Content Marketing

Content marketing as you might have guessed is a strategy focused around creation and distribution of content, it’s the cornerstone of effective inbound marketing. Creating a content marketing strategy begins with a whole lot of deliberate questions and research. Before any content is created it’s crucial to first identify goals and develop the personas you want to reach. With audiences properly defined and mapped to appropriate goals, content topics can then be identified and written to effectively guide your readers through various stages to the solutions you’re offering. Content marketing is most successful when carefully planned up front and accompanied by targeted promotion and detailed analytics.

Once content has been created, it can be put to work in a number of different ways. Content can be shared across social media channels to boost engagement and grow your bank’s following, printed and handed out by your loan officers or branch customer service representatives, used in targeted advertising campaigns to attract new visitors or bring previous visitors back to your website, included in email newsletters to engage customers, and promoted directly to other website owners to acquire links from their site to yours. The real value of any content created on your website is that you own it and the value from that content is invested into your own domain instead of another website or social network.

From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, all the value earned from the rented content will remain with your content landlord. As the content receives social media shares or links from outside websites, those signals could be benefiting your entire domain but will not do so when content is hosted elsewhere. While it may be possible to embed the third-party content directly into your own site, this is not likely to benefit your website’s SEO and can actually get you into trouble with Google. Hosting the same exact content on your site that’s found on someone else’s site is one of the biggest offenses your site can have with search engines. At worst you could get in trouble with Google, at best, that duplicate content on your site will not rank in Google. Having your own unique content provides your site the opportunity to show up in search results for new keyword phrases and earn new traffic.

From a user experience, visitors will have a clunky experience at best navigating back and forth between the third-party site and your bank website. Users will likely understand immediately that the information they are reading and watching is provided by an outside vendor which depreciates their interest. Collecting data analytics from a third-party site can also be a real challenge. Wouldn’t you like to know what information users are engaging with and utilize that data to direct future marketing efforts or remarketing ads to those visitors?

Creating your own unique content is not the easy way, but it’s the smart way. You’ll be building value directly into your website that you alone own and benefit from.

After defining the goals of your content marketing campaign we’ll work with you to create a content calendar. Content will be created for specific user personas and products with a focus on local relevance whenever possible. While the main part of your website may contain a lot of product-specific content and features, we can utilize a blog or resource center to publish lengthier articles (longform content) that rank well in search engines and engage readers with useful content. We encourage financial institutions to test a variety of content, not just financial topics and promotional pieces. In fact, we often find great success with creating local guides and resources designed to build trust and establish your bank as an integral part of the local community.

More is not always better, especially when it comes to content. Quality is crucial, since users and search engines are most interested in content that is well researched and written rather than the size of your website. We do suggest you ensure each page on your site has at least 500 words to ensure search engines can properly understand the relevance of each page. Most of your financial product and service pages fall into this category of 500 word page length. In addition to having regular length content on your website, we also suggest crafting much lengthier longform articles to include robust details and educational information. These longer high-quality articles rank well in search results and actually receive more shares/links as they are more authoritative. Often times, these longform articles are more appropriate for a blog or resources section on your financial website.

Using website analytics, we can measure a great many things to determine the impact of your content; organic visitors, duration of time users spend on the page, social media shares, backlinks acquired, resulting conversions from readers, and keyword rankings are all metrics available to banks and credit unions seeking to understand the value of their content.

Are you ready to get started building real value into your website with content? Reach out to us today!