Discover How to Use Content Marketing to Grow Your Financial Advisory Business
So you’ve launched your financial management firm, exhausted your LinkedIn contacts…and you’re still looking to grow. Let us introduce you to content marketing—one of the best ways to attract or engage prospects without breaking the bank on advertising.
If this feels like yet another task you’re taking on as a financial advisor, you’re not alone.
Content marketing gives you the opportunity to engage thousands of people and build your reputation. By comparison, every personalized cold message you send to a prospect without a strong brand reinforced by content marketing is effort you're funneling inefficiently into one person at a time.
A well-thought out content marketing strategy is an essential tactic in financial advisor prospecting as it compounds your existing outreach while generating prospects of its own.
Save Time with Effective Content Marketing for Financial Advisors
Say you’re outreaching through LinkedIn. Your prospect reads the message you crafted (or that you sent with AI-personalized outreach) and goes to your website for more information. They find a collection of articles or videos that perfectly address their challenges. You’ve just transformed from someone selling a service into a reliable and supportive financial expert.
Alternatively, you’ll create organic inbound leads when your content comes up as an answer to a question someone searches. This again positions you as a helpful financial expert.
Sharing and posting helpful content via social media also strengthens your LinkedIn reputation, which helps make your LinkedIn outreach more credible and thus effective from the get-go. So content marketing for financial advisors presents many wide-ranging benefits, but how do you make content that actually helps grow your financial business?
We’ve got five tips for how financial advisors can up their content marketing game to convert more prospects into clients and scale their revenue!
5 Tips to Build an Effective Marketing Plan for Financial Advisors
1. Know Your Audience
The golden rule of content marketing is to begin with understanding your audience. Defining target markets is a crucial aspect of LinkedIn marketing for financial advisors. If you haven’t yet identified your audience, start by researching audience personas—the demographic you aim to reach.
It's essential to align these personas with your content marketing goals. For instance, knowing your target age demographic helps guide your decisions on content types and channels for optimal reach and engagement. Effective audience research leads to better content optimization, ensuring your financial advisor content resonates and performs well across platforms.
2. Experiment with Different Mediums
When you think of "content marketing," blog posts might be the first thing that comes to mind. And you're right… but only partly.
Finance content marketing can take many forms across various channels. It includes blogs, infographics, videos, voice recordings, and more. For financial services firms, combining different content types can enhance your online visibility. For example, adding videos to blog posts boosts SEO and drives more website traffic, so don’t be afraid to experiment!
Just remember to consider your audience is an important factor in deciding the content marketing format(s) & channel(s) best for your financial advisory firm.
3. Be Strategic
You may be tempted to fire off whatever content comes to mind on a given day, but this won’t yield the best results. A little bit of strategic planning goes a long way.
When creating content, sometimes you struggle for ideas and sometimes you have ideas but you’re not sure if they make sense.
Here are tips to succeed in content marketing for financial advisors:
- Research Niche-Specific Financial Topics. Pay extra attention to topics that don’t have a lot of strong competition. In other words, what topics are underserved? As a small business, focusing on niche subject matters will help you avoid being pinned against competitors with significantly more resources.
- Build a content strategy. Come up with clusters of related topics so if your audience wants to learn more about a topic mentioned in one piece of content, you can direct them to another. For example, as a portfolio manager, you probably advise a lot on retirement savings; you could create topic subclusters like retirement-fund types, advice by clients’ age ranges and tax scenarios for retirement-account withdrawals. Clustering content increases your authority with both your audience and Google.
- Plan what you want to promote. In a perfect world, all your content is equally strong. But in reality, some pieces will stand out more than others. Consider what content adds the most value and relevance for your audience. Take extra care while creating that content. No amount of promotion is going to help unless the content itself offers real value.
4. Focus on Quality
Content marketing is a quality-over-quantity endeavor. Whether you publish content that drives website visits from Google or a lead browses your content to learn about your services, offering valuable information will push them towards your company.
Low-quality content turns away potential clients and increases your bounce rates (people who quickly leave your website after finding it), leading to lower Google rankings.
Remember—you’re already an expert financial advisor. Some technical phrases might not appear in everyone’s daily vocabulary, so how you communicate ideas matters as much as deciding what to talk about. You have the knowledge to produce good content—quality is a matter of the overall value you offer.
Think about the conversations you regularly have with clients, the questions they ask, the topics they enquire about, etc. What answers do you provide and how do you express those answers in ways clients find helpful?
Communicate clearly, address pertinent questions or concerns your audience has and make sure your content builds off itself.
5. Promote Your Content
Thought you could just fire off blogs or YouTube videos and pull in traffic? Think again. There’s a variety of ways to push your content further or promote brand new content throughout social media.
We’ll walk you through content marketing tips for financial advisors across different mediums to promote your content and drive leads.
There are many ways to use LinkedIn to promote your firm and improve content marketing for financial advisors. Leveraging tips from a LinkedIn lead-generation guide like posting regularly or improving your brand presence pay dividends in generating more clients from LinkedIn.
To start—get posting. Post thought leadership or share your existing content (videos, blogs, etc.) on LinkedIn. You’ll get organic LinkedIn reach from your network and their connections.
If you have the budget for further reach, you can also run LinkedIn Ads for further content promotion. Boost existing content or create ads to promote your services.
LinkedIn also offers “sponsored messaging” options that pop up with “Sponsored” in the message title.
TikTok
TikTok is full of subject-matter experts (just like you) spilling tips on niche industry topics. The algorithm then pushes out your content to a targeted audience—for free!
Use short snippets of YouTube videos to drive users to the full videos. You can also create some TikTok-only content with short clips that help you build a personal brand and position you as a subject-matter expert.
Still not sold? Worried TikTok is too young for financial services? Well, nearly 40% of TikTok’s userbase is over 30.
Like on LinkedIn, you can also pay to promote specific videos, although we’d recommend spending your money on channels that promote your long-form content.
If you’re going to market on Facebook, there are two main options to look at:
One is building a community using Facebook groups, where you can drive community engagement and share content & posts to establish your expertise in spaces where potential leads are looking for guidance.
From a promotional perspective, you can create ads on Facebook. You may have already used Facebook ads to promote your service, but you can also promote major pieces of content in these ads.
If you’ve invested significant time into a guide or webinar, these ads could be worthwhile. Instead of promoting your service, you’ll promote what specifically your content offers (e.g., an in-depth guide or webinar on risk management).
Guides or playbooks that your target audience finds useful work great as “lead magnets” to compel people to engage with your advertisements.
Promoting content on Instagram as a financial advisor is similar to Facebook. Both ads are primarily visual and best suited to either your service itself or particularly in-depth content pieces.
Whether to use Instagram or Facebook (or both) comes down to where your target demographic spends more time.
Leverage Content Marketing With Smart Outreach to Scale Your Financial Business
Running a small financial advisor business is time-consuming. And doing it alone or with a small team makes time an extra valuable resource.
That’s why you want to find tactics that optimize your marketing efforts. While content marketing may seem like a significant upfront investment, each piece you publish can reach thousands of prospects and reassure them that you’re the right person to support their financial needs.
Following the content marketing tips above will ensure the time you invest into content actually yields results.
You can optimize your marketing by using tools that automate lead generation for financial advisors. You’ll reduce the time you spend sending outreach messages, freeing up more time to talk to already qualified leads (or content creation).
