Finance brands need to have a significant number of clients to show that they are trustworthy; one way to show this credibility is through content. 

Content marketing allows you to share your company’s message through multiple channels, which gives you the flexibility to meet your customers where they are–and associate your company with the help you offer. That value-add is crucial as customers have a variety of platforms to choose from, so they’re likely to scroll past advertising-focused posts on their feeds.

So you’ve figured out that content needs to be helpful and informative and avoided the blatant promotion route. If you find little to no interaction with your existing posts, then this behaviour may be one possible explanation for fewer interactions, but it’s far from the only reason you may be missing out on opportunities to engage with your customers.

As a finance brand, engaging with your customers is essential–people may not feel they can rely on your company to have their best interests in mind if all they see you talk about is your latest product or service when that perception of how dependable you are can determine whether or not they’ll turn to you for that service or even continue to be your customer.

When you make it a point to review your content you help maintain the current client base and reach more potential ones. By analysing and continuously improving content, you enhance your marketing strategies, establish a strong brand presence and connect to a wider audience.

The impact of content on client trust

Content marketing involves the process of planning and creating content for brands on various social media platforms; when it’s reliable, relatable and relevant, content creates an impact on audiences and encourages trust in a finance brand. Other benefits of content marketing are:

• You position your company as an expert in your industry: by sharing insightful content, you shape the perception of your company as a verified source of knowledge.
• You drive traffic to your website: when your content is of excellent quality it’s shared online, so you’re able to attract more eyes to your page, creating more opportunities to convert leads into customers.
• You build customer relationships: by producing content that helps customers, you signal to customers that you’re interested in their success, not just in the profit they bring you, so you encourage them to trust you.  

The more trust that a customer has in a brand, the more likely they are to bring repeat business–and eventually advocate for your brand. Building this relationship takes more than just time, though, so you must have a plan in place to build your customers’ assurance.

Developing a successful content marketing strategy to gain more client trust

You need a content marketing strategy to ensure that your finance brand has trustworthy content that resonates with clients and prospective customers. Every industry has seen the value of creating content, but hopping on the latest trends and aiming to go viral is hardly a plan to tell your customers you can be relied on and to reinforce your brand awareness.

When you have building customer relationships and encouraging trust as your objectives for your content marketing strategy, you need to keep the following aspects in mind:

• Focus on your strengths with the customer: creating quality content can seem daunting, but it often boils down to featuring unique content that meets your customers’ needs and educates them on how you can make their lives easier.
• Prioritise and select your channels wisely: the most popular social platforms may not necessarily be relevant to your customers, so it pays to mind which channels make more sense for your target audience, and not hop on whatever platform is most popular.
• Improve your experience consistently: as practices develop and some technologies are rendered obsolete, you need to demonstrate your company’s agility to keep up with customers’ needs and keep a pulse on what functionality is most relevant to them.

Creating a successful content marketing strategy for finance brands to establish credibility can be challenging due to the competitive nature of the industry, so you need to make sure you’ve got the most updated and verified information to serve as the base for the content you’ll create.

Research plays a vital role when curating a strong content marketing strategy for finance brands because it’s an industry that’s subject to rapid and periodic changes, as markets move and people’s needs change. 

Both traditional financial institutions and up-and-coming players in the industry are seeing the value in creating content that meets client needs and fosters a strong relationship with their audience, so it’s essential to be focused on your approach and understand what your customers are looking for as well as seeing so you’re delivering the content that they need.

You must conduct your research to figure out for yourself what works, what doesn’t and what you can try to engage your audience even more.  

Monitoring content performance and engagement metrics to maintain client trust

Like any goal you want to reach, having content performance and engagement metrics in place is valuable for finance brands because they provide useful information to track the effectiveness of the content you’re using to engage your audience. Setting this up for your brand can begin with identifying the marketing goals and associated metrics that you want to keep tabs on:

• Brand awareness: website traffic, page and video views, downloads
• Engagement: comments, shares, inbound links
• Lead generation: subscriptions, conversion rate, form completions
• Sales: online and offline sales, manual reporting and anecdotes
• Customer retention or loyalty: retention or renewal rates, percentage of content consumed by existing customers
• Upsell or cross-sell: sales for new products or services

It’s up to you to select which metrics are most relevant to your overall business goals, as depending on the nature of your company’s ways of working you may find some metrics less pertinent than others. For example, if the majority of your customers already prefer to transact with you online, then emphasising physical sales as a metric may not tell you much.

After checking and evaluating your content, there are certain guidelines you can follow to avoid spending time producing low-performing content. Some of the most common challenges that finance brands have encountered after monitoring include: 

• Competing in Organic Searches: you’re unlikely to rank high on a search result page if you’re creating generic content, so establishing a brand and targeting long-tail keywords for unique topics can help your content cut through the clutter.
• Complying with Regulations: financial advice is heavily regulated due to the high risk of trouble with authorities, so creating disclaimers and sticking to topics that you’re most knowledgeable about helps reduce the liability.
• Finding Knowledgeable Writers: being too general in your job ads can trap you in a constant struggle to find the right writers for your content, so being deliberate and specific about the level of knowledge you expect a writer to have and supporting them with training in-house can help address this issue.
• Targeting the Right Readers: using the sales funnel as guidance for how specific and detailed your content will be at different stages of the purchase process can help you engage your audience at the right points in time.
• Update and Avoid Stale Content: conducting a sitewide audit, taking note of the posts that perform well and deleting any content that’s no longer in line with the latest regulations can help decrease your risk of traffic drop-off.

In the financial service industry, competition is high and having fewer clients can negatively impact the credibility of a finance brand. Content serves as a powerful tool for making a finance brand appear more reliable–the more you’re able to help people, the better they’re able to understand their own needs and perceive you as an expert who cares about their success.

You also need to review your existing content to make sure you’re able to maintain your relationship with your current client base, which is also a way to attract potential clients, gain trust, and establish your brand’s credibility. 

Building that trust and diligently monitoring your content can go a long way in fostering that enduring relationship with your customers. Reach out and get focused on your content with us.