Your customers need to understand your offerings, and believe in the benefits your business provides, for them to confidently purchase your products or services.

This is especially relevant in the finance industry, wherein the majority of businesses handle their customers’ money and wealth-building initiatives.

One of the challenges that finance brands face is boosting the financial literacy of their target audiences on complex topics that are relevant to the brand’s products and services. 

Increasing your customers’ financial literacy is an important objective for your brand, and content marketing can be a great tool for achieving this goal. Because it comes in various forms (like blogs, social media posts, infographics and videos), content is essential to share key messages and explain different topics. Not only do you increase your target customer’s financial literacy with content, but you also increase your audience engagement on different platforms.

When you maximise the use of your content marketing, you can build your brand authority and credibility as you share invaluable knowledge with your target audience, who will gradually see you as their primary source of knowledge and guidance when it comes to finance-related matters.

Why do you need to increase your customers’ financial literacy?

Financial literacy enables individuals to make informed decisions because they have the necessary knowledge and skills to understand different financial terms and processes. A lack of financial literacy can make it challenging for your brand to engage your audience and convert leads.

For example, a finance brand offers loan structuring services for its clients but doesn’t provide the necessary content to explain the importance of its services. If that brand’s target customer doesn’t know what loan structuring is and how it benefits their financial goals, then how can the finance brand expect people to avail of their services?

Sharing your expertise and industry knowledge can help your audience make effective financial choices while gaining a better appreciation of the services and products you provide. 

Empowering your audience to increase their financial literacy can encourage them to partner with you as they develop strategies that contribute to their financial goals. This can result in a deeper bond between your brand and your audience, encouraging customer trust and loyalty. 

How does content boost financial literacy?

Content can help you explain complex financial concepts and disseminate information to your target audience. To ensure your content is effective and successful, you need to have a solid content marketing strategy.

Content marketing is the strategic approach of creating, marketing and distributing content for a specific audience online. According to NYTLicensing, content marketing can be extremely effective for any business, and it works so well that over 70% of B2B and B2C marketers use content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. 

Content marketing is so effective because it helps brands in achieving their goals. NYTLicensing also reported that 81% of marketers said that content marketing helped them create brand awareness, and 63% of respondents reported success in building a growing loyalty with existing clients and customers. 

Content can be used to achieve multiple marketing objectives; aside from increasing your customers’ financial literacy, content also increases brand awareness and customer loyalty. By developing a content marketing strategy that utilises different types of content, you can effectively educate your audience and convert them into loyal customers.

3 types of content to boost financial literacy

We’ve shortlisted how you can use three types of content to help your audience increase their financial literacy and encourage them to partner with your brand.

1. Blogs

Long-form content is the perfect medium for creating comprehensive guides or articles about complex ideas and concepts. Blogs can be bookmarked by readers and reread numerous times when they need to refresh their knowledge about specific topics.

Blogs are also helpful in boosting your brand visibility online, especially if you use relevant keywords in your content. Optimising your SEO can help you rank higher on search engine results pages, which enables your content to be found more easily by your target audience.

You just need to make sure that the SEO optimisation of your blogs is balanced with high-quality content writing. There are several ways you can ensure that your content is engaging to read:

• Conduct research –  While you’re the expert in your industry, it’s crucial to research the topics you want to discuss. This ensures that you’re creating original, unique content that is backed by facts and figures.
• Develop a content style guide – Your style guide consists of the dos and don’ts of writing blogs for your brand. This ensures that your content has a uniform writing style and brand voice regardless of who creates your content (i.e. whether it’s an internal marketing team or a partnered content agency). 
• Structure the ideas of your blogs – Use the inverted pyramid style of writing with educational finance blogs. This means starting with the most important piece of information so the reader can quickly identify the main theme, before funnelling down into the specific details about that topic before you reach the conclusion (or “peak” of the inverted pyramid). 
• Incorporate social proof – Featuring quotes of your existing customers into blogs, or making full-length customer studies are a great way of adding a fresh perspective into your long-form content. It gives your customers a full picture of how your brand operates and how you can help them.Edit and proofread your content – Make sure to have an editor and proofreader check your content before publishing. This removes preventable mistakes such as spelling and grammar errors and ensures that all the relevant resources are properly credited and linked.

2. Infographics 

Infographics are a powerful tool for breaking down complex concepts or information into a simpler, more digestible and easy-to-understand format. 

The visual nature of infographics makes it more engaging to learn and remember statistics and numerical figures. Infographics can also be useful in repurposing your existing content.

For example, if you have a blog about “5 tips in creating a diversified investment portfolio”, you can transform the content into infographics by highlighting one or three tips included in the article.

Creating a visually appealing infographic requires you to thoughtfully consider the key message and ensure that layout and style support your brand aesthetic.

3. Videos

According to HubSpot’s The State of Marketing report, “90% of marketers using short-form video will increase or maintain their investment this year.” This demonstrates the impact and popularity of videos as a content medium. 

Videos are extremely versatile and useful; you can use short-form videos to create product teasers and behind-the-scenes clips while long-form videos can be used for explainers, tutorials or even documentaries.

This encourages audiences to apply their financial learnings to their current situations and how it can help them achieve their long-term goals.

Content helps boost financial literacy by providing accessible and educational content to your target audience. Content like blogs, infographics, and videos simplify financial information, help your individuals make informed decisions and show that you are an industry expert.

Book a call now to learn more about how content can boost financial literacy for your finance brand.