Create personalized content that answers the problems of your audience
Emerging FinTechs have been a driving force for human-focused financial content. This will likely spread throughout the industry in 2020.
Lisa Murton Beets, Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI’s) Research Director, predicted to The Financial Brand that “connecting” would be a key theme in the future - using empathy to better relate to your target audience as individuals. “Marketers are trending toward more awareness of the importance of the audience as human beings,” she explained.
The CEO of Marketing Insider Group, Michael Brenner, echoed this: “Empathy is the counterintuitive secret to success in content marketing.” He argued that marketers need to shift from talking about how great their organization is, and move towards caring about people’s problems. He proved his point by revealing that the consulting firm, Capgemini, saw a $24 million increase in sales after they adopted a customer-first content marketing strategy.
The UK's favorite challenger bank has already begun focusing on empathy.
If you look at the kind of content they've published on their blog, you'll see a lot of this. Their blog attempts to answer the day-to-day financial concerns of real people, putting emotion front and center.
While they still highlight Monzo's features in their content marketing, they do so in a way that contextualizes their services as something that can help your problems.
Moving towards very human-focused content has been incredibly successful for several finance companies recently. However, across the industry, only 25% of financial marketers think their use of content marketing is effective.
This suggests that there is a disconnect between what content marketers are creating and what their target audience wants. This is something we should seek to align in 2020.
There is no better way to create content your audience wants to see than by monitoring their reactions to what you're creating. If there are particular topics that get lots of long read times, make more of that. If there are topics that get ignored, try tweaking it or drop it altogether. You only have limited time and resources and your analytics should be telling you how to invest them.
With the boom in FinTechs in the last few years, there are more banks than ever for people to choose from, from both a consumer and business perspective. If you have a unique position in the market, you should focus on that in 2020. For example, Ellevest, an investment company specifically targetting women, has its own magazine which explores the financial issues unique to women, such as living longer but being paid less than men.
Generation Z now makes up about a third of the world's population and will be flooding the credit market in 2020. They are a generation particularly fond of doing research before choosing a bank so content marketing is an essential channel to target them. A TransUnion report found that their preferences include strong mobile experiences, fast credit approval decisions, and strong fraud prevention. The report states, "if lenders don’t adapt to Gen Z’s preferences, they risk missing significant opportunities to grow their revenue and customer base.”
