Content Marketing is a phrase heard frequently nowadays among financial services companies, and Forex brokers in particular. (This very article is an example of it!).
Does your company have a Content Marketing strategy in place? What should one look like? Bart Burggraaf, Managing Partner at MediaGroup Worldwide, takes a look.
Financial services companies tend to produce a lot of content.
Bart Burggraaf, MediaGroup
Whether they send it to clients, use it for PR or post it on their website to gain SEO traffic, it’s an important part of any modern financial companies’ toolkit.
Content in this industry typically tends to be discussing markets and trade opportunities, but we have seen everything from the inside story to client journals being used as an angle. In fact, it is safe to say content marketing has exploded as a tactic, and there is now far more content then there is attention from the target audience.
So the question becomes; how do we distinguish ourselves from all the other content out there, and gain attention from users?
The first part of the answer has to do with the quality and uniqueness of the content itself. It’s important companies have a brand of content. Like any brand, it needs to be chiefly known for one thing it is good at. To get there, companies need to think about the type of stories that will work with their brand and still be unique compared to all the other content out there.
Content Marketing interest over time (Source: Google 2016)
For instance, there are now so many contrarians, that it’s almost a distinguishing feature not to be a contrarian. Or what if your company doesn’t write about the markets as much as what goes on inside the company? What if content was not one monotone company voice but the voice of all the employees?  There are many possible ways to be unique but only one way to do boring market analysis. Trust me, there are many companies not getting attention from the audience, with far greater market analysis resources then your company would be able to muster.
Speaking to the quality aspect, local content for countries such as Germany or China shouldn’t be just articles rehashed and translated from English. These large markets deserve and require unique content of their own. And rather than focus on pushing out tens of stories every day, post one really good one. Quality over quantity. Hire a great trader rather than a copywriter if you are going to do market analysis. Get a fiction writer if you are going to do process stories. Use someone with cinematic experience if you are going to make videos.  You get the point, standing out in content marketing requires thought and investment.
So let’s say you have both high quality and unique content to share with the world. You post it on your company blog or on social media. Now what? While the sound of crickets might be therapeutic, from a business perspective it makes sense to promote this content to the right audience. So yes, ironically, advertising should be an integral part of content marketing and significant budget should be set aside for this aspect.
Some of the tactics to employ include SEO optimization and link building, native advertising with companies such as Outbrain, Taboola or Yahoo Gemini, social media advertising and email marketing. The thing they have in common is that they give you an edge in a very crowded marketplace of attention and allow you to constantly test and optimize for the best performing (= generating attention among the right audience) content.