Content marketing began in the late nineteenth century when John Deere began writing The Furrow magazine, which advertised its own products and provided advice and educational articles for farmers.
Now, in the age of the Internet, content marketing has exploded with the advent of blogs and social media platforms.
Content marketing is a valuable way to reach your target audience, as demonstrated by the popularity of the strategy:
- 70 percent of companies have a content marketing strategy
- 72 percent of marketers say that content marketing is a key to their success
- Content marketing is estimated to grow by $269.24 billion by 2024
When a retirement plan advisor provides useful content to consumers that explains how their products and services solve challenges, you can build relationships that gain clients.
Content marketing is more than adding articles to an online library. Instead, it should be part of a strategy of creating and distributing valuable content to your target audience.
Effective content marketing campaigns should:
- Educate consumers about your products and services
- Build relationships
- Show how your products and services solve problems
- Create a sense of community
Some of the most popular ways to disseminate this valuable content include:
Social media platforms: 3.8 billion people use social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and more. This provides financial institutions with a variety of ways to connect with their target audience.
Infographics: Infographics use images and graphics, often based on data, paired with short statements or statistics to help consumers understand a concept.
Blogs: Blogs provide educational content to consumers that relate to or explain your product offerings.
Podcasts: Over half the population over the age of 12 listens to podcasts. Providing a podcast improves brand awareness, promotes your products and services and builds consumer relationships.
Interactive content: The Marketing Rule of 7 says that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a purchase will take place. Interactive content helps prospects get there quicker, by actively engaging and interacting with your content. Examples of interactive content are educational courses, calculators, interactive graphics and games.
Providing valuable interactive content
Retirement plan advisors have the ability to be excellent content marketers because they can use content that is interactive, which encourages audience engagement.
By using financial wellness platforms, retirement plan advisors can provide value to their audience through the packaged educational content that includes interactive courses, tools, assessments and games.
Studies have shown that these financial wellness resources can also drive many positive behavior changes.
Some examples from the Enrich financial wellness platform include:
- Courses: “Buying a home and understanding mortgages,” “Creating a financial plan for your priorities and goals,” “Mastering credit and optimizing your score,” “Investing to build wealth” and more
- Tools: Student loan repayment tools, retirement analyzer, budgeting tools and more
- Assessments: Financial stress, personality assessments, home affordability calculators and more
Many financial wellness platforms are also personalized. This provides a more relevant user experience that leads to higher engagement. For instance, by creating an account on Enrich, users will go through our “Financial Wellness Checkup” assessment that measures financial stress and personalizes the platform for each user.
Actionable content and reporting
But just as importantly, these platforms provide the retirement plan advisor with key data points that reveal:
- Financial stress levels
- Total debt
- Student loan debt
- Financial goals
The wide range of topics covered allows advisors to insert relevant “calls to action”, driving users to key service pages depending on what courses and tools they are engaging with. Knowing each user’s activity also allows advisors to connect with each person on a much higher level.
Using financial wellness programs
A financial wellness program that is “holistic” can achieve many objectives for advisors and financial institutions seeking to grow their business. It provides a wealth of valuable, interactive, and actionable content that benefits retirement plan advisors by attracting new clients and increasing engagement with current clients. It’s a win-win.
About the author
Kris Alban is executive vice president of iGrad, a San Diego-based financial technology company that provides artificial intelligence-powered financial wellness solutions to employers, financial institutions, colleges and universities. Its Enrich Financial Wellness platform is used by more than 20,000 employers and more than 300 financial institutions.
Kris Alban is Executive Vice President of Enrich Financial Wellness.
