As a financial adviser, you know that if you want to reach a broader audience or even grab the attention of the next generation of clients, the place to be is online. While social media is a great tool to generate awareness for your business and engage with clients, creating a content marketing plan can be extremely helpful in gradually making prospects trust you and your brand.
At first glance, generating content might seem like a time-consuming effort that will only showcase returns after a long while. Well, it is true that results might take time but look at it like this: it is a very inexpensive way of attracting new clients while establishing yourself as an expert to your audience. So really, the time you’re putting into creating content (which is not that much, trust me!) will pay off. Content will help clients trust you and even if they’re not in need of your services when they first stumble upon your posts, your brand will definitely be top-of-mind when they do.
Having a blog isn’t mandatory
In the scope of content marketing, it is easy to assume that having a blog comes with the territory. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. A great way to get started might be to sporadically guest blog for third-party websites in the industry. This will get your name out there under the brand of a renowned publication that’ll reinforce your credibility.
Another interesting option is to create a firm newsletter with curated content from industry websites (e.g., relevant news, opinion articles) and gradually introduce original content as you go. Once you’ve started writing your own posts creating a blog as an aggregator platform can come in handy for prospects to easily find you.
You can also leverage from the kind of content you present. Try to generate educational, evergreen pieces of content whose message will prevail and be a source of new leads for many years to come either in the form of blog posts, podcasts, short videos, or any other format you’re comfortable with. Exploring the right topics is determining for the success of your content marketing strategy, thus putting yourself in your target’s shoes is an extremely helpful exercise when it comes to finding ideas to create relevant content.
Get organised
Finding time to plan your content strategy isn’t always easy but there are tips that can help you squeeze it into your agenda without compromising the time you dedicate to clients. Start by creating a monthly calendar and add any guest blogging gigs, newsletter dates if you have them or just two or three pieces of content you’d like to create and stick to it. As always, it’s better to start with just a few posts and as you get the hang of it (and hopefully a taste for it), start creating more content. Soon you’ll have a structured calendar of your actions which will aid you in managing the time you can allocate to content creation.
Once the content is finished, you can just schedule it to your preferred date. If you’re using a Content Management System such as WordPress to host your blog, or an e-mail provider such as MailChimp to send your newsletter, you’ll find this is a built-in feature. If you’re creating content for social media instead, a good tip is using tools like Buffer, or Hootsuite to publish your posts at the desired time.
Practice makes perfect
You should start paying attention to your content’s performance and measure the outcomes of your efforts from day one (do keep in mind you’ll need long periods of time to see your ROI). This will allow you to make any necessary adjustments to your content marketing plan as well as extracting valuable insights into your audience’s preferences which you can then put to good use in future content.
Regardless of how many content pieces you post, whether it is on a blog, newsletter, or on social media, you can’t forget about consistency. It’s a long path from writing your first post until getting leads from it, but the key is giving your best and don’t feel discouraged by slow results, those will appear in due time.