6 Mistakes Financial Marketers Make with Content Marketing (And How We Solve For Them)
Financial services isn’t the easiest industry to write for.
In B2B financial services, you’re creating content that has to be read and understood by both technical and commercial audiences. In B2C, you’re often writing about crucial and yet highly personal topics that aren’t taught in schools, like taxes, mortgages and pensions.
The financial services industry is also one of the oldest in the world, which means it’s still undergoing its digital transformation and adapting to a tech-first consumer. Marketing (and especially digital marketing) is still new to financial services, which is why financial marketers might have to spend more time educating the internal team on the role of marketing – while still having to prove business results.
We’ve spent the past few years helping financial services companies grow with content marketing, ranging from helping fintech company Zai acquire $500k+ of deals with blog content alone, to helping financial corporates like Confused.com turn their internal product knowledge into expert B2B content. We’ve also worked with other financial services and insurance companies like Jeeves, Modulr, Persona and William Russell to help them get business results from their website content marketing efforts.
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of people who work in financial services misunderstand what content marketing is about and how to get the best results from the content they create. When it comes to content, we’ve seen financial marketers struggle with:
Not finding writers who can write about technical, financial topics
Not being able to track and prove the results of their content (even though they know it’s delivering)
Having to become an expert on technical topics in months rather than years
Constantly managing expectations with leaders and compliance teams
And many more!
Financial content marketers face challenges that other marketers in other industries may not, such as having to manage compliance, having to acquire and train others on highly specialised knowledge and constantly having to educate internal stakeholders on the role of marketing in the organisation.
In this article, we’ll be going through the most common mistakes we see financial services companies make with content marketing – and how we’ve built Mint Studios to solve for those.
Although we are aware that content includes video and audio as well, in this article we’re going to focus specifically on long form written content as this is still the predominant form of communication in financial services.
Note: get notified every time we publish a new article by joining our newsletter!
6 most common mistakes financial marketers make when creating financial services content
Expecting to acquire customers with content that focuses on brand awareness
One of the first questions we ask financial marketers who are looking to invest in content is: what’s the main objective of your content marketing? Is it to:
Generate leads?
Educate and build trust?
Position the company as a thought leader?
Help the sales team?
Most people will respond with: all the above.
The issue is that one piece of content that is designed to generate leads can be very different from a piece of content that is focused on educating and building trust. An article on “Why real-time payments are vital for the travel industry” that will be promoted on LinkedIn is very different from an article that’s designed to acquire customers by ranking for “top payment orchestration platforms”.
The “Why real-time payments are vital for the travel industry” article is unlikely to bring in leads and it won’t ever rank on Google. The “top payment orchestration platforms” article will bring in leads, but might not help build trust when promoted via LinkedIn ads.
The main mistake we see is that financial services marketers create thought leadership content like the example above and expect it to generate new, qualified contacts. Creating thought leadership content that’s targeting people who are at the very early stages of their buying journey (or may not ever buy), won’t generate business. And yet, most financial content programs are solely made up of thought leadership content with the hopes that “someday” it’ll generate customers.
Now, in 2024, fintech and financial services companies are more focused on revenue and profitability and asking marketers to be accountable for revenue – and yet content programs still focus primarily on thought leadership content.
If your focus is revenue and customer acquisition, make sure the content you create can support that. If your objective is customer acquisition, we advocate for starting with Bottom of the Funnel content: start by creating content that targets people who are actively looking for a solution to their content. We go into more detail about how we do this at Mint Studios down below.
2. Creating beginner-type content for advanced readers
A lot of financial services content is written for a beginner audience. This may work in B2C, but with B2B, general and beginner topics risk alienating your target audience. Here’s an example of the content a large, well known financial services company that targets CFOs publishes on their blog:
Would a CFO or financial analyst really be impressed with content that covers these topics?
Too many financial marketers believe that financial services content has to be covering basic and general topics. But the risk with creating content like that is:
You end up alienating your target audience and targeting the wrong people
You come across as unprofessional
You’re not taken seriously
If you’re hoping to acquire customers with content, writing advanced content is even more important. Someone who’s at the bottom of the marketing funnel and ready to buy likely already has done some research, is familiar with the terms and doesn’t need a Finance 101 lesson. Creating beginner-level content for an advanced audience will neither help you with educating and building trust for your target audience.
As we’ll see in the next section, one of the main reasons we believe financial services companies create so much beginner content is that writers doing the writing are beginners themselves, and are learning about financial services on the go. We also believe that the traditional method of working with writers which involves a brief with a couple of sentences is outdated and no longer works to create customer-focused content. To write for your audience well, you need to understand them inside out. And yet marketers and writers don’t spend enough time understanding who they’re writing for.
Content is too often seen as a brand building exercise that involves creating general content targeting the general population, rather than an activity that can actively help grow the company (and is proven!).
When developing your content strategy and content, make sure you’re writing for the level of knowledge of your reader.
3. Hiring writers who aren’t familiar with financial services and aren’t involved in strategy
This situation may be familiar to you: you’ve found a great writer who you’re excited to start working with. You send through the brief with a few bullets on what you’d like covered and some additional resources, and avidly wait for the first draft. When you get it, you’re shocked.
What’s happened? Although the article covers the points you added, the writing itself seems to be written for someone who’s completely new to the topic and just learning about financial services. You give the writer a lot of feedback, send them a few resources and ask them to try again. They do, but it’s still not what you were hoping for. You end up writing the piece yourself. This happens for the next 5 articles until you give up and decide to put pause on content (or do it yourself).
This happens so often, and yet it’s not the writer nor your fault. It happens due to two key reasons:
The writer isn’t familiar with financial services.
The writing process leads to a situation where the writer is too detached from the business, and therefore doesn’t understand the customer pain points, product features and wider industry topics.
You can choose to hire a writer who doesn’t have a background in financial services, but then you must expect to invest in educating and training them. Or you can choose to work with writers who are familiar and have experience with financial services. The second option is usually easier, especially if you’re working with freelancers or agencies.
The second issue, however, is more complex to solve as it’s the process itself that is the problem. Great content that educates, builds trust and acquires customers can only be done when the writer understands the customer pain points, how the product works and specific use cases. You can’t expect a freelance writer to go in-depth about your product in an article without them first understanding how your business, market and product work. In order to do this well, your writer needs to be more embedded in your business. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be in-house – but it does mean you need a better process so they understand better the strategic nature of your content.
To summarize: in order to avoid the situation of having to rewrite and continuously re-edit content, hire writers who have a background in financial services and make sure you have the right processes in place to understand your business, customer pain points and product.
4. Creating content based solely on desk research
Even when your writer does have a background in financial services, there is a separate challenge you’ll face: the content is too general and doesn’t stand out.
Writers are tasked with one thing: create great written content. But they usually aren’t experts in the specific topic of financial services you’ve asked them to write about. When tasked with writing a piece of thought leadership content, they then need to do online research, which usually involves Googling and reading eBooks and white papers. But this leads to a situation where although the writing may be good, the content itself is not unique. The content is essentially summarizing what everyone else has said on the topic.
Your readers don’t want to read the same things written in a different way: they want to read something new and useful.
Not only does regurgitated copycat content make your articles bland and not very compelling to read, but it doesn’t really help you with one key objective of content: to position yourself as an expert. It’s hard to position yourself as an expert if your content is just summaries of other people’s work.
And if you’re hoping to rank on search engines, Google sees financial services as a special category where authority is even more important – which means it’s even more important to be writing from a position of authority and trustworthiness.
This is why we advocate for creating content based on interviews with internal experts – which we’ll go on to explain in more detail down below.
5. Not having a clear distribution strategy: how are you going to get this in front of your target audience?
You could have the most beautiful and well written white paper ever, but if you don’t get it in front of the right people it won’t bring in the results you’re hoping for.
Many financial services companies will create content on their blog and hope people find it and read it. But that rarely happens.
If content is to play a large part of your marketing and acquisition strategy, then you need to have a distribution channel in mind for each piece of content you create.
For example, if Google or LinkedIn ads have done very well, then it’s highly likely that SEO – ranking on Google for specific terms – could work well for you as well.
But if you’ve never acquired a customer “cold” via ads or where there was no pre-existing relationship, then SEO might not be the right channel for you. In that case, your distribution channel may be your sales team and email list.
Whenever you create a piece of content, it’s important to be clear about how you’re getting it in front of the audience. If not, there is no guarantee they’ll read it and you are wasting money.
Some channels and ideas of distribution:
SEO: targeting people doing research on your topic on Google
Email: targeting people who might not be using your product, but have clearly demonstrated interested in reading your content
LinkedIn: targeting people who want to be influenced and learn about your topic
Sales team: targeting people who you have a relationship with and may become a customer
Knowing where your content will end up will influence your strategy and the topics you’ll cover. If you’re doing sales team content, for example, your sales team should be heavily involved in your content strategy and deciding on the topics, since they will be distributing it.
Make sure you know how your piece of content will reach your target audience before creating it.
6. Not tracking sales related metrics
There’s a continuous debate in the content marketing industry when it comes to revenue attribution.
On one side, marketers say that content shouldn’t be held accountable for revenue because the customer journey is too complex to track how content influences a purchase. On the other side, some marketers believe that revenue is the ultimate goal of all marketing efforts and therefore we should try as hard as we can to attribute revenue to content.
Both positions are right. But we don’t believe the debate is relevant because ultimately it comes down to your company, goals and the metrics your leadership team is tracking.
A company that has a large marketing function and is highly focused on growth is different from a company with one marketer that is tasked with bringing in revenue.
Based on our many years of experience, we’ve seen that financial services companies tend to prefer tracking sales and business metrics to measure content marketing success. As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, marketing is still relatively new to financial services which means marketers are usually under more pressure to deliver business results.
And yet, most content marketers are tracking and reporting on traffic, backlinks and impressions to measure the success of their content marketing. Although they are important metrics, these are not always correlated to business success (an increase in traffic doesn’t always equal an increase in sales). If you want a larger marketing budget and to prove the contribution of content to the business, then make sure you’re tracking sales-related metrics like:
First and last click customer conversions
Revenue
Influenced content
If you use Hubspot as your CRM, we recommend reading this article to set up the right reports to be able to attribute revenue and customers to your content: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 4 Hubspot Reports]
How we built Mint Studios to solve for these problems
We set up Mint Studios because we saw many of the mistakes and issues financial marketers faced first-hand and believed that there was a better way to do things. Araminta, our founder, worked in-house for a fintech company and then as a consultant for multiple companies, and saw them first hand. Here’s how we solve for each of these issues:
You’re working with an agency that has a background in financial services
At Mint Studios, we almost exclusively work with financial services, fintech and insurance companies. Having this specialization allows us to go a lot more in-depth with our content and create more advanced content. We’ve been able to create content on topics like:
Payment methods
Payment APIs
Identity fraud
Financial services licenses
Merchant payment services
Invoice financing
And a lot more!
Not only are we already familiar with a lot of the terminology, but we know how to write about technical topics. We know how important it is to be specific, to write in a casual but formal tone of voice, and when to highlight specific features. We also know how to write about a product, which requires its own skillset.
We can also more easily transfer knowledge from one client to another, which means when we start working with a client we can hit the ground running and not have to learn about a topic from scratch. We also stay on top of the news and updates so we can write about current financial services topics.
Here are some examples of advanced and technical pieces of content that we were able to create more easily thanks to our background:
You’re working with a team that understands your business inside out (and bases content on interviews with experts)
As mentioned earlier, one of the challenges facing financial services marketers is that content is too often outsourced to a generalist freelance writer who doesn’t have an understanding of the business.
As an agency, we overcome this by spending up to one month with a new client to understand the nuances of the business, target customer pain points and products. We talk to salespeople, customer success, growth and a lot more. This initial research phase allows us to get a good understanding of who your customers are and what their pain points are. It also means that the writers on our team can create content that goes in-depth about your product and can cover all the right angels. You can learn more about how we do this here: How to Do Research for Bottom of the Funnel Content Marketing
We also follow our own specific methodology to create content that resonates a lot more with the reader. Instead of giving the writer a brief and asking them to do research, we instead use “questionnaires”. It takes around 2 weeks to create a piece of content, and there is heavy collaboration between the writer and strategist. With these questionnaires, writers are asked questions like:
What are the customer’s pain points?
Which features and benefits should we focus on?
How do we make this better?
By encouraging the writer to think like a strategist and actively think about the customer they’re writing for, they’re able to create content that resonates with their pain points.
90% of our content is also based on an interview with an expert on your team. Most pieces of content are based on a 30 min - 1 hour interview, which allows us to extract unique insights which we can create the content with.
There are so many benefits to creating content based on interview with experts:
Your content will help position your company as an expert and authority on the topic since your content includes unique insights coming directly from your experts.
You can more easily add in details about your product, industry and customer pain points that only an internal expert would know about.
Your content is more likely to be rewarded by search engines like Google, which prioritises authority and expertise when it comes to topics like finance.
Here are examples of pieces of content we were only able to create because they were based on an in-depth interview:
You’ll get customers and revenue, not just blog posts
For our content strategy clients, we focus on creating content that generates new business – rather than just content itself.
Whereas a lot of content marketers start their content strategy by doing keyword research and doing content like “Top tips for XYZ”, we advocate doing customer research first by interviewing salespeople and identifying customer pain points. Based on that research, we then pick content topics that are “BOFU”, in other words, targeting people who are already looking for a solution to their problem. This allows us to create a content strategy that gets results sooner.
Our methodology is the following:
A content strategy based on customer research and focused on Bottom of the Funnel
Content for the level of your reader and focused on your product
Content based on interviews with experts
Content results that can be tracked
You can learn more here: Mint Studios Framework
In the world of financial services, leaders want to see business results from their marketing efforts. We help marketing managers, CMOs and marketing leaders implement a content program that allows them to prove their content efforts.
To learn more about how we do this in-depth, we recommend reading how we helped fintech company Zai acquire $500k+ worth of business with content marketing alone: Case Study: How We Helped Zai Gain Multiple SQLs Per Month with Content
Avoid these 6 mistakes: make sure your content marketing is aligned with your objectives
These are the most common mistakes we’ve seen financial services marketers make, and they are the ones that lead us to starting our agency. If we had to summarize them all into one, it would be this: don’t create content “because everyone else is doing it”. Do it because you have specific objectives and it’s a channel you want to invest in. Too many content marketing programs start and stop because there isn’t enough direction.
When content marketing is done well, we’ve seen it become the number one growth channel for financial services businesses. It could be for yours as well, as long as you avoid the mistakes mentioned above.
Interested in learning more about how we work? Learn more about what we do below!