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Content Marketing for Financial Services SEO

Content Marketing for Financial Services SEO

Reading Time: 5 minutes

When looking for a new accountant, did you know that 72% of potential clients start with an online search? For tax services, that figure increases ever so slightly to 76%, and for loans, it skyrockets to an undeniably huge 90% of financial services clients.

The point? Your online presence and visibility matters, especially if you are in the financial services sector.

By making use of a financial services content marketing strategy (the technique of publishing content to engage and inform your audience) you can cultivate a more visible presence in search engines, tapping into that huge market of financial clients. From blogs to videos, content creates an ecosystem of value designed to push your business into the spotlight.

To learn about content marketing and how it fits into the wider world of SEO for financial services, we’ve put together this handy article.

What Is Content Marketing?

Simply put, content marketing is the creation and publication of content for your business. It involves planning and strategy, content creation, and relevant, consistent distribution, with the aim of engaging and converting your target audience organically.

Financial content can be created in a whole range of forms, including:

    • Blogs
    • Articles
    • White papers
    • Videos
    • Infographics
    • Podcasts

Rather than a standalone plan, content marketing is one piece of a much wider, more complex SEO strategy. It sits within search engine optimisation (SEO) in the digital marketing space and is used by 90% of professional marketers to connect businesses with their target audience.

Why We Conduct Content Marketing

Content marketing is an important part of the marketing strategy for any financial business.

Just a few of these reasons include:

    • Building Trust and Credibility: Content marketing shows you know your apples from your pears (or your HMRC from your Companies House). High-quality, regular content will establish you as a thought leader in the finance industry, showing potential clients that you’re knowledgeable, confident, and trustworthy.
    • Educating the Audience: Content is crucial for educating your audience. This can include informing them of why certain financial services exist and are so important, the implications of not seeking professional financial support and guidance, and how they can make staying on top of their finances easier.
    • Engaging Potential Clients: There are a lot of financial services businesses out there, so why choose yours? Content will inform and engage new potential clients, taking them from the top of the sales funnel and nurturing them right through to a conversion.
    • SEO Benefits: When creating a financial SEO strategy, content marketing is key. By using optimisation techniques, your site can be boosted higher up the ranks for relevant results, helping you get noticed by the audience looking for your services.

Benefits of Content Marketing for Financial Services Companies

As a finance professional, photography and video editing might seem a world away from your industry. What has a YouTube video got to do with helping your clients get their accounts sorted? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Increased Online Visibility

Content marketing is a critical part of ensuring your website ranks higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Considering that everyone who’s anyone in finance has a website these days, this is incredibly important.

By consistently publishing valuable content, you can tap into the Google algorithm and make yourself more favourable in the eyes of search engines. The more valuable they perceive your content, the higher you’ll appear for relevant search results.

This drastically enhances your online visibility. We know that users don’t tend to scroll very far down the SERPs, with a huge majority of clicks going to the first few results, so ranking in those pole positions is going to bring a lot more attention to your financial business.

Higher Quality Traffic

Using content marketing in your financial SEO strategy will drive more relevant, higher-quality leads to your site.

These are users who are actively looking for the services you’re offering with the intent to convert (or a far higher likelihood of conversion).

Enhanced User Engagement 

Including videos on your website can boost the average time a user spends on it by 88%.

Quality content engages your users. It entertains, informs, and makes learning more about your industry appealing to your target market. It explains what they want to know and dives deeper into interesting topics, bringing value to your users that entices them to stick around.

Improved Conversion Rates

Content marketing enables winning financial SEO strategies to enhance your visibility and engage your audience. Once you’ve got your audience interested, it also drives conversions.

From calls to action (CTAs) to empathising with pain points, there are a multitude of techniques that encourage your audience to convert.

This allows you to take your high-quality leads right from the top of the marketing funnel – at that first point of engagement – through to a conversion using only the power of valuable, informative content.

Strong Client Relationships

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that strengthens your relationships with your audience, as well as building your SEO.

The right content answers audience questions, empathises with their problems, and provides useful solutions. It helps potential clients get to know your business too. From your tone of voice to greater visibility of your friendly team, it humanises your brand for stronger connections.

This is true both for leads and existing customers. Once a user converts, your content will still work to earn their long-term loyalty.

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How Content Marketing Supports A Financial SEO Strategy

We use content marketing for both on-page SEO and off-page financial services SEO. It offers a wealth of opportunities to gain some lovely SEO points, including through:

    • Keyword Targeting: We carry out keyword research to find the terms your target audience is searching for and work them into your content, helping search engines match your blogs, white papers, and videos to the audience they’re intended for.
    • Content Planning: Research fuels our content planning sessions, helping us pinpoint the financial topics that your audience is interested in. For example, if we see that your audience is searching ‘How do I register for tax as a sole trader’, we know that content answering this question is going to resonate with your target market.
    • Optimising for SEO: There are a multitude of ways we optimise content to rank higher in the search results, from adding multimedia components to using keywords in alt tags. This has an impact across your website, showing Google just how relevant, credible, and trustworthy you are.
    • Distributing and Promoting: From Digital PR to social media marketing, content distribution drives more clicks to your site, building trust with search engines, and encouraging them to increase it’s rankings.

Kickstart Your Financial Content Marketing

In the financial industry, content marketing builds credibility around your business. Informative content that’s easy for non-financial experts to understand can help bridge the gap between you and your audience, showing them exactly how you can help them and cultivating trust.

Quality content will drive high-quality traffic to your website, engage the audience, and encourage them to stick around for longer.

At Woya Digital, we offer complete content marketing services for finance sector businesses. With a team of experienced SEO experts, we’ll work with you to build a winning strategy that drives long-term success. Book a free consultation with our team today.

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The Importance of Business Content Marketing

The Importance of Business Content Marketing

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Content marketing is increasingly acknowledged as a vital component of an overall marketing strategy in creating and furthering brand awareness to attract customers both online and off.

Content marketing is particularly important for growth and visibility in ever-crowding markets and looking up any successful brand online today, you’ll undoubtedly find a whole host of multi-model content spanning various platforms.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the creation of relevant, useful and educational content for a business’ target audience, consistent with its overall branding and positioning. Content should ideally be multi-modal to span different content consumption habits and preferences as well as to enhance SEO ranking and may include: blogs, e-books, audio files, videos, images, infographics, white papers or full content libraries that customers (potential and existing) will find useful.

Content marketing is often primarily pushed out to market online but may also involve offline communications; dependent on the audience and their preferences. For this reason, content marketing often forms part of a wider digital marketing strategy.

Why is Business Content Marketing important?

Content marketing has numerous benefits for businesses of all types and sizes and continues to prove itself as valuable for marketers across all industries.

As an activity, content marketing focuses directly on improving engagement between customers (or potential customers) and a business; in the long term aiming to increase sales, nurture customer loyalty and to encourage repeat custom. This engagement comes through the interaction customers have with the content being created and published; be that reading it, listening to it, viewing it, watching it or even better, sharing it onwards with others. If the content is pitched and created appropriately, the target audience will consider it to be of value to them and so will interact with it.

Content marketing can help position a brand as a thought leader or industry expert. In creating and providing educational and informative content, even if it is not of a specialist or especially technical nature, businesses are able to cement a reputation as one that can be approached for knowledge or guidance in their field, and that they can be trusted. It is this tangibly useful and valuable content that creates a connection with consumers and dependence on the business that promotes loyalty.

Great content produced and published online may be shared widely; furthering a brands exposure to an ever-growing audience. This furthers organic digital reach and increases the amount of people exposed to the business’ branding.

Content marketing also has positive benefits for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) purposes. Google and other search engines use algorithms to read through digital content to reinforce a website’s theme, location, relevance and authenticity; promoting its chances of higher ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). In addition, with the latest update to Google’s algorithm, the Multitask Uniform Model, all types of content can be understood by the programming and so a variety of media used will only seek to enhance organic search performance.

It is clear that content marketing provides fantastic value not just to the business’ target audience online but also to the business’ bottom line. It is estimated that content marketing as an activity costs up to 62% less than traditional marketing but delivers three times the leads.

What Type of content should form a Content Marketing Strategy?

For many years, content marketing has simply involved the writing and publication of blogs on a website but with devices improving in function, mobile network speeds improving in capacity and speed, and attitudes toward content types changing, it now involves much more.

We are seeing a shift in short form written content to long form with articles of 1,000 words and more becoming more prevalent; and being read more as users recognise the value in investing the time to consume them. In conjunction with this, studies prove that consumers are more likely to engage with content that includes data and analysis as they respect the specific detail included.

Google’s latest algorithm update will, for the first time, analyse and understand multi-modal media types and so will favour the ranking of a brand with a variety of content available. This reinforces the importance of businesses offering their content in different modes; appealing to and being accessible for as many people as possible.

Strategising Your Business Content Marketing

Many businesses create and push out blogs on themes related to their brand niche ad hoc, whenever they’re able to but with no rhyme or reason in their topic or placement. This makes the success of such content largely down to luck.

Taking the time to lay out a proper content marketing strategy allows for the production of strong, long-lasting assets that serve the brand long-term. This involves the planning of content spanning different types, topics and platforms to carefully curate helpful and valuable resources for consumers.

How to put together a Content Marketing strategy

A business looking to compile a comprehensive and effective content marketing strategy must first define their mission and goals, outline their target audience and understand what they wish to achieve with the content they produce. Content can then be planned on a tailored basis to cater for specific personas; giving them the information they need in a form they’ll understand and enjoy on a platform they use.

A timeline should be created to map out the planning, creation, management and publication of content across all channels with a joined-up approach for consistent (and therefore recognisable) branding. Finally, the results of content marketing should be measurable so that the business is able to understand its effectiveness. Without this, there can be no real mark of success.

If you are looking for support with your content marketing strategy and execution, you’ve found the right blog! Head to our Woya Digital website to find out more about us and then get in touch to discuss with us how we can help you grow your business with effective content marketing.

 

 

Content Creation Tips for Every Step of Your Funnel

Content Creation Tips for Every Step of Your Funnel

Reading Time: 6 minutes

When it comes to the art of digital marketing, we often work clients who haven’t heard of the terms we use and don’t necessarily know how to leverage each step of the customer experience to drive sales.

We have created this article not only to explain why every step of your “funnel” needs to pack a content punch, but what it all means – and why it’s enormously valuable for you to understand as a business owner.

You hear a lot about content creation, particularly in this visually focused age where innovative graphics are the norm, however content isn’t just for marketing and sales. It’s also about building relationships and trust with your customers, establishing yourself as an expert in your field, as well as encouraging engagement and growing brand advocates.

Why a Content Strategy is a Secret Business Weapon

To kick things off, we’d like to introduce the concept of a content strategy. It sounds pretty serious, but doesn’t have to be mind-blowingly complicated, and you can start with a short-term calendar of content and build on it as you go – or dive right in with a strategy that covers the next 12 months!

Strategising is the key to all great marketing.

Think about:

  • What do you want customers to think of when they think of you?
  • What values does your brand stand for?
  • Who is your key customer, and what sort of content resonates with them?
  • Where do they look for information? What mediums will help you meet your customer on his or her own terms?

In essence, a content strategy means that you have worked out your key business priorities, and put energy into fleshing out those objectives to identify how you’re going to go about content creation that will help you reach your audience, step-by-step. But, circling back, you can’t create a content strategy until you have established your funnel!

The word “sales funnel” always sound a little cold. Still, the reality is that every brand, every business, every company that engages in any sales and marketing does have a funnel; even if they don’t realise it!

The funnel is the journey your customer goes through, from first hearing your name, to becoming a loyal follower.  This theoretical funnel is made up of specific steps that your customer will move through, but the key is to focus on each step individually and for the purpose of content creation, create content to nurture and move your customer on to the next step in the process.

How are Funnels Essential to Driving Business Growth?

As an example, we’re going to work through a sales funnel, to illustrate what that customer experience might look like.

  1. To start with, we’re not going to try and force a customer into buying a product (nor would that work!). Instead, we’re going to introduce ourselves, establish a presence, and get our name out there to build awareness.
  1. Next up, we want that customer to consider us as their next port of call when they need something. Alternatively, we tell them what problems we solve, and establish ourselves as the experts who can help.
  1. Yep, that’s right; all businesses are real people, with real personalities, and real thoughts. Engagement isn’t just telling people who you are, but listening to them! Ask your audience what they like, what they don’t, what they think, how they feel – get a  conversation started that values any contribution they would like to make.
  1. So, you’ve connected with a customer, and they’ve bought a product. Great news! The next step is just as important as everything that’s come before – retention. You don’t work this hard to sell one product, or one service, to one person. You want them to rely on you to deliver the good stuff and keep coming back for more.
  1. Once you’ve reached this stage, it’s essential to retain that customer and to connect with them at the right level to cement your relationship. This stage is about your customer becoming your advocate, and being happy to share their positive experiences with other potential new customers; who start right at the beginning of your funnel.

So, this is a very brief rundown of the critical steps in the funnel, and why you need to build up through the stages to secure sales.

Why Skipping Content Creation at any Funnel Stage is Disastrous

You probably see where we’re going here; EVERY step of the funnel is fundamental.

Content creation doesn’t solely mean videos, website content, newsletters, follow-ups, messages, social media images, blogs, emails, marketing ads. It is all of these things, working cohesively to engage with your ideal customer base, and showcase what you have to offer.

Once you have established your funnel, what you’re doing is breaking down the steps that every customer will take before they decide to spend their hard-earned cash with your business, and then afterwards too. Your content creation strategy should be built around your funnel, and the funnel provides you with a good framework from which to work and help you to make sure that you deliver valuable, interesting, engaging content at every touchpoint.

How to Create Great Content at Every Stage of Your Funnel

It’s easy to use phrases like ‘content strategy’ and ‘sales funnel’ – but for a lot of businesses, particularly SMEs who perhaps don’t have a marketing guru on their team, it’s not always quite so obvious or straightforward.

This information is to help you create a standout content strategy and guide you in your content creation, so let’s work through each step of the funnel, and think about what content we might create that would help us work towards those overarching objectives.

  1. The top of the funnel – ATTRACT – Build Awareness

Building awareness means you want to increase the visibility of your brand. This is not a step for pushing sales, but rather for introducing your business, sharing advice or solutions, and generating leads.

  1. Publish blogs to educate, guide and provide solutions to problems
  2. Share social media posts with tips or info
  3. Share ‘how to’ videos
  4. Share checklists
  5. Create downloadable guides with lead generation forms
  6. Share a signup for your newsletter with lead generation forms

Step Two – CONVERT

In this step you want your customer to consider using your brand. It establishes you as the business that can solve a problem (even if it’s a problem they didn’t realise existed!).

  1. Make good use of CTAs (Calls to Action) – make it easy for your customer to ask you a question, learn more, download a guide, and send you a message. One-click is ideal!
  2. Focus on your website, populating it with relevant, informative content.
  3. Think about SEO, and optimise every element of your digital presence to make it easier to find, and higher ranked
  4. Invite customers in the door to get to know you, with blog posts that explain what you can offer
  5. Keep creating engaging social media posts

Step Three – ENGAGE

Now we’re in the conversion stage of the funnel – you’ve worked consistently to reach this point, so let’s keep going!

Here we need to solidify everything your customer knows about you, and leave no doubt that you’re the business they need.

  1. Concentrate on your website UX (user experience) – how many buttons do they need to press to add something to their cart?
  2. How quickly can they find the information they need?
  3. Do you have a published FAQs page with all the critical answers about delivery lead times, packaging, payment terms and anything else relevant to your business?
  4. Do you make it easy for a customer to sign up, register, or buy? Use CTA buttons, instant links, and make sure the content and pop-ups at every stage of that process are perfectly aligned with the brand image you have created.
  5. Do you have a mobile optimised version of your website? Can customers buy something from you with one-click through social media?
  6. Can customers purchase directly through social media – are you set up for social commerce?

Step Four – SELL

Here we’re building on that established relationship and creating brand loyalty

  1. Make sure your customer is happy with their purchase. Send an email, pop them a message, or give them a call (depending on your business and what makes sense!).
  2. Request feedback or a review – everyone likes to be asked for an opinion!
  3. Use email marketing to stay in touch, and allow your customer to connect with you again.
  4. Keep on delivering useful content; think about blog posts, new product or service launches, sharing interesting social media content, and keeping that interest alive.
  5. Always pay attention to reviews and feedback you receive. Be honest, keep it public, and never be tempted to brush off a bad review because how you react will define whether you reach the next stage of the funnel.

Step Five – CONNECT – Customers That Advocate for You

Once you’ve turned a potential lead into a customer, you then want them to become an advocate, and cement their brand loyalty.

You want your customers to love what you do, and to be proud to buy from your business. Delighting customers is an excellent way to expand your reach and connect with more like-minded people.

  1. Think about customer loyalty; do you add value to their experience, by sharing content, links or opportunities that you think they’ll be interested in?
  2. Can you build a community that will make this customer feel that they’re a valued part of something?
  3. Use emails and social media to keep them informed, continue to engage, and perhaps create special offers or exclusive services that only your established loyal customers receive.
  4. Reward customers who share your products by using giveaways or competitions, ask them to share their experiences and be sure to give them something back in return.

What’s interesting is that, at every step of the funnel, the goal isn’t brand marketing. It isn’t pushing products, selling at knockdown prices, or piling a budget into digital ads (although all of these things have their place on the broader marketing framework!)  This is about content creation and engagement that sings for your brand, makes customers want to buy from you, and establishes your position in the market as a reliable, personable, expert brand.