The Big 5: Content Topics Your Prospects Actually Want to Read

“What should we write about that people will actually read?”

If you work in marketing and content is part of your marketing mix, it’s probably a question you and your team have asked yourself at one point. 

When you first started investing in content you probably had a long list of good ideas. But after 6 months, or even a year, you started running out of content ideas. You don’t want to start guessing content topics and you don’t want to start creating content just for the sake of it (that you know few people will read). You want more content ideas that will resonate with your reader.

This is where “The Big 5” come in handy. The Big 5 are the top five topics that buyers, whether consumers or businesses, are always wanting to learn more about. Regardless of what you sell and how you sell, they get to the heart of what a customer needs to know when making a purchase. The Big 5 framework was conceived by Marcus Sheridan, author of “They Ask You Answer” (what we consider the best book in content marketing).

Interestingly, these five topics are often the topics that businesses are least comfortable writing about. But that’s precisely why you, as the marketer of a business, need to write about them. Your customers are asking these questions whether you like it or not – so why not give them answers? 

Inspired by Sheridan’s book and with our own adjustments, in this article we’ll cover the five key topics (and a bonus!) we believe every financial services company should write about:

  1. Pricing, costs and money

  2. Problems and pain points

  3. Comparisons

  4. “Best in X” lists

  5. Founding stories

  6. Bonus: Very high intent topics (Low volume, high ROI keywords)

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Topic 1: Pricing, costs and money

When you go to a website to buy anything – a bicycle, a holiday package, a consultation with a lawyer – and can’t find the price anywhere, how do you feel? Probably frustrated. 

Not because you can’t find the price on the website (although that is part of it), but because you know the business knows the answer to the question and is choosing to not tell you. In other words, you know they are hiding something from you. Not a great way to start a business relationship, right?

Before, you might have spent some time digging through their website, maybe even calling them. But nowadays, it’s more likely you’ll click away and just keep going through different websites and options. In fact, you’ll probably keep searching until someone answers your question. And the person that eventually does, very likely will get your business. 

The point is: your prospects are looking for pricing information. Hiding it from them is not a good way to build trust.

In our experience, companies that aren’t comfortable sharing pricing usually do it for a couple of reasons:

  1. There’s a lot of variation in the price and therefore it’s hard to give an exact number

  2. They don’t want their competitors to find out about their pricing

But the thing is, you don’t necessarily have to publish a page with your pricing on it. You can simply talk about the variables you take into account when deciding on the pricing. See how MangoPay breaks down the fees without including all of their pricing. Instead they only mention where pricing starts from.

Or look at Synctera, that includes no numbers at all and just talks about the various fees that are factored into the end price.

In terms of competition, it’s very likely that your competitors already know your pricing since they are always doing research. Also, are you sure you want your competitors dictate your ability to build trust with your customers?

Aside from creating a pricing page on your website, how does “pricing” translate into new content ideas? Here are some examples: 

Content about how much your competitors’ products cost

Creating content on general costs of competitor products is a great way to help your prospects looking for this type of information. For example, Wise does this a lot by creating content that targets keywords like “Westpac pricing” and “RBS fees”.

It’s a very clever approach because:

  • Costs and pricing are key topics that buyers want more information on

  • Banks and these providers are probably not sharing the information in easy to read way

Although it may be tricky to get leadership approval on these, if you can, these types of content will definitely get read by your target market, probably rank well on Google and will most definitely bring in new customers. 

Guides on general costs in the industry

If you don’t want to write about specific competitors or providers, you can also create a general guide on costs of products in the industry. For example:

  • How much does it typically cost to work with an expense provider?

  • What are the ranges of costs when partnering with a payment provider?

  • What do fees typically include in this industry? And what do they depend on?

Here’s an example of a BaaS provider talking about general costs in the BaaS space: Evaluating BaaS Platforms vs Payments Platforms: Cost and Time

Or a corporate expense provider writing a guide on how to pick the right business credit card: A Guide to Choosing the Right Business Credit Card

We’ve seen this type of content do very well as it gives the buyer guidance on how to buyg in the industry and positions you as the expert and trusted advisor on how the industry works. You can even write buying guides about industries that are adjacent to yours (make sure to interview someone who knows a lot about that) as your target market will be interested in those guides as well.

Topic 2: Problems and pain points

This is our favourite content topic because realistically you’ll never run out of ideas: there are endless problems and pain points that your prospects and buyers will want more information on. 

Start by sitting down with a salesperson on your team and asking them: what are the biggest pain points of our best customers? That list of answers is full of content ideas right there. 

Some of our favourite types of pain point topics include:

  • “How to” posts, for example, “how to pay employees overseas”

  • Competitors problems, for example, “Amex business card no fees”

  • Upcoming regulation or law, that people clearly don’t understand, for example, “Operational Resilience” or “Consumer Duty”

  • Specific use cases, such as “spend management for international businesses”

  • Jargon specific pain points that are so specific, you know they would be a good fit, e.g. “FCA safeguarding audit”

When we first start working with a client, the first few topics are often the most pressing questions and problems the target audience faces. The more pressing the problem, the better, since they are likely more eager to get answers to their questions and are looking to buy. 

However, what’s important here is not to create content targeting specific pain points that is very surface level and doesn’t get into the specifics. You’ll have done the hard work of capturing the reader’s attention, but with surface-level content you won’t give them the answers they’re looking for and risk losing their trust. Examples of content we’ve created targeting pain points are:

You can find a list of questions to ask your salespeople to uncover pain points in this article: How to Do Research for Bottom of the Funnel Content Marketing

And we go into more detail about how to create content that resonates with pain points here: How to Create Content that Speaks to Your Customers' Pain Points

Topic 3: Comparisons

The last time you bought something high value, such as a holiday package, a car or a desk chair, you probably spent a decent amount of time comparing different products and companies. 

That’s because to you it’s important to compare the price, various features and the pros and cons of each option before making a decision. And you probably spent a decent chunk of time going through review sites like Reddit or Booking.com’s reviews sections.

Your prospects are doing the same when they consider buying your product. They are comparing you to your competitors. 

Based on our own analysis, comparison posts are in fact the highest converting types of content, bar no other. In fact, we noticed that with one of our clients, the conversion rate of comparison posts was twice as high as non-comparison post content and that the size of deals brought in by comparison posts was twice as big.

This happens for two reasons:

  1. People who are comparing different options are much closer to buying than those who aren’t, so it’s natural that conversion rates are higher.

  2. Few companies write good comparison posts, so there’s a higher chance that yours is standing out and more people will read yours.

However, the biggest challenge here is often getting leadership buy-in to write this type of content. This is usually because leaders are worried prospects will discover new competitors and work with them instead. They may respond along the lines of “If we don’t mention our competitors, they won’t know they exist”. But in today’s world, customers and prospects can research and find your competitors in seconds.

In fact, Patrick Campbell, founder of ProfitWell, did some interesting research that showed people do research online 7x more than before. So your prospects either already know your competitors exist, or they will find out in under 5 seconds.

Another objection you may hear is: but how will anyone read this and take our comparison post seriously? Isn’t it clear that we’re biased? 

The good news is that there are ways to write a comparison article in a way that builds trust. The best way to do this is to disarm the reader by acknowledging the elephant in the room: by admitting that yes, you are the one writing the article, admitting that your product may not be the best fit for everyone, and that you will try to take an honest look in this article.

We go into more detail about how you can write this kind of article in a way that builds trust and has high conversion rates here: Why You Should Write About Your Competitors as a Fintech Company

Still, few companies write and publish comparison posts, for the same reason they may not write about the above topics: it’s uncomfortable. But consumer ignorance is not a viable sales and marketing strategy, and like the other “Big 5”, this will be one of the key questions your prospects have. 

At Mint Studios, we believe comparison posts are a fantastic type of content because the conversions are always higher, and because it’s an article that finally answers the reader’s question. It also allows you to make a strong case for your product in a way that G2 or Capterra would never let you do. Here are some comparison articles that we’ve produced that have done very well:

Topic 4: “Best in X” lists

As consumers, we love reading lists of top brands in a specific category. We’ll research online “top shoes for running” or “best spend management tools for finance”. Again, this is why community sites like Reddit do so well – we can easily compare brands for a specific use case. 

This type of content is like a comparison post, but is actually more like a list of the best providers in the industry. Like comparison posts, leaders are often uncomfortable about writing about these topics since they require listing competitors. However, there are ways to write these articles in a way that brings in conversions and builds trust.

  1. Talk about your product first: this is your opportunity to make an in-depth case for your product’s features and benefits. Go into detail, add screenshots, diagrams and examples. 

  2. Don’t criticize competitors: it comes across as unprofessional and removes the trust that you’ve been building.

  3. Add educational sections: add sections like “what to consider”, a comparison table or a list of pros and cons. These help the reader navigate the list and make an educated buying decision.

If you’re ever uncomfortable about writing a “best of” article, remember the position the buyer is in. It’s hard to make a decision when you have so many options in front of you. 

You may be an expert on your industry, but it’s likely your reader or prospect isn’t. They see a lot of different options and aren’t sure how to move forward. This is where your article can help direct them and understand better what their options are.

Since “Best of” lists are a type of comparison post, they are also some of our highest performing articles. Here are examples of those:

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Topic 5: Founding stories

A founding story is an article that explains the “why” behind your company.

It goes through the various gaps in the industry, and your company’s key value propositions that help fill that gap. 

We love creating these types of articles because they do a great job of explaining how your company or product is different, and why it’s disrupting the market. The main benefits of creating this type of content is:

  • You can link to your founding story in any article so the reader gets a good understanding of your product and what differentiates you.

  • It’s a great way to unit your internal team on what gaps in the market you’re solving for and your key value propositions.

  • It’s a great way for new hires, investors and journalists to get a quick understanding of what it is you do and how you’re different. 

The structure we typically like to follow is:

  1. Gap in the market #1

  2. Gap in the market #2

  3. Gap in the market #3

  4. Feature / benefit that solves the gap #1

  5. Feature / benefit that solves the gap #2

  6. Feature / benefit that solves the gap #3

It’s a great piece of content that tells the story of your company, and it’s also worth doing this if you haven’t already. Here are examples of founding stories we’ve created that have done well:

Bonus topic: Very high intent topics (Low volume, high ROI keywords)

Articles that cover very high intent topics but are low volume are targeting are a small pool of people who are urgently looking for a solution like yours. 

What differentiates this type of content is that it is “low volume”, meaning SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs report that few people are searching this keyword every month. Typically we’d say any searches between 0 and 50 searches per month are low volume. You could argue that most of the “Big 5” above are very high intent topics, which is why we’ve put this one as a bonus. 

Instead of targeting high intent keywords like “spend management tool” or “payment processor” that everyone else targets, why not target the ones that are searched by fewer people but are still very high intent?

This is what we call low volume, high ROI: these are keywords that indicate high intent to buy, but have very low monthly search volume. That way you get high conversions, and because they aren’t competitive (and often ignored), it’s a lot easier to rank and get results. This type of keyword can bring huge ROI if a customer is high value (e.g. over $10k per year), because even just getting one customer from that article makes it worth it.

Across our clients, we’ve seen that articles targeting low volume, high ROI keywords often bring in the best results. As you can see in the screenshot below, many articles had very low traffic overall per year because they had very low search volume. 

But you can also see that they had very high conversion rates, and even a high absolute number of conversions:

Here are some example of low volume, high ROI keywords that have brought in great results:

And here’s our guide to finding those keywords and creating the right content to target them: Low Volume, High ROI Keywords: Why You Should Include Them in Your Content Strategy

Focus on these topics: pricing, pain points, comparisons, best of and founding stories 

When you feel that you’re running out of content ideas, don’t fall into the trap of creating content “just for the sake of it” and that you know no one will read. Even though there is more content out there than ever before, your prospects are still starved of answers to the real questions they actually have. The questions that no one seems to want to answer: about pricing, problems, comparisons, best of lists and the “why” behind your company.

Feel free to bookmark this page if you ever feel you’re running out of ideas. Or set up a call with your salesperson or customer success to find any other pain points and problems your prospects may be facing.

Financial Services Content StrategyAraminta Robertson