s goal is even more specific than the goal of most financial companies; they aim their content at medical professionals and their families and focus specifically on the financial challenges faced by this demographic.

That’s why the brand’s med school calculator is such an incredible tool. By targeting a young audience that hasn’t yet committed to medical school, they initiate a trusting relationship early. After all, if a pre-med student uses an MD Financial calculator to pick a med school, they’re way more likely to consult relevant branded content as they grow in their career.

Keep the marketers’ Rule of 7 in mind when you create content for an audience that you hope will stick with your brand their entire careers. On average, it takes a consumer seven points of contact to feel they have a relationship with a brand. The earlier you can seed that first memory of value, the faster you’ll reach customer loyalty.

Citi Entertainment

When it comes to placing a brand name in unexpected situations, Citi is the reigning queen. Because of Citibike, you can’t rent a bicycle in most cities without thinking of the bank; meanwhile, if you want first dips on hot concert tickets, you better have the Citi Entertainment program page bookmarked.

The bank’s entertainment access program links its credit card in consumers’ minds with aspirational and fun purchases like concerts. If you’re a Citi person, the music content suggests, you’re also the kind of person who spends disposable income on live music. You’re not just financially literate; you’re fun-loving, young, and hip.

While anyone can view Citi Entertainment content, you have to have a Citi card to make a purchase. While deciding whether to pull the trigger and convert, you can follow Citi Entertainment’s content via email newsletter or on social media. All the content distributed through those channels hammers home the same point: cool people simply bank with Citi.

It’s the bank’s long-term commitment to a younger audience, pop culture, and entertainment that makes Citi’s access program one of the best pieces of branded content marketing for financial institutions.

Mastercard’s #PricelessToMe Campaign

Mastercard celebrated the 25th anniversary of its “Priceless” branding in 2023, and all evidence suggests we’ll be hearing more of the slogan for decades to come. One place you may not have expected to see this branded content in action? The Australian Open.

Here’s where the campaign gets interesting—rather than simply run an ad on their latest products, Mastercard wanted to shine a light on Australia’s growing culture of inclusivity. With the help of well-known Australian athletes with disabilities, Mastercard positioned itself as the credit card distributor that connects people and businesses.

The Australian Open #PricelessToMe campaign wasn’t just a commercial. Instead, the company built multiple experiential activations (complete with a game of tennis simulated from the perspective of a player with a vision impairment), funded a Blind Spots Australia grant, and launched a WebAR competition that encouraged spectators to complete a series of challenges.

They didn’t skimp on the content, either. Mastercard created a 3D spatial audio experience for live sports, which allowed blind and low-vision audiences to experience the Australian Open through the radio.

Branded content marketing for financial institutions doesn’t always have to mean posting a boring blog. Instead, brainstorm ideas that tie your content back to your core message.

Deloitte’s Annual Back to School Survey

Now, Deloitte isn’t a bank, but it’s one of the Big Four accounting organizations and financial advisory firms. They help high-earning movers and shakers manage their wealth—right? At least, that’s the identity you might gather from Googling their brand name. If you enter Deloitte’s orbit by way of financial content marketing—as most will—you’re likely to conclude that Deloitte has a unique and realistic handle on what affects the finances of regular folks.

Take the brand’s annual back-to-school report, for example. Each year, Deloitte surveys American families about the materials they find themselves buying for kids every time autumn rolls around, and they present their findings in a cool infographic. It’s not just about new clothes either; Deloitte breaks the data down to show how many families shop brick and mortar vs online, and the brand unveils customer “dealbreakers,” research methods, and typical shopping cadences week to week.

Although they’re not a B2C company focusing on school supplies, Deloitte knows the subject concerns their target audience. That display of empathy is why the brand belongs on our list of stand-out finance content marketing campaigns.

Current’s Partnership with MrBeast

What does Current, a fintech company, and MrBeast have in common? If you answered “money,” that’s only partially correct—both have mastered the art of capturing public attention through unconventional tactics.

To a layperson, it might seem ironic that Current would sponsor a MrBeast video titled “First to Rob Bank Wins $100,000,” but hey, it worked. In less than 24 hours after posting, the video became the top trending video on YouTube, generating over 58 million views, 120,000 comments, and 2.4 million likes. Current saw a 700% increase in its daily Current Pay requests and skyrocketed to number five in the App Store finance apps category.

Moral of the story? While you can build a financial content engine from scratch, consider turbocharging your efforts by finding influencers and content creators aligned with what you do. You might not have bagfuls of millions to give away, but good, creative content will always attract an audience.

How to Win at Content Marketing for Financial Institutions

If you’re in charge of branded content marketing for financial institutions, you can count on a few universal truths as you ideate new campaigns. Yes, your content should be educational and include a specific CTA that maps against your company’s goals, but it should also enhance the brand’s unique position.

Is your brand committed to flashy, fun, poignant moments with artists like Citi, or is it cognizant of social issues like Mastercard? Your content should answer that question in a fluid, natural way, and be aimed at your target audience personas.

Although any great financial content marketing strategy should include educational tools like fact sheets, e-books, and whitepapers, you should study the more ambitious campaigns of those marketers who have come before you.

There’s nothing stopping today’s banks and financial institutions from getting involved with charitable giving, political statements, or entertainment events—in fact, you’re far better off if you can leverage what your consumers care about and enjoy.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs

Q: What are notable trends or emerging strategies in content marketing specific to the financial industry?

Notable trends for financial content marketing include personalized content experiences, interactive formats like quizzes or calculators, and leveraging user-generated content for authenticity and engagement. Download our 2024 Finance Content Trends Report for more insights!

Q: Given the competitive landscape and increasing consumer expectations, what strategies can financial institutions employ to differentiate their content and stand out in the market?

To stand out in the market, financial institutions can focus on niche segments, tell compelling stories that resonate with their target audience, and embrace innovative content formats such as podcasts or live video streams.

Q: What challenges might arise from implementing similar strategies in finance, and how can they be managed?

Implementing storytelling into B2B content programs has shown to be an effective strategy for connecting with readers. Let the funnel be your guide!

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

The post Content Marketing for Financial Institutions: 5 Examples of Content Done Well appeared first on Contently.

On March 11, the content team at MD Financial was finalizing their Q2 content plan, built around themes like spring cleaning your finances and home-buying season. Then Prime Minster Trudeau announced Canada’s response to the COVID-19 situation.

“Our world flipped,” said Shawna Dennis, who leads all of marketing for the physician-focused financial services company.

By March 13, the entire marketing team was mobilized around an entirely new content strategy. Within a week, they had launched a hub of COVID-19 resource content. The results have been astounding: 200 percent audience growth, a 38 percent increase in logins by its customers, and a 30 percent uptick in messages to financial advisors.

The story of how they got there is a masterclass in how to adapt an enterprise content strategy on the fly—one that marketers across industries can learn from.

The COVID content strategy

MD Financial’s content strategy shift was led by its director of content, Rachel Kenworthy, but it was supported by the entire organization.

Kenworthy and Dennis set out to fully understand the impact COVID-19 would have on its audience of 130,000 physicians and medical learners in Canada. They tapped into the subject matter experts (SMEs) at the company—from asset management, wealth and financial planning, and field teams—to understand client needs. Some physicians were seeing an 80 percent drop in income; others were working overtime on the frontlines.

MD Financial discovered three core needs: peace of mind about their portfolios during volatility, how MD was going to address their unique financial needs during the pandemic, and an understanding of what government programs were available to them.

The results have been astounding: 200 percent audience growth, a 38 percent increase in logins by its customers, and a 30 percent uptick in messages to financial advisors.

Within six weeks, the content team created 16 fact sheets, 15 articles, 10 market thought leadership blog posts, and 8 videos. They’ve attracted over 53,000 visits to the new COVID content—an impressive feat given that its total addressable audience is only 130,000 people. They also launched the “MD Market Watch” podcast, which was downloaded over 1300 times in those first 6 weeks.

Perhaps most impactful, though, was an interactive tool that gave physicians personalized information on which government assistance programs available to them. Its audience visited the tool over 15,000 times.

“We were flat out saying, ‘We understand that these are the challenges you’re facing right now,'” explained Dennis. “Here are some pieces of content that are going to help you. We’re always here.”

MD Financial’s 3 keys to success

A successful content strategy pivot doesn’t just happen by force of will. It was made possible by years of groundwork and an audience-first approach to marketing. Dennis walked me through the three keys that set them up for success.

1. Establish buy-in from the top

As a former journalist, Dennis believes in the power of content. But the team needed more than her buy-in to execute this content strategy to its full potential. The entire marketing team had to rally to get its COVID content up and running in less than 10 days. The company’s internal SMEs had to be willing to help, and the rest of the senior leadership needed to support the content-first focus.

That collaboration was the result of two years of effort developing the content program. “The strategy help that Contently has provided in getting our content strategy documented, getting the technology in place, all of that has been really valuable for the team,” Dennis said.

Dennis and Kenworthy have also gotten buy-in by setting clear goals and KPIs that demonstrate content’s impact. MD Financial measures content success in three buckets that map to the stages of the funnel:

Site Traffic and Engagement (top): visits, views, and time spent with content, with an emphasis on organic traffic.

Deeper consideration (mid): Driving from content to tools/calculators, newsletter sign-ups, and product pages.

Sales and loyalty (bottom): Leads, sign-ins, customer engagement, and advisor messages.

Showing how top-of-funnel engagement maps to sales and revenue makes it easy for others in the org to see why the entire marketing team needs to throw its weight behind a content strategy shift like this.

“A lot of people get hung up on the vanity metrics because they’re easy to get,” Dennis said, “but it’s very difficult to prove the ROI to the rest of the org when you’re talking about pageviews and engagement rate because they don’t see how that ties into sales.”

2. Pivot quickly and put your audience first

When COVID-19 hit, MD Financial had a full-fledged Q2 content strategy mapped out and ready to go. But when the world changed, they didn’t hesitate. They threw that plan out the window and started from scratch.

“We were running along ready to go with our normal stuff we had planned for Q2 and overnight had to do a 180 and change what our plan was,” Dennis said.

If they’d delayed even a week or two, they not only wouldn’t have seen the same content success, but also wouldn’t have been there for clients in the same way.

“I will always clear the way for content,” Dennis said. “If I have to move budget there to make it happen, if I have to clear things off people’s plates and make content a priority, then that’s what we do.”

3. Involve SMEs early in the process

Collaborating quickly and effectively with SMEs throughout the company had two big benefits. First, it helped them understand what their audience needed quickly.

“We used our SMEs as real partners,” Dennis said. “We worked hand-in-hand with them to create content that was super specific to our clients and what they needed.”

Second, working this way helped MD Financial expedite approvals and publish content quickly. “A lot of times the SME is the last person who reviews, but we found that by engaging them early in the planning process, the whole thing went smoother than it normally would. And from a compliance and legal perspective, the reviews we had to go through took way less time.”

Research backs this up. In our recent state of financial services content research report, we found that including SME and compliance teams early was one of the biggest keys to content success.

“Everything that we do, all of our acquisition campaigns, our advertising, our social activity, everything that we do from a digital perspective, is driven by content,” Dennis said. “It’s the underlying force behind what we’re doing.”

The post Inside MD Financial Management’s Successful COVID-19 Content Strategy appeared first on Contently.

Paul sounds like a pretty cool guy, only he isn’t real. Paul and Sarah are two fictional personas brightpeak financial has created in order to understand different segments of its target audience—married Christians between the ages of 20 and 45 who are preparing for major milestones in life.

brightpeak is a not-for-profit financial organization that takes “a refreshingly holistic approach to personal finances,” according to its website. It’s upfront about being faith-based, baking Christianity into its mission statement: “We’re helping Christians look at money in a whole new light.”

“We’re definitely marketing to Christians,” Ashley Haugen, content strategist and editor for brightpeak, explained. “But we are careful to do it delicately so that we’re not alienating people who are non-Christian. We believe in financial strength and literacy for all, regardless of faith.”

Content for a niche audience

A look at brightpeak’s content strategy reveals that while faith is an important part of the brand, it does not overpower its millennial appeal. On Instagram, for instance, Bible passages are sprinkled among inspirational quotes, food pictures, and financial tips.

For brightpeak, faith is one of many elements that influence the decision-making process. Other factors like occupation, family goals, and financial literacy all shape purchasing decisions, which is why they are crucial parts of the brand’s audience segmentation strategy. The better brightpeak can define its personas, the easier it will be to target people who fit those personalities.

If you’re in brightpeak’s target audience, chances are you relate to Paul or know someone who does:

He follows Deschutes Brewery on Instagram. He also follows Humans of NY on Instagram because the channel shows ‘real’ pictures of people. Every so often, Paul gets to thinking about faith and spirituality while listening to a beerpastor.com podcast and crafting a rich, dark stout.

Clearly defined personas help the company’s marketing leadership identify financial patterns and match them with brightpeak products. How does this process work? The same research that shows Paul enjoys a milky stout also suggests he avoids risk when dealing with money.

“Each of our personas have different concerns and approaches when it comes to different financial topics,” Haugen said. “So we take a product line like emergency savings and try to figure out, from [one] perspective, what are the types of questions they’re asking? What are the emotions they feel? How does their background impact their savings habits? How are they communicating with their spouse? From there, we do a lot of social media listening.”

One thing Haugen likes to do is visit Pinterest and type in keywords like “emergency savings” to see what pins would appeal to different personas. After examining which pins get the most engagement, she uses that as a starting point for a piece of content or campaign. The result could be a guide like “How (and How Much) to Save in Your Emergency Fund,” geared toward the fiscally responsible Paul.

While the members of brightpeak’s marketing team have become pros at social listening, their ideation process is far more sophisticated than just skimming Pinterest. Their strategy involves mapping audience personas to different stages of the marketing funnel, creating a path for how content works together to drive each audience segment to a particular product page.

For example, a top-funnel post on “What is Disability Insurance?” is meant to lead Paul to a separate story on “The Difference Between Short and Long-Term Disability Insurance,” which eventually draws him to the disability insurance product page.

In the Contently platform, brightpeak’s content plan focuses on three pillars: saving for emergencies, getting insurance, and planning for milestones. Once the team creates and distributes content, Haugen takes a deep dive into Contently’s Story Analytics to assess performance. Haugen can filter stories by persona (like “Paul”) and see the top posts for that audience segment for whatever date range she selects. This not only gives her a better understanding of which topics perform well by persona, but also helps her redefine the attributes of that segment. (If cost-savings content in Paul’s segment has low engagement, maybe saving isn’t as big of a priority as brightpeak once suspected.)

Average engagement and finish rates, in turn, have helped Haugen optimize content on a per-story basis. Upon digging into engagement analytics, Haugen realized that when infographics were placed at the beginning of the post, engagement time was low. As soon as she moved the infographic to the bottom, guiding readers with introduction text, engagement time and finish rate increased.

With an organized approach to content development and reporting, the marketing team has been able to spend more time refining its SEO strategy to ensure content reaches the intended audience. brightpeak’s latest objective has been to optimize stories with specific keywords like “life insurance basics” or “student loan debt” to draw attention to primary themes and products.

“One of the challenges is just how long it takes for SEO to really show any gains,” Haugen explained. “But after a few months, we’re showing that our work in pairing keyword strategy with high-quality content is paying off.”

From basement beer to ROI

In the last three months, brightpeak has seen organic search traffic to its blog jump by 77 percent, referral traffic increase by 70 percent, and direct traffic surge by 97 percent.

In addition to the documented content strategy, Haugen attributes the success of her segmentation to the talented freelance contributors who have helped her scale. “Contently has really increased our capacity and speed to get articles out there,” she said. “That’s part of the reason that we see an increase in traffic because we’re able to consistently get out more content that’s high quality.”

“We listen … That’s how we finesse our personas. That’s how we help people. That’s how we impact business.”

Part of this efficiency comes down to logistics. After partnering with Contently, Haugen no longer needed to process payment for each individual story. Her team was free to focus on optimizing their strategy and perfecting the editorial calendar. Once the operation was running smoothly, Haugen was even able to use Contently’s industry benchmark data to show that brightpeak’s content was outperforming competitors’ stories.

“Average attention time per person shows that we’re twenty-three percent higher compared to other publications in the Contently network,” Haugen said. “That helps us build that argument to invest in more content.”

As brightpeak moves forward, Haugen will continue to incorporate analytics into her strategy and reporting, garnering a deeper understanding of each audience segment’s needs. “As we put more targeted content out there, we learn about what works and what doesn’t,” she said.

She’s found, for instance, that marketing disability insurance to Kim’s persona, who is an expectant mother, is not the best product fit. Educating Paul on disability insurance on the other hand, has made a lot more sense because he relies on his paycheck to feel secure.

The financial organization plans to get more granular with distribution, detecting where each persona consumes different stories. Part of this strategy will be to work more closely with sales and data teams, tracking content performance against key life stages, and seeing who actually buys brightpeak products. (Is it really Paul? Or is it Paul’s parents?)

At the same time, Haugen and her brightpeak team will remain committed to getting to know the people who shape these personas. “We listen,” she said. “That’s how we finesse our personas. That’s how we help people. That’s how we impact business.”

The post Contently Case Story: How brightpeak financial Used Audience Segmentation to Increase Traffic 97 Percent appeared first on Contently.

Turns out, I’m far from the only young consumer looking to escape the in-person process for the ease of mobile banking. According to a January 2017 Salesforce study, 31 percent of millennials use mobile as their primary banking option, nearly double any other channel.

Millennials aren’t the only generation choosing to automate their finances. Fifty-one percent of Gen X and 40 percent of baby boomers also use mobile apps or websites as their primary banking channel. Across all demographics, 62 percent of Americans prefer online banking to any other option, per a 2016 Bank of America survey—an 11 percentage point increase from the previous year. The study found that convenience was the major factor for the uptick. Nearly nine out of 10 surveyed use mobile banking alerts and notifications to stay up to date on deposits made to their account, fraud warnings, or low balances.

Aside from the convenience of computers and cell phones, some could argue that face-to-face interactions leave more room to manipulate customers. Bankers often work on commission, providing an incentive to sell unknowing customers products and services they don’t need. Technology firms have responded by creating digital solutions to common financial problems, “making it easier to avoid the headaches and fees associated with traditional banking,” writes Lauren Lyons Cole of the International Business Times.

Bill Gates once famously said “Banking is essential. Banks are not.” While personal bankers might go the way of the insurance or travel agent, the institutions are here to stay. They just need to meet modern consumers in the right way. For this millennial, that’s in the palm of my hand.

The post The Rise of Mobile Banking appeared first on Contently.

This might read like a problem, but it’s also an opportunity. With 45 percent of millennials open to switching banks, financial institutions are in the position to convince them to make a change.

What can savvy banks do to reach younger consumers? For starters, keep in mind that nearly half of millennials prefer mobile banking. I’m a millennial, and I use my phone to check my bank balance, deposit checks, and watch my savings account grow. If I had to navigate a clunky website or visit a branch every time I wanted to make a transaction, I’d start keeping my money under my mattress.

Millennials are also seeking financial guidance for the money they may or may not keep under the mattress; surprisingly, 40 percent of all financial conversations occur on Facebook. As a result, financial service companies that publish helpful and straightforward content have the best chance to build trust with millennials. Look no further than Mint, the personal finance service that grew its user base to 10 million in large part to a small blog that offered great content.

To learn more about how banks can appeal to the coveted millennial demographic, check out the full infographic from Facebook IQ.

The post Infographic: How Banks Can Woo Millennials appeared first on Contently.

Crickets may be pleasant on a warm summer night, but they’re a nightmare if you hear them after you tell someone a story.

Unfortunately, when financial services companies start creating content to boost their marketing, the dreaded sound of crickets are all too familiar. However, for Aberdeen Asset Management, an investment management firm based out of the U.K., trying to get a response from an audience on social media became a crucial turning point in its content marketing efforts.

“That was the trigger for us to become more organized,” said James Whiteman, Aberdeen’s head of investment communications. “You need a big, monstrous content strategy to [be heard].”

A method to the madness

Thinking Aloud, Aberdeen’s blog launched in partnership with Contently last year, offers commentary on financial events and investment strategies through a wide variety of articles and videos. There’s also a strong mixture of newsworthy analysis and evergreen advice. For example, this week, “Chinese Circuit Breakers” gave readers a timely look at the impact of falling stock prices in China, but the site’s most popular story, published in October, include short animated videos that explain “The Seven Deadly Sins of Multi-Asset Investing.”

The company ultimately decided to create their own media hub from scratch after trying (and failing) to be heard on social media. Aberdeen realized it was nearly impossible to compete without a cohesive content strategy.

Thinking Aloud has set up three categories to cover its most important pillars in more detail. The Bigger Picture focuses on world news from an investment perspective, Investment Clarity discusses macroeconomic trends, and Culture and Inspiration balances out the investment-heavy information by delving into broader anthropological issues that show off the softer side of the brand’s personality.

Aberdeen consistently differentiates itself from other financial content marketing by taking on unique angles that demonstrate its storytelling capabilities. Topics on the three sub-sections range from the “The Ten Golden Rules of Equity Investing” to a culture piece that uses study data to compare how the effect of classical music on the brain is similar to how the brain analyzes the stock market.

Aberdeen uses Contently’s content marketing platform to manage its process for creating stories and measuring results. “[Ordinarily,] managing the calendar is hard and quite complex,” Whiteman said, “so there’s no coincidence on why we adopted Contently on that front.”

By using the platform to create and optimize content on an ongoing basis, Whiteman can ensure that he’s never without a new story to publish. And most importantly, he’s able to make sure the content he already has is as effective as possible.

Getting stories seen

Even though Aberdeen has become an impressive publisher in the financial space, the company has still had to deal with its fair share of challenges.

“There’s a big learning curve on how best to produce the content,” Whiteman explained, echoing the thoughts of brands everywhere. “And not just how to produce good, interesting content, but how to promote it.”

Since this realization, Aberdeen has developed a way to consistently produce superior content—getting it to the right readers through a combination of creativity, content management, and strategic paid promotion.

From the U.K., a small editorial team works with in-house writers in the U.S. and Singapore. The writers collaborate on stories with Aberdeen’s investment experts to help promote the investment firms industry leadership.

“If it’s a bond fund manager talking about the next big thing, we try to work out whether they have a strong opinion or something interesting to say,” Whiteman said. “And then, we tie it into what’s important to our target audience as well as to others.”

When the site launched in February, Whiteman initially struggled to find enough internal story ideas that met the company’s standards. But as the site’s profile and popularity increased since then, so too has the number of pitches sent his way.

“More and more employees are submitting pieces and ideas, rather than us having to drag it out of the business,” he said.

Unlike some brands that compile their stories months out, Aberdeen’s development process fluctuates (much like the stock market itself). On average, it takes two to four weeks to complete a story—six months for “hero pieces” with video animations. But to stay as relevant as possible and publish at the speed of news, Aberdeen has also configured a way to post with efficiency—within a week, if needed.

For example, last Halloween, on the morning of October 26, Whiteman was approached with a concept that would feature “zombie companies”—an ongoing topic of conversation in the industry. The story was live by October 30, just in time for the holiday.

Content & PR: An unbreakable bond

Since story angles often come from topical news and events tied to specific regions of the world, public relations plays a big part in Aberdeen’s content strategy.

“We’re always thinking, is there a PR opportunity?” Whiteman said. “We have to be alive to the fact that others have bigger audiences, but over time there will be places where ours starts to supercede other publications.”

Whiteman works closely with the company’s PR team to regularly develop stories that run in the Financial Times and other industry outlets. And to expand the site’s impact and reach, the editorial team makes sure that their audience gets to read the best content through email newsletters and financial advisory networks popular in the asset management world.

“[Clients] are always looking for content that showcases our products and some intellectual capital around us,” Whiteman said. “PR and content marketing sit nicely side-by-side.”

This May, for instance, when Thinking Aloud published an inventive piece comparing the financial crisis in Greece to the music of British ’80s rock band Dire Straights. The story worked PR wonders, getting tweeted by Reuters Asia editor Peter Thal Larsen and became the centerpiece of a story on CNBC.

Additionally, the company’s animated guide to “The Seven Deadly Sins of Multi-Asset Investing” was picked up by numerous media outlets, including Business Insider, Think Advisor, and Wealth Manager.

Good company

For Aberdeen, Thinking Aloud isn’t just about chasing clicks, but remaining reliable and relevant—and in turn, developing a loyal audience. While content is the main focus of Aberdeen’s marketing strategy, the editorial team continues to grapple with how much to spend and where, when it comes to promotion.

Aberdeen is primarily investing in paid social, paid search, native advertising, and content recommendation to boost traffic. Although Whiteman declined to give specific data, he said that Aberdeen uses Contently Analytics to measure ROI, mostly focusing on audience engagement metrics.

“We have faith that by working backwards from the solid foundation of great content, we can become far more effective at distribution and measurement over time,” Whiteman said. “Through Analytics, there’s real value from Contently in terms of looking at engagement and measuring attention.”

As Thinking Aloud looks to build on its first year, delivering a steady stream of quality content remains the top priority. “Building an audience is a bit like being a good friend,” Whiteman said. “Not only do you have to be a good listener in order to be good company, you also have to have something interesting to say.”

The post Contently Case Story: How Aberdeen Makes Smart Financial Content Accessible appeared first on Contently.

(Full disclosure: I drafted Rob Gronkowski on my fantasy team this year.)

Most professional athletes aren’t famous enough to get major endorsement deals. Those that do typically just appear in 30-second commercials and sweat Gatorade or talk to Papa John. But New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, the transcendent bro that he is, has moved beyond that to become a content marketing stud.

He stars in Nike’s new two-minute video, Snow Day; steals the show in Madden: The Movie; and this summer, he published an autobiography titled It’s Good to Be Gronk. While promoting the book, he even told The New Yorker, “Yeah, no one can stay up with us. We party-rock too hard.”

His latest content campaign, for Capital One, might be his best. I present to you Gronkonomics:

Incredible. To be clear, Gronkonomics isn’t a spoof or a parody, and that’s what makes it so intriguing. Despite his goofy, fratty reputation, Gronk has been financially savvy since he turned pro. He’s on record saying he has yet to spend any of his NFL contract.[note]He’s in the middle of a six-year deal that will pay him a total of $54 million.[/note] Instead, he simply relies on his marketing income, which makes sense since he really only needs to buy grilled chicken, whey protein, and gas for his legendary spring break party bus. Capital One took advantage of this little-known insight, getting him to offer financial advice to consumers about things like sub-savings accounts and emergency savings funds.

The main lesson here for marketers who partner with celebrity endorsers is to create campaigns with a unique and honest angle that stays true to a brand’s identity. Finding that sweet spot can be difficult, but when it works—as it does here—people will want to pay attention. If Gronk bought a new neon Hummer (or party bus) every week and burned through his contract, people would just shrug the campaign off with a laugh.

Everything he does is funny, but it’s not a joke, and brands are taking full advantage of that. Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman… Rob Gronkowski. Why the hell not?

The post The Content Marketer’s Guide to Rob Gronkowski appeared first on Contently.

If you go to the Chase.com homepage, you’ll find something that’s unique in the finance industry: a company website that puts investigative, multimedia stories prominently next to customers’ banking and servicing. Under the banner of “News & Stories,” you’ll find everything from an in-depth profile of LeBron James’s mentorship programs, to a series from business owners called “What I Wish I Knew,” to a masterful five-part series on the revitalization of Brownsville, New York. It’s not necessarily what you’d expect from a bank that serves 50 percent of U.S. households, but it’s also telling. America’s largest financial institution has now become one of its most ambitious brand newsrooms.

Chase’s foray into content reflects the evolution of its brand. “We aim to deepen our relationships with customers into lifelong relationships. We want our customers to know that we are here to create content that can help manage their lives,” said Susan Canavari, Chief Brand Officer at JPMorgan Chase.

A content strategy two years in the making

Chase’s evolution into a storytelling-driven brand did not happen overnight. It takes a lot of work to build a successful newsroom inside a company as large and storied as Chase. From the start, Chase was driven by a belief that “content humanizes financial brands and builds relatability,” said Stacey Warwick, Head of Brand Innovation at JPMorgan Chase. “It’s important to provide [consumers] with content when they need it—[content] that impacts them at every point in their lives.”

Beginning in 2013, Warwick and Brian Becker, Head of Content for the Chase newsroom, strategically rallied internal support for the company’s newsroom. The duo took a three-pronged approach. First, they established a system of governance and standards; then they developed relationships with creators; finally they created an editorial board chaired by the CMO and attended by a broad set of senior-level employees.

“We had to set up our infrastructure and then show the organization how it could work,” Becker said. “We needed to prove that content can improve marketing’s effectiveness. We also built standards, governance, and communication that reinforced that we would be responsible and thorough.”

This structure allowed Chase’s content operation to grow quickly. So did the success of the content. “News & Stories” launched as a platform to provide customers with high-quality financial tools and advice, often from internal thought leaders. The impact was immediately clear: Users who consumed content spent three times as long on the site and were applying for Chase products at a higher rate. Content was helping Chase build stronger relationships with its customers and connect with new audiences.

That helped the Chase newsroom make a case for getting even more ambitious with its content, partnering with Contently and other creators to produce inspiring pieces of multimedia storytelling that tie back to the products and services Chase offers its customers. “Partners such as Contently helped as we built more structure in our organization around the newsroom and provided access to talent across different locations and topic areas,” Becker said.

Particularly impressive was “Brownsville,” a five-part series highlighting the leaders working to revitalize the Brooklyn neighborhood. Through investigative reporting and accompanying video interviews, Chase revealed how Brownsville residents are coming together to build a stronger community. The stories highlight important programs like Quardean Lewis-Allen’s Made in Brownsville, an organization that employs at-risk youth in the fields of technology, design, and advertising.

The fascinating story is a sign of what’s to come for the Chase newsroom.

“That really reflects where we’re trying to go, which is a lot more content that’s episodic, tied together visually, and increasingly aligns to our products and services. Additionally, this reinforces the commitment we have to the local communities we operate in,” Becker said of “Brownsville.”

It’s also a reflection of Chase’s unique approach to content. In addition to providing customers with crucial financial advice and small-business tips and stories, Chase also aspires to broaden its reach by telling stories that get to the heart of what’s important to the communities it supports. Ultimately, Chase’s ability to reach a large number of people with its content might be the most impressive thing of all.

A sophisticated distribution strategy

The addition of “News & Stories” to the Chase homepage in late July was a big deal, introducing the 35+ million people who visit Chase.com each month to the company’s impressive storytelling. But when it comes to content distribution, the newsroom didn’t stop there. First, it was able to pull off an impressive feat by meeting the notoriously tough standards to be accepted into Google News. The company has already seen a tremendous growth in organic traffic as a result.

The company recently partnered with theSkimm, a daily email newsletter for millennials, which regularly sends articles from “News & Stories” to its subscribers.

“It’s been a tremendous win,” Warwick said of the partnership. “Readers who viewed us on their emails felt more favorable towards our brand, and theSkimm’s target audience is getting financial information they need.”

Chase also leverages it sponsorships through partners like Madison Square Garden and the US Open to create timely and engaging stories tied to major sporting events. For instance, when the New York Rangers and the Tampa Bay Lightning faced off in the NHL Eastern Conference Finals this year, Chase interviewed spectators and former players to tell the story behind the game. And when Serena Williams made her run to win the 2014 US Open, Chase provided a behind-the-scenes story that reinforced its commitment as a sponsor.

Naturally, all this relevant content has proven to be powerful ammunition for Chase’s social channels. “Good, relevant content is inherently shareable, so we are very focused on using our content as a source for social channels and search,” Becker said.

Measuring success and moving forward

Chase is deeply committed and disciplined when it comes to measuring the success of its content, measuring views, shares, time spent on site, and lead generation for each piece, among other metrics.

“Most of the feedback we’ve received from customers is positive,” Canavari said. “I think a lot of them are surprised. We feel much more authentic, and we’re trying to be much more helpful in the environment we operate in. It’s always something we intend to do, but I think we’re really showing it better through the content we’re creating.”

Chase plans to keep growing its newsroom in order to build stronger relationships with its customers.

“We need to continue to find surprising and unexpected points of contact in our customers’ lives where we can communicate and relate to them,” Canavari said.

Appropriately, this plan fits Becker’s advice for big brands looking to jump into content: Step up to the plate and be brave. “Be an evangelist at your company and strive to make things better,” he said. “Establish risk and controls early on, and train the organization from being challengers to supporters until this becomes business as usual.”

The post Contently Case Story: How Storytelling Is Helping Chase Build Its Brand appeared first on Contently.

It’s tough to get millennials to think about their finances. Understandably, they can’t be persuaded to trudge through complex jargon, let alone plan for something that might not affect them until retirement. So how do you arm 3,000 financial representatives across the nation with the tools they need to reach this increasingly valuable audience?

You create high-quality, visually stimulating content that speaks millennials’ language and can be shared easily across social networks—just as Guardian Life Insurance has done in partnership with Contently.

“Saving for thirty years down the line is all fine and dandy, but we focus on how to protect you now,” said Tara Meehan, head of social content at Guardian Life Insurance. “That’s why content is so important for us—to be able to tell that story in a way that’s easy to understand.”

Today, Guardian’s social accounts are chock-full of engaging infographics and blog posts, but they started the year in a much different place—devoid of a solid strategy, and working with a third-party vendor to post clickbait articles that didn’t fully represent their company’s values.

“That’s where Contently came in,” Meehan said. “[It’s crucial] to be able to have a vendor that really puts the story first to help push our philosophy forward.”

Now, through Contently, Guardian is armed with a team of five writers and two go-to designers to produce content to help millennials make better financial decisions. But Meehan doesn’t just create what she thinks millennials need to hear. Instead, she pays close attention to what most interests them.

“It’s not a case where I have a calendar and say, ‘Okay, on this date at this time, I’m going to make sure I have this and this,'” Meehan said. “That, to me, rings somewhat inauthentic. It’s kind of like checking a box.”

With football season in full swing, the company is giving its audiences an opportunity to plan their fantasy teams and finances at the same time. The company’s new infographic, “How Solid Is Your Offensive Line?,” highlights the four levels of protection their customers need to stay in the pocket and be a successful financial quarterback.

Meehan knows the content is doing its job because it’s generating conversations on social media and helping financial representatives set up new appointments. Engagement is the big goal.

“For us, the ROI of content isn’t sales,” Meehan said. “The metrics that I really look at are likes, shares, and—the biggest one—comments. That’s the conversation. That’s the opportunity.”

That’s not to say that this engagement doesn’t play an important role in the sales funnel. Once someone comments on a social post, Meehan encourages the financial representative to reach out and respond. That strategy is working.

When Josh Parsons—a Financial Representative with Opes One Advisors, a Guardian Life agency based in Dallas—shared an infographic about wedding planning, one woman commented comparing the cost of weddings today to when she got married 20 years ago.

“How would you react to that in the real world, if you’re at a cocktail party and someone says that to you?” Meehan asked. “Do you just stare blankly at them, or do you say, ‘Hey, unfortunately I couldn’t help in that instance, but perhaps I can help in this one.'”

Parsons followed up with an email, which led the woman to introduce him to her son, a medical student, for financial advice.

“He’s doing that with all content [we produce] now,” Meehan said.

As a result, Parsons and his fellow representatives are engaging in conversations that are beneficial to both parties: The commenters learn more about how Guardian can help them with their finances, and the representatives gain a better understanding of their customers’ needs. Most importantly, appointments are coming through.

To deliver the content, Guardian works with Socialware Voices, a social business solution specifically for the financial services industry, which streamlines legal approvals.

Overall, the company’s new approach is working. Contently-produced content is shared by Guardian’s financial representatives on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter more than any other type of content. It’s also generated the greatest reach and highest average number of re-shares among the company’s content mix.

“Thankfully, the content has been so good from Contently, and it’s been so well received that message has gotten through and people are excited to share content,” Meehan said. “And they’re really seeing the results.”

The post Contently Case Story: How Guardian Life Uses Content to Reach Millennials appeared first on Contently.

Most professions have been progressively taken over by technology in some capacity over the past century, but creatives have been generally immune to the machine takeover. That may change quickly. In the past few years, a number of companies have developed natural language generation (NLG) platforms capable of mimicking the quality of publishable written work you’d expect from a human.

Back in March, The New York Times published an op-ed with the cheeky title “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?” to show just how far NLGs have come. For example, Automated Insights, one such service, which has a product named Wordsmith, produced more than 1 billion stories last year for clients including the Associated Press and Yahoo—mostly work like short corporate earnings recaps or fantasy football analysis. The Times piece also includes an interactive quiz that asks readers to choose whether a human or computer wrote eight different passages. Even after spending hours researching NLGs for this article, I still got two wrong.

But does that mean all journalists should find a new line of work? It’s not that simple.

For the most part, these language algorithms operate by taking dense data sets and using certain statistics and parameters to tell a story. Think box scores for sports, or financial reports for business. By nature, the algorithms work using formulas that are extremely complex but somewhat limiting. For now, an algorithm could take hundreds of financial data points and give historical context and identify relevant trends and correlations, but the insights will still lack nuance. While a human can easily bring in context that falls outside of the data set, NLGs can’t look past the numbers to add opinions or research, or to interview someone and incorporate quotations into the text.

In other words, NLGs are extremely powerful tools that still need human oversight.

“There’s data out there, and that data actually means something,” said Kristian Hammond, chief scientist and co-founder of Narrative Science, a technology company that created an NLG named Quill. “If you run the appropriate analysis of it, you can glean facts from the data, which can then participate in a later narrative.”

Narrative Science, which was formed in 2010, has become a major player in the NLG space thanks to Quill. The company has raised more than $30 million in funding in the last few years, and its client roster includes Forbes, Credit Suisse, and Deloitte. In the financial space, there’s been a lot of interest in Quill and its competitors. Forbes, for example, publishes short pieces of investing analysis that are heavy with data. And a company like Credit Suisse, while not publishing Quill’s work on a blog, is still using the algorithm to produce investing reports that help help analysts save time during the workday.

Before Quill became the T-1000 version of an NLG, Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, Narrative Science’s chief scientific advisor, helped create a program called StatsMonkey, which could automatically formulate baseball game recaps, while they were professors at Northwestern University. Once they saw that StatsMonkey worked, they began to think of ways the technology could apply to other industries.

“This has nothing to do with baseball. This has nothing to do with sports. This has nothing to do with media,” Hammond said. “We are now in a world where we have massive, massive data sets available to us. And very few people can actually understand what they mean. So we started to think of ourselves and the technology as a conduit for information.”

Narrative Science’s success comes at a time when data journalism is booming. Publishers like Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and The Upshot (a New York Times blog) have set a high standard for producing statistical analysis that separates itself from traditional reporting. The upside here is crucial: Those who break news may get a few minutes of fame before their stories are recycled by other outlets, but those who produce original research and analysis have material that typically leads to greater recognition and is harder to rip off.

Brands like Zillow, Jawbone, and even PornHub are progressively jumping on the bandwagon as well, using unique internal data to tell interesting, viral stories without the need for hard-hitting journalism that could open up conflicts of interest.

It’s worth pointing out that the reason sites like FiveThirtyEight and Vox have gotten so much respect is that their writers have managed to complement esoteric data analysis with a human voice and perspective. The content is smart but also entertaining and accessible. Brands that are successful with data storytelling follow a similar formula. But in the NLG world, the hope is that the technology will get closer and closer to getting the job done.

“We iterate with the clients with regard to what Quill is producing. From the client perspective, it almost feels like they hired an analyst/writer, and they’re just getting feedback, and the feedback gets fed into an automated system,” Hammond explained. “It has that feel that you’re working with a new writer. But the reality is that new writer just happens to be a computer.”

But while NLGs may seem appealing on the enterprise level for the way they could potentially cut content costs and save time, the situation is a bit more complicated on the writer side. The lazy argument in support of automated content is that game recaps and basic financial reports are so formulaic that they don’t need to be written by humans. But cutting off the lower rungs of the journalism ladder would make it even harder for new talent to break into editorial careers that are already extremely competitive.

And even if algorithms can generate prose that is just as good as—if not better than—human work, that doesn’t mean all readers will back these robot writers. If you saw the byline for this article came from a computer, would you want to read it? And if you decided to read it, would you attribute its quality (or lack thereof) to the publisher or a computer?

Those philosophical questions don’t have easy answers at the moment. “Our technology in general is what we call truth-preserving. The way it’s structured, once things are in place, it can’t lie to you. And that’s actually a reassuring moment,” Hammond countered. “There might be a moment of surprise, but then it turns out, ‘Oh, I actually understand this story.'”

In 2014, researchers from Karlstad University, in Sweden, ran a small study that attempted to assess whether there was any difference in quality between content created by humans and content created by algorithms. The study only relied on 46 undergraduate students—so take this with a little salt—but the results suggested that the NLGs scored higher on trustworthiness and accuracy. To the credit of the human journalists, they scored better in terms of writing skills, but for formulaic recaps, that may not matter. And, tying back to The New York Times quiz, the study found that more than one-third of respondents thought a journalist had written text that had actually been produced by software.

“It’s not writing the next Harry Potter, but is explaining how your portfolio is doing,” Hammond said of Quill. “And it is explaining what the water quality of your beach is like. Or it’s telling you about a little league game. And you don’t have to worry about it getting it wrong or having bias.”

In today’s media world, bias isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just about every major publisher has adopted some sort of blogging persona that values opinion more than hard reporting in an effort to make the news more compelling. Interestingly, the need to suffocate bias could be most useful in a newer space like content marketing, where brands might have more issues with transparency and honesty than newspapers and magazines. Particularly for companies with small teams that crunch a lot of data in industries like finance and insurance, algorithms could help cut costs and improve accuracy without eliminating jobs.

Regardless of how much NGLs take over in the future, it’s important for publishers to remember why it’s wise for humans to stay involved in the creation process.

“Answers alone don’t make us smarter,” Hammond said. “Answers and communication—that’s actually what we think the future of collaboration with intelligence systems is going to look like.”

The post Are Robot Writers Really About to Take Over the World? appeared first on Contently.

There’s nothing quite like arriving at a hard-won success with your content program. You’re hitting your goals, your metrics look great, and everyone is popping champagne (literally, if you work at a startup; metaphorically, if you don’t).

But by the time you’re sipping that second glass, chances are there’s a new challenge to tackle. If your company is growing, there’s a decent chance you need to do it all over again.

Whether it’s to introduce the brand to a new demographic or promote an entirely new product, high-growth companies often need to tell a new story to a new audience. But one successful content program is hard enough—how should a brand approach their second effort? Is it a matter of starting from scratch, or should you clone the strategy that’s worked for you already?

These are the questions Betterment, a fast-growing automated investing brand, has faced after finding success with its first content program, which successfully captured an audience of retail investors. Its resource center, as well as collaborations with publishing partners like Investopedia, has helped the company double its customer count in the last eight months.

So it’s only logical that great content would continue to be a key part of the marketing strategy for Betterment’s new brand, Betterment Institutional, a tool for financial advisors and other industry insiders. But Betterment is discovering that replicating content success isn’t as easy as it may seem.

Replicate what is replicable

“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here,” says Betterment Content Manager Catherine New. “It’s a process to build an editorial property. We worked really hard to refine the process from copy flow up to production and publication. It works.”

While the audience, voice, and topics may need to be different for Betterment Institutional than for its retail program, the behind-the-scenes processes can be duplicated. That includes collaborating with the right internal stakeholders, reaching out to publishing partners, and building a social following.

“Every editorial/content team has to come up with the right recipe to make the food people want to eat,” New says. “For us, a lot of our lessons learned have been about our internal process.”

Determine the key differences

Even though some of the internal processes are the same, that doesn’t mean BI’s content will be a direct reboot. In order to connect with a new, unique audience, the second publication has to be distinct. New and her team are executing this in a variety of ways. For instance, while it wouldn’t make sense to have Betterment’s retail customers write content for their peers, New is tapping outside financial advisors to write some of the content for BI.

Connecting with a new audience also means understanding their particular perspective. While Betterment’s retail content addresses a more general audience of consumers with little to no financial knowledge, BI is reaching out to a much more savvy reader. The industry insider content will also be more technical than the retail brand’s stories—and on top of all of this, it will have to address a unique challenge: negative perceptions of the product.

“Betterment and other automated investment services had originally been cast as the enemy of financial advisors. But that isn’t the case,” New says. “[It’s about] making sure that we’re communicating the right message to financial advisors. The idea is that the Betterment product isn’t a threat to them, but actually a tool to help them build their practice.”

Every audience has its own distinct qualities. While replicating processes can work for a brand launching a new publication, identifying what makes the new audience different and customizing content around those factors is critical.

Clone the quality

Though the topics addressed in BI’s content will be different from the retail program, one lesson the team will carry over from their first success is to forgo the temptation to generate traffic with a large quantity of articles. Instead, their focus will be on high-quality content that attracts more relevant and valuable readers.

“Quality over quantity,” says Betterment Growth Manager Sarah Kaufman. “It took a little while for us to learn that as we started to increase publication frequency, though we had an inkling that it was the case.”

Amongst retail customers, they’ve found content that relies on their own data and analysis performs well—stories such as “High-Frequency Monitoring: A Short-Sighted Behavior” and “Data Suggested Women Are Better (Behaved) Customers,” which New says helped to spawn at least five organic press articles in publications like Fortune. They’re hoping to find similar success through high-quality reporting for the BI audience.

“We use Betterment data to set our stories apart,” Kaufman says. “It’s very rare that you’d read one of our stories and say, ‘Yeah, obviously,’ because we’re always looking for fresh angles. We use data to really show evidence of the points that we’re making. And a lot of times it’s exclusive data.”

At BI, they’ll also work to replicate the successes they’ve found with interactive content, like this handy IRA calculator, and stay away from reactionary stories on breaking financial news. Though it may not include custom data or interactive content, every brand has a unique recipe for high-quality content. Identifying that winning combination and folding it into a second publication can position the new venture for similar success.

Repurpose promotion and distribution

The Betterment content team has found a winning balance between production and promotion, and it’s one they plan to use with BI’s content.

“Oftentimes people spend 80 percent of their time on the actual production of the content and only 20 percent of the time on the promotional side of it,” Kaufman says. “It should be more of a balance so that you actually get people seeing and reading the content and ultimately going back to your site and converting.”

For Betterment and BI, that means a mix of social channels and strategic publishing partnerships.

“A lot of the partners we had pre-BI we knew were a bit more advisor-focused,” Kaufman says. The new BI brand allowed them to make better use of those partnerships by writing advisor-focused content to better match those publications’ audiences.

The Betterment Institutional site is just about a month old (though some relevant content from Betterment’s original resource center has helped populate the archives already), so how well the team’s blend of replication and reinvention will work remains to be seen. But their recipe is built on proven ingredients.

“We are using our original framework as a starting point, but we are very nimble,” says Kaufman. “We’ll build on it when we need to do so.”

The post 4 Keys to Capturing a New Audience for Your Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Puppy Love: Inside Purina’s Ambitious New Content Play

When we think of pet content, our minds usually jump to cute, vapid stuff that gets us to click but doesn’t get us to think. Purina wanted to change that, but will its new publication, Puppyhood, take enough risks to stand out? Natalie Burg takes an honest look:

While Puppyhood gets top marks for concept, the execution will leave readers begging for more. The site promises in-depth topics such as grooming, health, behavior, and puppy planning, but the trending stories only offer the same old pet content: “5 Reasons Your Pup Is Irreplaceable,” “10 Moments That Melt Your Heart as a Puppy Owner” and “The Best Puppy Accounts to Follow on Instagram.”

Purina said its content comes directly from researching the needs of puppy owners and workshopping with its “internal corps of experts,” and, to be fair, there are some interesting stories on the site—like, for example, “Puppy Worms and How to Treat Them.” But for every interesting piece, there are two or three articles sharing comically obvious advice.

Read it.

The State of Messaging Apps, in 5 Charts

Dillon Baker’s deep dive on the exponential rise of messaging apps like WhatsApp will give you all the ammo you need for your next marketing meeting and then some.

Read it.

RoboEditor: The Strange New Editorial Machine You Need to Become

Before Joe Lazauskas went on vacation and left me in charge, he penned this impassioned commentary about how editors need to evolve alongside technology if they want to succeed in the long run. Consider this the Lazer trademark—a crucial content marketing insight baked inside a pop culture reference that he probably wrote while drinking a little too much beer:

We need to become a very specific creature: half editor, half data scientist—someone whose data analysis skills fuse seamlessly with editorial judgment. Like RoboCop, but with more creativity and less killing.

Read it.

From Facebook to TD Ameritrade, Corporate Giants Inspire Employees With User Stories

A few years ago, Facebook started receiving hand-written letters from people all over the world who wanted to thank the social giant for helping them connect with friends, families, and strangers. Years later, that snail mail turned into a major publishing initiative that, as Molly Blake points out, is helping the company’s employees do their jobs better.

Read it.

The Most Important Audience for Your Content Marketing: Your Own Employees

Contently CRO Brett Lofgren is racking up those bylines. This week, he explains what companies can do to reach their most important demographic:

When we talk about what fuels content marketing today, the typical buzzwords always crop up: engagement, brand awareness, audience building and retention. We talk about the content we create—social, blogs, white papers, videos, etc. We talk about budget, and how we wish we had more of it. But we typically don’t talk about our most important audience: our employees. Make no mistake, evangelism for any business starts with your employees. If you truly want to succeed, you need to educate your employees about the meaningful work you’re doing across your organization. More importantly, you need to get them excited about it.

Read it.

Now hope for more of Colin Farrell’s mustache Sunday night, and we’ll see you back here on Monday.

The post Content Catchup: The Rise of Messaging Apps, Puppies, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

Lots of banks talk about helping customers with content, but few put their money where their mouth is. An occasional blog post here, an instructional video there—for most banks, that’s enough to check the customer service box.

But what if a bank did more? Enter Great Ideas for Small Business and MoneyFit, two publications launched this April by BBVA Compass with the help of Contently.

The publications are meant to provide guidance for two underserved audiences: small-business owners, for Great Ideas, and average folks looking for proven financial advice, for MoneyFit.

“We have a bank that’s made up of financial professionals who have a lot of knowledge and know how to make good financial choices,” said Amy Johnson, director of SEO and content marketing strategy at BBVA Compass, “and we wanted to make sure that we have a platform where they can connect with our audience. We want to make sure our expertise is accessible to the folks that need it. That’s our primary objective.”

By taking advantage of Contently’s network of freelance journalists, BBVA Compass has been able to scale this expertise to its liking—in these early stages, the company plans to publish 16 engaging, high-quality stories on each site every month. Add the fact that video content is on the way, and you’ve got the making of two impressive publications.

BBVA Compass realized early on that producing a huge amount of content wouldn’t be enough—striking the right tone was also crucial.

“I think the challenge is sounding like a human because we don’t always interact with our banks as people,” Johnson said. “These sorts of topics are human, and they’re real, and they should come across as human and real.”

To help find this tone, Contently provided BBVA Compass with experienced writers who have been producing friendly, informative financial articles their whole careers. Take Emma Johnson, who, besides starting her extremely successful blog WealthySingleMommy.com in 2012, has written for The New York Times and appeared on every talk show imaginable.

Visit either of BBVA Compass’ publications and you’ll find bright colors, smiling faces, and supportive article headlines. According to Johnson, the aesthetic is meant to reflect that the company legitimately cares for your financial well-being.

“We budget and look through our pantry and find ways to save money and teach our kids about finances the same way anyone else does,” Johnson said. “And we as a bank have a real interest and a real passion for making sure our consumers are well-equipped to make good decisions where they can do whatever their passion is.”

Johnson gives the example of her neighbor, who’s an artist looking for financial advice—she’d much rather have her neighbor focusing on art rather than worrying about her financial future. And that’s where MoneyFit comes in.

MoneyFit focuses on life stages—graduation, a birth of a child, buying a home—and advice for those in times of great financial stress. It also features more general financial overviews of big topics such as auto loans and credit cards, which can often be predatory ventures for consumers if they’re not informed.

Great Ideas for Small Business features similar formats, except the focus—if you couldn’t tell by the name—is on small-business owners. Articles range from educational lists, stories of tweets gone wrong, and more specific guides such as how to apply for an SBA loan.

Great Ideas has also begun to host events for small-business owners, meant to “bring together business leaders in the community and small-business leaders, and discuss topics that are really important in the community,” according to Johnson.

It’s easy to cynically write off the publication’s goals as simple brand building—which the team would readily admit is an undeniable part of the initiative—but there’s a lot to be said for bankrolling finance publications meant to help everyday folks instead of big-time investors.

Overall, the blogs have electrified the team behind them, who feel like they’re serving those who need the help the most.

“I think in the financial industry, that’s something really remarkable,” Johnson explained. “And it’s something I can tell you I have not necessarily encountered in other financial institutions. [We’re] honestly just encouraging consumers to make decisions that are best for them whether or not it’s best for our bottom line, and I think that’s amazing.”

The post Contently Case Story: Inside BBVA Compass’ Ambitious Mag Aimed at Main Street appeared first on Contently.

The post 3 Ways You Can Leap the Hurdles of Creating Content at a Finance Company appeared first on Contently.

Financial firms are willing to spend a lot to reach people where they are. That’s because over time, those people can be worth a lot.

But if there’s one thing finance managers don’t want to do, it’s waste money.

Making sure marketing efforts pay off can be a challenge, given the competing metrics, an array of screens to consider, shifting consumption patterns, generational gaps, and new digital channels constantly arising.

At LinkedIn’s FinanceConnect conference in New York this month, executives from the likes of Oppenheimer, JP Morgan Chase, and AXA—as well as marketing and media companies—gave a hard look into ways they drive ROI by tying their content to specific results.

(Full Disclosure: JP Morgan Chase is a Contently client.)

Define goals and map to them

Marketers unabashedly love generating pageviews, social shares, likes, and other indicators of attention. It takes some work, though, to figure out whether being popular also contributes to the bottom line.

“It’s a long game … building that relationship with your consumers,” financial services media strategist Rod Kurtz said.

Before getting overly excited about the simple metrics such as inbound traffic, session times, or newsletter signups, institutions are taking steps to understand how those metrics can indicate that more revenue is on the way.

A financial firm may have to study, for example, whether a higher proportion of people who sign up for newsletters become customers than other folks, or whether those who sign up use more of the firms’ financial products.

If the answer is “yes,” then it makes sense to try to cost-effectively generate as many newsletter signups as possible in target communities.

A sophisticated marketer will also test different designs, language, and layouts, and run them against a control group. They can dig deeper to see if clickthroughs and newsletter-generated phone calls lead not only to inquiries, but also additional sales.

Done well, and iterated over time, the effort will pay off. The expense—the cost of creating and managing social and digital media efforts—will remain relatively stable, but as effectiveness increases, so will revenue.

David Edelman, a partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., said that by evaluating “the steps somebody takes to give a crappy evaluation,” a client was able to “create a map” of touch points—website, emails, branch visits—and improve customer satisfaction.

Track, dammit

A surprising number of efforts in social media, blogs, and elsewhere are measured crudely—or not at all.

Yes, web analytics can say how many referrals came from Twitter or Facebook, but how much more can be learned? Experts at the conference advocated adding tracking codes on social posts to measure what works for specific customer segments. Looking more deeply at session times, pages or videos viewed per visit, repeat visits, and other loyalty measures also help, especially if they can be mapped to goals, as noted above.

It’s also crucial to create taxonomies and tag content so that it can not only be accessed and elevated quickly for people trying to find it, but also parsed and categorized in measurement tools to create more full pictures of who is consuming content, and how.

One executive told me how his bank provides content to other financial institutions in geographies where they don’t operate. His bank then gets a percentage of the presumed value of new customers, if their signup can be traced back in some way to that content.

The executive’s team puts pixels (images or code that are invisible to the human eye) in their articles so the bank can then track people who access them. That way, when readers do take an action, his bank is more likely to know.

Facebook recently introduced tracking pixels to help companies understand whether a clickthrough they’re getting from a post on the platform leads to a conversation event like filling out a form, signing up for a newsletter, or clicking to receive a call.

While this kind of categorization helps any content manager, it’s especially crucial for financial firms, which often offer a multiplicity of complex financial products addressing very different needs—and whose content requires careful vetting and organization before being presented to customers.

And sometimes, the data individuals share can provide great clues for financial institutions.

“Train advisors to focus on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,” said Frédéric Tardy, chief marketing and distribution officer at AXA. When someone updates their profile and shows that they’ve “moved from company A to company B” that alone can indicate they’re ready for some financial help, he said.

Not just numbers

Not every media effort of course leads to a direct sale, or has to. Sometimes the goal is simply to create brand awareness or impart a sense that a bank shares values, or is “cool” or fun.

Transamerica hired an artists’ collective named Mr. GIF to travel throughout the U.S. and tell visual stories on the bank’s Tumblr about positive community efforts in promoting diversity.

The bank was happy to see increased traffic and positive comments and show that it stood by values it promotes, executive Allan Gungormez told me. Sometimes that’s the simple return on investment you’re looking for. You just have to know your goals.

The post How Finance Execs Measure the ROI of Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

There’s a good reason money managers and marketers were avidly discussing this burgeoning group of teens to 30-somethings: It’s where the money is, and it’s where it will be in the future.

Millennials represent 22 percent of the world’s affluent, one exec from Citi said, and hold even bigger potential over their lifetimes if for no other reason than because of coming inheritances.

“There is going to be a massive intergenerational wealth transfer, and millennials are going to be the beneficiary,” Marty Willis, Chief Marketing Officer, OppenheimerFunds, added.

Millennials also have new behaviors that present special challenges for financial marketers. Luckily for finance content marketers, LinkedIn’s conference provided plenty of tips for engaging this valuable audience.

1. Be social

Saying a company needs a presence in social media might sound like saying they need phones and electricity. D’uh.

But financial firms are conservative and cautious by nature, and have only recently started to aggressively staff departments so they can quickly answer questions and join in the social stream, ending a frustrated era when it took days to approve and send a tweet.

In many finance companies, social responsiveness is now being championed by the c-suite. Bank of New York Mellon CEO Gerald Hassell and John Thiel, Head of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, both discussed deeply involved in crafting messages through social and digital channels.

“The instantaneous feedback is fantastic,” Hassel said.

A few firms, including Wells Fargo, Transamerica and TD Bank have moved beyond Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, posting on Tumblr, Vine, Snapchat and Pinterest to capture the interest of young potential customers.

2. Don’t be afraid to be traditional

While moving to digital channels, banks, investment and insurance companies still need face-to-face communication.

One fifth of millennials believe “all their financial information will come from social networks in the future,” according to Donna Sabino, SVP, Ipsos, who was quoting a study. That means four-fifths do not.

And while 25 percent of millennials never go into a branch, 50 percent regularly do, said Leslie Gillin, Managing Director and Chief Marketing Officer, Citi Global. “It’s important not to think that because someone is a certain age, they want it all [via] technology,” she said.

3. Educate and empower

“Millennials are highly empowered to make decisions, but skeptical and less attached,” Richard Kirshenbaum, CEO, NSG/SWAT, said.

Sabino added that 49 percent want to “make decisions on their own” after doing their own research.

LinkedIn News Editor, Maya Pope-Chappell, meanwhile, quoted another survey that found 85 percent “are financially illiterate.”

Those data points indicate a great opportunity to educate and empower millennials through content.

Someone may be starting a job with their first opportunity to sign up for a 401(k) but “really have no idea why they would want to do this,” Ann Glover, CMO, Voya Financial, explained. She suggested firms give advice in “today’s language” that makes the process “painless and better” then congratulate them for signing up.

“If you’re going to talk to them, listen to them first, and deliver,” Sabino said. “You will establish brand loyalty, introduce them and be in control of your own narrative with these customers, and that is a really long lifetime value.”

4. Be authentic

Banks can have a personality in their media. They can appeal to consumers in younger age ranges without seeming artificial, the experts said.

TD Bank marketing officer Theresa McLaughlin gave the example of how TD not only talked about customer rewards but actually dolled out cash and gifts through ATM machines, launching a viral phenomenon.

“We looked through all the comments, and millennials said, ‘This is a brand I want to associated with,'” McLaughlin said. “We’re not going to be cool, we’re not GoPro, but [they said] this is a brand I want to be associated with.”

The post 4 Ways Banks Can Reach Millennials appeared first on Contently.

Capital One is on a mission to “ignite your inner entrepreneur.” And the fuse comes in the form of branded content.

Since last summer, Capital One’s Spark Business IQ site has been producing rich and functional business content for small-business owners across the U.S., while also promoting a range of Capital One financial products and services expressly designed for small businesses. The content hub is split into three sections: Ignite, Improve, and Inspire. Articles, white papers, listicles, and checklists on such subjects as cash flow, mobile payments, and achieving a career–life balance all work in tandem to inform and energize Capital One’s target audience.

Brands of all kinds are upping their investments in utility editorial content that adds tangible value to their customer’s lives—and B2B is a particularly hot space. Long-running destinations like American Express OPEN Forum (a Contently client), and IQ by Intel have proven that customers will happily engage with quality branded content. Spark Business IQ is a relatively new entrant into the space, but with the help of Contently it has been able to rapidly scale up an editorial team and is now putting out upwards of 25 stories a month. These include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more.

Spark doesn’t rely on a single source for its content, though. Features are written by a combination of internal staff members and finance journalists provided by Contently, with the overall goal being to produce a publication that demystifies complicated financial issues and helps Capital One customers navigate the complexities of owning and operating a small business. The company is using Contently’s analytics tools to measure everything from reader attention time to which social channels are driving the most traffic.

One example of the high-quality storytelling Spark is pulling off is “The Resilience Series,” launched in January to celebrate the strength and perseverance of select small-business owners while encouraging others in need of guidance. The five-part multimedia storytelling series combines articles with three original videos spotlighting businesses in New Orleans, Detroit, and New York.

Among the entrepreneurs featured is Frank Carfaro, president and creative director of Desiron. In one video, the New York-based furniture maker discusses how he survived the “tough” post-9/11 business climate and the importance of being open to change. Capital One’s storytelling prowess is evident not only in its selection of businesses to feature—the New Orleans and Detroit installments are compelling in the context of Hurricane Katrina and Detroit’s dismal economy—but in the ability of the videos to present valuable insights into the unique small-business experience.

The Resilience Series comes on the heels of “I Am Small Business Proud,” a content marketing effort that saw filmmakers Trisha Dalton and John Sears travel across the country to showcase “the true fabric of America’s economy—small businesses.” They met with some 200 businesses and interviewed owners about their challenges and successes. Because the filmmakers are small-business owners themselves—Dalton and Sears both own media production companies that cater to small businesses in need of promotional videos and commercials—their trip also afforded Capital One a secondary opportunity to showcase its financial products, including the amount the pair spent using their Spark credit card and the rewards they earned by doing so.

The videos were made available on YouTube and the Spark Business social accounts, which includeTwitter, Instagram, and Facebook. A campaign-specific Tumblr page was used to share behind-the-scenes anecdotes and photographs of the journey, and all of it was tied together with the #SmallBizProud hashtag.

To further assist small-business owners, Capital One Spark Business maintains a Forbes BrandVoice page that it updates with branded content. Here too, the brand shares business stories that epitomize the tenacity of American entrepreneurs.

(Full disclosure: Forbes BrandVoice is also a Contently client.)

Across the board, Spark Business IQ articles and videos are a nice balance of thought leadership and branding. Stories are actionable and inspiring, even as they serve the underlying goal of generating interest in Capital One’s financial services. By promoting customer successes and saluting the high standards that business owners aspire to maintain, Capital One comes off as a devout small-business defender. And there’s nothing small about that.

The post Contently Case Story: Capital One’s New Mag Gives Entrepreneurs a Spark appeared first on Contently.

Everyone needs helps with their money. And in the digital age, finance companies want to be the ones to provide that help, using the latest technologies to let people know they’re available and keep them satisfied once on board.

At LinkedIn’s fourth annual FinanceConnect conference last week in New York, finance, marketing and media professionals from around the world avidly discussed ways to turn prospects into customers and keep current customers happy amid technological transformation, media fragmentation, and generational shifts.

From global players like Citi and Starcom MediaVest to more niche institutions such as ABN AMRO and, well, Contently, they revealed consistent themes on guiding people across multiple screens about sensitive money matters. Here are some of the key pointers.

1. Follow the “customer journey”

One presenter after another this year opined on the “customer journey.”

The head of digital marketing for a major European wealth management firm helped me understand why. The average cost to acquire one customer, he said, can be thousands of dollars, but it’s worth it because that person’s lifetime value for the company typically goes well into six figures and beyond.

Financial institutions are trying to glean what questions people have as they consider what to do with their money. Current customers, too, need answers and explanations that guide them to the right resource or person.

“Marketing is not just about the message and the communication and the brand. It’s now about the journey you can provide somebody,” said David Edelman, Partner and Global Co-Leader of McKinsey Digital, Marketing & Sales. “That journey is a representation of your brand.”

2. Be fast, and train well

Heavily regulated financial institutions have understandably been skittish about moving fast in digital media.

A few years ago “one bank was proud of being able to send out a Tweet in four hours,” quipped LinkedIn executive editor Dan Roth in a conversation with top banking executives. “Not anymore.”

Allan Gungormez, AVP, Enterprise Digital Strategy for Transamerica, told me they train their teams to be able to immediately answer questions in social media, referring people the right customer service areas while avoiding explicit financial advice that could get the bank in trouble.

His and other institutions’ content teams also have dedicated compliance experts, so they can move fast.

For instance, Voya Financial can go live with a new article within 4-5 hours to, say, explain the implications of a newly announced government regulation, executive Jim Cowsert proudly said when I asked how fast they can move.

“We try to be relevant and assign something that is useful for our clients,” he said.

3. Be surprising—and human

Financial companies are among the most concerned about creating content that’s safe for their brand. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be surprising and have fun.

ABN AMRO created a roller coaster that potential buyers rode to tour a home the bank was helping sell. The YouTube video went viral and got worldwide news coverage, bringing new attention to ABN’s home sales products.

TD Bank had their ATMs talk to customers and give them gifts. Their “#TDThanksYou” video showing delighted people receiving extra cash, presents and flowers has more than 20 million views. The hashtag spread through social media.

Transamerica has won awards for their efforts in newer social platforms. Gungormez said they’re active in Vine, Reddit, Snapchat and Tumblr because reaching younger people now will help the bank talk to them throughout their customer journeys.

“Snapchat is a very long-term play,” Gungormez said.

Moving to these social platforms has also meant that financial institutions have had to change their tone into something a bit more relatable to the average user.

Whether in person or on screen, banks can seem stodgy and impersonal, but by talking to people with a human face and even a little whimsy they can humanize their brands while responsibly managing their customers’ most important assets.

That human touch, along with proper care to make content, technology and teams work together to help individuals, can breed success for those people—and the financial firms trying to help them.

The post 3 Content Marketing Tips From Top Finance Brands appeared first on Contently.

The magazine, published in print and transposed to the web, was the sort of inwardly-focused corporate publication going out of fashion these days. The content was almost exclusively about ING, and the opinion pages served as a platform for the bank’s senior leaders to opine on global trends—regardless of whether those trends fell under their areas of expertise.

Instead, Head of External Communications Egmont Philips and his team chose to embrace a new format, one that put both the digital experience and the reader first. In May 2014, the company introduced ing.world, a digital quarterly magazine that broadened the editorial scope to include thoughtful analysis of the business world at large. In doing so, ING has been able to reach an audience beyond the small slice of highly-interested shareholders who used to read the old print magazine. In fact, the sleek, insightful publication now sees up to 35,000 unique visitors per issue and recently won an award for being Europe’s best branded web magazine.

“By revamping our magazine, we have attracted a completely different audience, which was our target, and the reach has been higher as well,” Philips said. “Basically, we were surprised by its success. We had hoped it would work, but we actually have had greater reach than we had aimed for.”

The new publication, published in both English and in Dutch, is structured similarly to the popular public radio program “This American Life,” as each issue has a theme that is explored from several angles.

For instance, the theme of the most recent issue of is “family,” a topic ing.world delved into with a feature story on how important family businesses are to the economy, and an interview with the Dutch psychologist Frans de Waal comparing the way humans and animals relate to their respective family members.

Each issue is released alongside ING Group’s quarterly financial results and includes both a roundup of ING news and a video interview with CEO Ralph Hamers. Philips said the magazine’s primary goal is to help its readers get ahead in their lives and in business.

By choosing broad topics and exploring them from angles that don’t always have to do with finance, ing.world is able to provide readers with content that is relevant to their interests even if they are not ING customers or lack financial literacy.

“There’s different content, and different audiences start by reading different articles,” Philips said. “It’s a bit like how a painter has a palette with different colors and blends it into one painting. That’s how we do it as well.”

From a visual standpoint, the publication relies on large photos, white space, and a clean, responsive design to pull the reader into an experience that feels somewhat shielded from the rest of the white noise of the Internet.

Each issue is crafted by two ING employees—who also have other responsibilities at the firm—and two employees from the creative agency Born05. Some of the articles are written in-house, while others are done by freelancers. ING Group’s central corporate office in Amsterdam, which publishes ing.world, works with the regional offices in the 12 countries it has retail banks to make sure the magazine does not interfere or contradict with the content each office is producing locally.

For instance, the head office is responsible for ing.world and press releases, but the company’s retail banking branch in Belgium is responsible for the print content found in its offices and online packages that educate customers about the different financial tools they will need for life milestones such as going away to college or buying a house.

When it comes to distribution, the company’s primary tools are its website and social media. In addition to the organic reach of its owned channels, ING amplifies its social distribution by asking employees and influencers featured in the magazine to share the publication from their personal accounts.

ING will also pay to seed its content in targeted LinkedIn groups that have members interested in finance. The company, at one point, tried placing banner ads for ing.world on a Dutch financial news site, but while the effort drew lots of clicks, most of the readers left the site almost immediately. This last bit is important because the bank considers attention time a crucial metric for determining the success of its content.

According to Dagmar van der Plas, an ING senior advisor who manages the publication’s distribution strategy, ing.world strives to keep its audience members on the page for at least two minutes. Otherwise, it’s unlikely the reader will have had time to absorb a typical story.

The amount of time someone spends on a piece of content is the difference between whether ING successfully engaged with the reader or merely communicated with him.

“When you communicate, you spread your message and that’s about it, but to reach a real engagement with your reader, you have to be really at the heart of what they want to hear from you,” van der Plas said. “Our profession is ‘communications,’ but I believe more in ‘engaging,’ so I would prefer to be called an ‘engagement manager’ rather than a ‘communication manager.'”

By the looks of things, ING is succeeding in developing a base of readers that do, in fact, want to engage with its content. According to its internal metrics, the publication is getting more than three times as many readers per issue as the old magazine, and an impressive 60 percent of those readers return to the magazine a second time.

In a corporate culture, it can be tough for a company to take a step back and make such a drastic overhaul to its marketing strategy. But ING is a great example of what can happen when content informs the reader rather than just promoting a company’s services. And as ING continues to build long-term relationships with consumers, it can now bank on content to drive its business forward.

The post How ING Built Europe’s ‘Best Branded Web Mag’ in Just One Year appeared first on Contently.

Canada-based Sun Life Financial had some hype to live up to as soon as they launched their lifestyle and money management platform Brighter Life in 2011. At the time, the Financial Post immediately called Brighter Life “worth taking note of—particularly if you’re an executive developing corporate blogs, web sites and trying to develop a social media strategy.”

Since then, Brighter Life has risen to the occasion. According to the Content Marketing Institute, within nine months more than 620,000 pages of content were consumed on the blog, which helped the platform convert approximately 4 percent of traffic to leads and garner more than 8,700 click-throughs to SunLife.ca—exactly the impact the brand was aiming for.

As Brenda Spiering, manager of content strategy at Sun Life Financial and editor for BrighterLife.ca, put it: “Brighter Life was launched as a way to reach consumers where they are, searching for information online before they may have even considered Sun Life or are aware that their needs may be met by a financial product.”

Starting with quality

Early on, Brighter Life shaped itself as a resource by focusing on useful tips and tools about money, health, family, working life, and retirement. Sun Life made sure their content served consumers, not the company’s bottom line.

“Consumers are quick to dismiss content that’s little more than thinly veiled sales messaging,” Spiering said. “Brighter Life articles do not discuss Sun Life-branded products and services. Instead, the site looks to engage consumers with content that’s credible, unbiased, written in plain language, and free of marketing tactics.”

For lifestyle content like “Five Fun Ways to Get Your Family Fit,” it’s a bit easier to steer clear of a marketing agenda. But even for their investment content such as “How Will Bank of Canada Rate Cut Affect Consumers?,” Sun Life avoids mentioning any of their financial products. These kinds of articles smartly stick to general advice about how consumers will be affected by the financial news of the day.

Once that editorial model was put in place, Sun Life continued to invest in content as it rolled out a French-language edition for Quebec in 2011 called Simplement Brillant, before launching custom platforms in Indonesia in 2012 and the Philippines in 2013. Each platform has its own editorial team tasked with developing content for its region.

And as Spiering pointed out, even shared content is “carefully adapted to ensure the nuances of the language and the cultural references work for their specific audience group.”

Paid content distribution

No matter how refreshingly unbiased content might be, for a brand to grow a sizable audience, people still need to know it exists. When Sun Life started publishing their work, they were buoyed by an advertising campaign that included paid search, ads on popular publications, and targeted ad buys for Facebook sponsored posts.

But even though that strategy worked well in the beginning, Spiering explained it had to evolve as the blog continued to thrive.

Now that Bright Life has a loyal readership and large followings on social media, it has since decreased its paid distribution, which can be expensive and lead to inconsistent traffic. Today, with more than 155,000 Facebook followers across the four international platforms, Brighter Life’s social network is its most powerful audience-building tool.

“As our social media followers and newsletter subscribers have grown,” Spiering said, “we’ve gradually reduced our paid content activation strategies and focused more on activation efforts across our own Sun Life web platforms.”

Those efforts include integrating links to Brighter Life content on both the Sun Life homepage and plan member community site as well as working with business partners to share targeted Brighter Life content.

Leveraging content as an internal tool

While reeling in consumers may be crucial to Brighter Life’s overall content strategy, that doesn’t mean the brand is limiting its audience growth only to potential customers. Sun Life has started to leverage their financial advisors as promoters of the platform, using content to educate and engage their existing clients.

When a particular article relates to a client’s needs, Sun Life advisors now reach out with a direct link or send timely and relevant content to everyone on their email lists and social channels. Sun Life even rolled out a tool to automatically add advisor contact information to Brighter Life pages after an article gets shared. So while the advisors aren’t penning guest posts themselves, they are helping create a culture of content, which is a smart move for any company that wants to seriously transform their marketing from top to bottom.

Banking on content takes support from executives, and any company actively working to get more employees involved in the marketing strategy, regardless of their editorial experience, knows what they’re doing. And for Sun Life Financial, it’s clear they’ve known what to do every step of the way.

For more case studies like this and an overview of the latest trends in finance content marketing, read “On the Money: How 5 Finance Brands Build Loyal Audiences by Investing in High-Quality Content”.

The post How Sun Life Financial Turned Their Blog Into a Lead-Gen Machine appeared first on Contently.

However, instead of partaking in the fun, a whole bunch of marketers chose to sit in a packed parlor room as I interviewed two of the smartest people in the business—Tara Meehan of Guardian Life Insurance and Ann Hynek of BlackRock—about the art of navigating legal approvals in brand newsrooms.

(Full disclosure: Guardian Life Insurance is a Contently client.)

Here are seven important lessons we learned during the discussion.

1. Work closely together

Coming from the insurance and finance worlds, respectively, Meehan and Hynek face as many compliance hurdles as anyone. But they don’t use it as an excuse.

“Compliance is a hurdle, but I really don’t like to call them a hurdle,” explained Meehan, who, as the head of social media content for Guardian Life, leads the company’s social media efforts and manages the tactics used by the company’s 2,700 representatives. “Their first job, and legal’s first job, understandably is to protect the brand. Our job is to tell the story. So it’s very critical for us to work with our compliance team very closely to make sure we’re all on the same page. There’s no demonization of compliance. We’re not, ‘Compliance bad. Content good.’ It’s not like that.”

Both panelists stressed that getting content passed swiftly through legal approvals often comes down to the personal relationship between content and compliance teams.

As a vice president at BlackRock, Hynek is the managing editor of BlackRock Blog, a publication chock full of smart, daily financial content. She also oversees all of the company’s content and social media marketing. One big key to her success has been having a compliance representative on the team to guide their efforts.

“We were starting this from the ground up, and he was really sort of the major player from the very beginning,” Hynek explained. “It was, ‘How do we tell these stories to the investor, remain true to the brand, and remain compliant?'”

For BlackRock, having compliance fully integrated into content creation proved incredibly successful. Their compliance rep approved everything for the team on a daily basis, from tweets to blog posts. Hynek also kept him looped into the team’s plans. “Any time we had a piece that might have been a little tricky from a legal perspective, it was, ‘This is coming down the pike,’ so there were no surprises,” she explained.

Meehan agreed that kind of close collaboration is crucial.

“When you keep that constant flow of communication with legal and compliance, you help them understand that this is an infographic that’s going to educate the public about how Whole Life can help you pay for college,” Meehan added. “Disclosures should not be all over it.”

2. Set clear rules

Those close relationships with compliance also helped Meehan and Hynek establish clear rules that kept non-compliant content from clogging the pipeline.

“The big one is no promissory language,” Hynek said. “We absolutely have [rules about] what we can say and what we can’t, but it’s pretty general. Once you’ve been in it for a while, it’s pretty much common sense.”

Meehan agreed that disclosures are crucial, adding that it’s also important to keep any personal opinions out of your content. “Compliance and legal on our side is very cognizant that it’s a very conservative industry,” Meehan said. “Nothing from HuffPost or Fox News like, ‘Obama really good! or ‘Obama terrible!’ You can’t do that. Try to stay away from those hot-button topic issues, but still stay trendy and still give topical content and valuable educational content.”

At the end of the day, it’s a matter of making sure each side knows what the other is supposed to deliver. “Setting expectations on both sides is critical,” Meehan said.

3. Train, train, train

When trying to educate an entire company on best compliance practices, it’s hard to put too much importance on the initial training period.

“It’s a constant educational training model,” Meehan said. “I work with our internal teams who actually have their own compliance rules. There are certain disclosures that only retirement needs, and there are certain disclosures that only life needs, so it’s important for me to learn that and have those groups inform me constantly of the different rules.”

“Anyone that touches those different [social] channels is required to go through training,” Hynek said. There’s somebody on the compliance team who’s charged with talking everybody through it, and answering any questions that they may have—talking about best practices with [the employee’s] own social media channels right from the beginning.”

For Hynek, that extends to the various writers she works with as well. Her life as managing editor is made, well, manageable because all of her writers know what’s compliant and what’s not from the very beginning.

4. Let technology make your life easier

When it comes to compliance, record-keeping is key. But figuring out how to set up an organized system to handle those records isn’t always intuitive.

“One of the very first things that we did with compliance was worry about how we’re going to keep track of everything. Their question was, ‘So do we take screenshots of every tweet and every blog post?'” Hynek said with a chuckle. “We were like, ‘No, that’s not how we’re going to do this.'”

Instead, BlackRock used social media archiving tool Smarch to capture all blog and social media posts.

Similarly, Meehan relies on an archiving tool, Socialware, to capture and monitor Guardian Life’s far-ranging social media activity. “It would be pretty much impossible to be able to monitor what goes on for every single rep [without it],” she said.

5. Pick up the phone—or holler across the office

To solve a problem unique to the digital age, sometimes the best answer is old-school communication.

“We’re so wrapped up in the digital space—everything is email, email, email,” Meehan said. “Following up with an email to see if you got the email, and then following up a week later with an email about the email. Sometimes it’s really crazy, but there’s this thing on your desk. It’s called a phone. And when you pick it up and dial it and hold it to your ear, there’s another person on the line that’s a human.”

Hynek, on the other hand, bypasses the phone and takes it a step further: She hollers over at the compliance team, which sits at a nearby pod of desks . “I can stand up and say, ‘Hey, is this tweak going to fly?’ and Scott [in compliance] says, ‘I’m on the phone, but we can talk about it in a second!’ It’s kind of nice because they’re right there. They’re easily accessible.”

6. Respect compliance’s time

Considering just how important relationships are between content and compliance, it wasn’t a big surprise that respecting compliance’s time was a point both panelists emphasized again and again.

“Every week I always send our entire editorial calendar for that particular week just to say, ‘This is what’s coming,'” Hynek said. “‘We’ve got this product launch on Thursday. This blog post has to be live at 8:00 a.m. What can we do to work together to make sure that this goes out?'”

And that weekly routine has done wonders when it comes to keeping her content cadence on beat.

7. Don’t let fear kill your creativity

During our question and answer period, one member of the audience brought up a common concern: Content creators can get discouraged by compliance regulations and be afraid to try out creative ideas that push the limit.

“It’s not like the world’s going to fall apart if I submit something and it gets rejected,” Meehan said. “If it’s something I feel strongly about, but I feel like it’s going to cause some friction, it’s important to have a meeting before I submit to say, ‘There’s something coming down the pipeline you haven’t seen before. You may have questions about it. Please don’t freak out about it. Just come to me and I’ll work it out.'”

For Hynek, that advanced notice is equally important. “We have a weekly meeting where content and compliance come together,” she said. “It’s [crucial] having the foundation of an active group and figuring out together how to get around it—collaborating.”

Ultimately, that collaboration is the key to a smooth relationship between content and compliance. Bring them into the fold and talk constantly. And if there’s anything we learned from South by Southwest, it’s that brisket and breakfast tacos will make people show up to anything. At the very least, spring for some bagels.

The post 7 Lessons From BlackRock and Guardian Life on Hurdling Content Marketing Compliance Issues appeared first on Contently.

For established financial institutions and capstone banks, building an audience can be a little easier if customers are already familiar with your brand and name. But for Mint, a digital personal finance service founded in 2006, there was no head start. They had to start from scratch.

But from the get-go, Mint had a target audience in mind and a plan for reaching that audience. According to serial entrepreneur Sachin Rekhi, one of Mint’s earliest goals was to get the attention of their prospective customers: young professionals. Since this demographic spent so much of their time online, Mint launched MintLife, a personal finance blog that would act as a significant money management resource for these young consumers, even though the company didn’t have a finished product people could buy.

“They decided in the early days to invest heavily in building out MintLife … independent of the eventual Mint.com product,” Rekhi writes on his blog. “This created a welcome audience when their product eventually launched, and MintLife went on to become the number one personal finance blog on the web.”

Even in the early years, articles like “Home Budget: Affordable and Cheap Dates” and “How-To Guide: Paying for College” were perfect for that welcome audience. And when Mint eventually revealed its product—a tool that helped users budget their finances by gathering different accounts and balances in one place—the viral nature of the blog was key to the company’s rapid growth.

How rapid? Mint grew quickly enough to sell to Intuit for $170 million after three years in business. By 2013, the tool reached 10 million users, many of whom trusted Mint to handle their sensitive banking information because of the blog’s smart, helpful content.

Building Content Demand

Since Mint was in the unique position of relying on its site for both sales and content marketing, the editorial team needed to make sure their content hit exactly the right audience.

While many established financial services brands already have more than enough capital to build a publication, Mint had to hustle in the early days before it sold. To create content on a tight budget, the team invited finance bloggers to write for free and sponsored other finance blogs. Those tactics eventually helped Mint attract 20,000 email subscribers.

To fine-tune the creation process without wasting money, the company seeded its content on popular distribution sites, building strong presences on Digg and Reddit and tracking the engagement after an article went live.

As Mint’s former lead designer, Jason Putorti, told KISSmetrics, “Our app didn’t have a high viral coefficient, but we had content that [did].”

That highly sharable content included features like “Trainwreck Tuesday,” a series that highlighted personal finance disasters—some of which were crowdsourced—and in-depth interviews about personal finance habits with people such as Shelley Elmblad of About Financial Software.

In an interview with Big Think, Mint founder Aaron Patzer said that by the time the product was released, MintLife was driving more traffic than their competitors were to their entire websites.

Demand was so great, in fact, their system couldn’t initially handle allowing all 20,000 email subscribers to try the beta version of the product. Mint took the hurdle in stride and created even greater demand by giving readers who wanted early access to the product the ability to post an “I want Mint” badge on their blog or social media profile—which helped boost the search ranking for MintLife content and generated even more buzz for the young company.

Once the groundwork was all laid out, Mint started to see incredible results. Seven months after Mint’s 2006 launch, Bloomberg reported the site was adding 10,000 new users each week. That momentum still continues today. TrafficEstimate.com shows Mint received nearly 12 million visits in January of 2015, up almost 8 million year-over-year.

Brands from all industries dream of building an audience that big. For Mint, there’s no need to dream. The brand committed to content from the very beginning, and as a model to other financial companies, Mint’s owned media property not only became a hub for resourceful articles, but also a place for users to open up their wallets and buy a financial product.

For more case studies like this and an overview of the latest trends in finance content marketing, read “On the Money: How 5 Finance Brands Build Loyal Audiences by Investing in High-Quality Content“.

The post How Mint Turned Content Into a Big Business appeared first on Contently.

How to Craft a Brand Voice That Carries Across Platforms, Formats, and the Space-Time Continuum

Nailing your brand voice is an essential building block of any content marketing campaign, but it’s one that brands really struggle to do right. In the second part of her brand voice series, content strategist Melissa Lafksy Wall explains how to create a brand voice that carries across media channels, resonating with each audience in exactly the right way. Read it.

The Mighty Ducks: The Story Behind the NHL Team That Doubled as an All-Time Great Marketing Stunt

In an epic longform piece, Dillon Baker looks back at the insane marketing stunt that was the Anaheim Mighty Ducks:

The story of the Mighty Ducks is one of radical experimentation, an unparalleled business move that combined the movie industry, brand marketing, and professional sports. The Mighty Ducks are the only team in the history of major North American professional sports leagues to be named after a brand. In this case, it was Disney’s successful hockey movie franchise The Mighty Ducks.

Looking back, it’s difficult to fully grasp just how bizarre the creation of The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim was. Read it.

10 Content Marketing Takeaways From SXSW

Unless your boss owed you a favor, there’s a good chance you missed out on SXSW Interactive last weekend. Have no fear: We were there and put together a handy listicle of takeaways. Read it.

On the Money: How 5 Finance Brands Built Loyal Audiences by Investing in High-Quality Content

In our latest e-book, we dive into the case studies of five brands that built massive audiences for their content—in large part by eschewing marketing altogether. Read it.

Why Content Marketers Are Overcoming Their Fears and Learning to Love the Pop-Up

Pop-ups are making a comeback, and surprisingly, it’s a good thing. (We’re not trolling you, I swear.) Jay Acunzo on reports why pop-ups have reemerged as a powerful weapon for marketers that are dishing out high-quality content and building an owned audience. Read it.

That’s all for this week. Now go forth and frolic in the springtime.

The post Content Catchup: Crafting a Cross-Platform Brand Voice, The Mighty Ducks, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.