GRABBING
ATTENTION
xperienced financial marketers are strategic geniuses. Approaches to advertising strategy, corporate identity, public affairs, public relations, direct mail, market research, and even guerrilla marketing are now well established.
However, the past five years has seen an explosion in content marketing, with financial institutions spending big, building in-house teams, and using external agencies to develop a content strategy that aligns with both operational and sales objectives.
2022 research by the CMO Council and KPMG explains why this may be. The report states that 68% of business- to-business buyers “prefer to seek out information online before talking to a salesperson” with 62% able to “finalise selection criteria, or a vendor list, solely on digital content.”
The ability to produce great content and build an audience, organically, has now become a fundamental support pillar for corporate sales teams.
It is, therefore, important that financial marketers understand how to build a content strategy that is strategically aligned with the company’s mission and its other marketing initiatives.
Most marketers will have produced content before. Blogs, whitepapers, video clips, podcasts and newsletters have become core assets in the content mix. It is less likely, though, that these assets will have been scheduled, structured, deployed and measured within the same parameters as traditional marketing programmes. For many people, content is simply a string of blogs that grab at product themes.
For a content strategy to have real impact, it is important to take more time on the “strategy” part. Far more so than the writing (or production) of the content itself. That’s not to say there is not a place for tactical, last minute, content, but strategic content is something which takes careful thought and planning.
Identifying objectives
To get the best value from an investment in a content strategy, it is imperative that the programme has structure. And, before you even begin planning, you need to think about what you want your content campaign to achieve. Consider whether the programme is a standalone initiative, or whether it is to complement and run alongside, other marketing activities.
You should consider the timeline for the campaign and whether corporate events or activities may distort, elevate, or interrupt your campaign at any point. Once you have nailed down the objective(s) for the campaign, it’s time for some in-depth thinking about your readership.
Audience considerations
Most marketers will be familiar with identifying and segmenting an audience for traditional campaigns. With content, this is even more important.
Written or broadcast content should ‘speak’ to every individual in your audience group – which means being more granular in your analysis.
Traditional segmentation techniques are a good way to start, considering your target readers’ geographical locations, demographics, attitudes, and lifestyle characteristics.
PLANNING CHECKLIST
➥ Set campaign objectives
➥ Identify target audience
➥ Understand deployment timeline
➥ Consider internal & external events
➥ Weigh-up asset suitability
➥ Assign distribution
➥ Draw up the briefing documents
➥ Start writing / production
It is also important to assess the seniority of your target audience, alongside their level of familiarity with the concepts you are discussing. Consider the level of influence they have with their peer group, colleagues, and other industry stakeholders.
Be careful – seniority and influence are not the same thing. It is very possible for a leader of a business or division to be among the most senior and yet unable to influence others in the peer group. Similarly, more junior members of the organisation might be incredibly well thought of, and incredibly well-connected.
Your content team will benefit from having a specific person in mind when producing your content assets. This means going deeper than segmenting audience groups and thinking about individuals within those groups.
The development of specific audience personas allows you to anticipate any objections to ideas raised in your content, and it encourages the writer/ producer to think about the issues that may trigger your audience into taking action. You need to be clear about what you want your audience to think, feel, or do, after consuming your content.
To create a reader persona, begin with the work you have done on segmentation and drill down further. Think about the lifestyle habits, age, marital status and educational level of the individual you want to reach. Try to picture them in your mind. It might be helpful to capture a photo which you think matches the profile of that person.
For your content to truly resonate, you need to understand what matters to that individual. Try and map a mini biography of your target reader. This means considering the motivations of your target individual, both in and outside of work. For example, are they motivated by their work performance, their family, or their desire to become more focussed?
Beyond their day-to-day motivations, you also have to chart what their aspirations are. Consider why they might be sympathetic to your message. Are they looking for career progression? Do they want solutions that make their day job easier?
The more you can anticipate the drivers for why a reader will take action, the more successful you are likely to be in crafting the message.
Deployment timing
Having whittled down your objective for the campaign and clearly identified your audience, your attention should now turn to when your content will be distributed. Your audience research will help here.
Once you have agreed the timeline for your campaign with internal stakeholders, you can start identifying key dates where potential readers will be more pre-disposed to consuming your content. Begin by looking at internal materials that you already have. Are there any activities planned in other areas of marketing during this period which will support your content programme’s aims? For example, are there press releases going out during the campaign window?
Are your colleagues speaking at industry events? Is there any market research being conducted?
The more difficult, but valuable, research piece is considering the events that are happening outside of the business during your campaign.
Are there any major regulatory announcements or consultations? Are there any industry events? Are any related themes scheduled to be discussed in UK or European Parliament? Are your competitors planning any launches in the same area? Are trade bodies planning any collaborative roundtables or panel debates?
These ideas are not an exhaustive list, but your subject matter experts should be able to share some pointers if you are struggling to build the list out.
Finally, if the list you have put together still doesn’t afford sufficient opportunities to integrate your campaign messages into a calendar of events for your target market, think about whether some of the assets you are creating could be deployed as hero assets. Hero assets are major pieces of content, from which other pieces of content can be deployed.
For example, you may have produced a 5,000 word survey which has multiple findings, conclusions, and trends. Rather than just dumping this on a website on the day of publication, consider a trail of “breadcrumb content” which will lead your audience to the hero asset in the weeks before, or other more digestible assets which can be deployed after the hero asset. This can also work well with panel debates, webinars, podcasts, and roundtable- based assets.
Asset identification
With your list of events nailed, you can start to think about the assets you want to create as part of your campaign. Begin by looking for any major events (i.e. The Budget, a General Election, a regulatory deadline, etc.) which would be an obvious magnet for your content.
Whether you are attracting readers to your content through a push function, such as an emailed newsletter or magazine, or you’re hoping to organically attract them through social media or unpaid search, it is important to deploy on dates when your audience will already be looking at that area/product/idea/service.
Attracting readers this way ensures the content feels less “salesy” and becomes more of a problem-solving interaction. When this works best, the reader feels they have stumbled on information they were already looking for.
Use the profiling work you have done on your audience, together with your content calendar, to plan the type of content that should be distributed at each day during the campaign.
For example, if most of your audience are likely to be at an industry conference three days after your campaign launch, you might want to think about some digital content in the lead up to the conference, some print materials for distribution at the conference, and some webinars, vox pops or podcasts after the conference to discuss key themes and relate it back to your campaign objectives.
Similarly, if you are planning a major product launch on a day when some disruption is expected (i.e. a major public transport strike), you should consider how home working practices will affect how your audience interacts with your content. Are they more likely to embrace short-form or audio?
Different content types have strengths and weaknesses, so pause before deciding the best format to convey a message.
Blogs are short, punchy and digital friendly, but they are not great for deeply technical issues. News stories, meanwhile, are great for grabbing attention if the information is genuinely new, but they are time limited and go stale quickly.
In longer-form content, surveys are great for generating new ideas and for breeding other smaller pieces of content, but they are expensive, time consuming and can be lost, if not promoted in the right way. Similarly, whitepapers are super for tackling big themes and they perform well on LinkedIn. However, any call to action (CTA) can be easily buried, so conclusions might be better captured in other, smaller assets.
When choosing your content formats of choice, remember to consider the volume of information being conveyed, the complexity of the message, the sophistication of the audience, the timing of distribution and whether there is a need for data to be illustrated alongside the main narrative.
Distribution
A final, but critical, consideration for your content strategy is how your newly crafted assets will be distributed. So many blogs and whitepapers are thrown on websites, never to be read again.
Considering the distribution approach allows you to think about the channel of distribution and how content can be repackaged to reach audience members who may have missed the content in the first round of deployment.
Whether distribution is digital, print, broadcast, or event-driven, marketers should weigh up the pros and cons of each method before deploying assets.
Digital newsletters, for example, are great for building an organic audience, but if the content isn’t of high quality and curated keenly, it can easily alienate your audience and result in your organisation’s domain being blocked from email inboxes, causing a headache for your sales team, and extinguishing your marketing efforts.
Partnering with a media owner may allow you to tap into their distribution list, but consider using your own content agency or staff member to write the piece. This ensures that any technical information is recorded exactly as you would like, and that nothing is lost through the involvement of any third party intermediary.
Briefing
Now that your strategy is planned, your audience identified, your deployment timeline agreed and your distribution methods chosen, you can begin writing up the briefing document for your writers/producers.
Your briefing document should be comprehensive, so your writers are able to deliver what you need, as quickly as possible. The more scope for ambiguity at this stage, the higher chance these pieces will need significant edits/ rewrites at a later stage.
To avoid this, you should prepare a briefing document for each piece of content. This may seem like overkill, but there are likely to be subtle differences in each element of the campaign and the writer/producer needs to know about these.
The briefing document should include the project lead and their content details, the deadline(s) for the piece, specifics on the audience and the objective of the asset itself. If it is a written piece, there should be a word count and if broadcast, a post-production time length.
The brief should name the asset and this should relate back to the name on the content strategy project plan. The specification, meanwhile, should include guidance on tone of voice, style of writing, format type and an indication on whether any interviews are required with third parties or stakeholders within the business.
A supporting information section on the briefing document should offer the opportunity to highlight any other materials which could inform the writer/ producer, such as previously published brochures, whitepapers, marketing, news stories, articles, etc. This section is also the place to put any other thoughts on direction or approach.
If you’ve gone through all of the above stages, your assets should start to come through in line with expectations, with only modest requirements for edits and adjustments.
Finally, most organisations have a structured approach to editing, proofing, sign-off and approval. This will be covered in the next piece in this series, in issue two of Financial Promoter.
ENHANCE YOUR KNOWLEDGE FOR FREE!
Every two months, Rhotic Media hosts free taster sessions of our content training programmes. Hosted in the City of London, these workshops are designed to highlight the role that content can play in the modern day mix of corporate communications.
Themes covered include:
➥ Content marketing basics
➥ An introduction to content strategy
➥ Using newsroom techniques for corporate objectives
➥ Audience segmentation for beginners
➥ Briefing and editing fundamentals