While new year’s resolutions may not appeal in your personal life, taking the time to set clear intentions for your finance brand will help keep your finance content marketing program on track in 2021.
To help inspire what the new and improved you might look like in 2021, we’ve compiled a list of simple resolutions all finance brands should implement to elevate their finance content marketing program this year.
Review your 2020 finance content program
The starting point for any 2021 finance content marketing program should of course be a review of 2020.
Which content performed best and which was ignored? Which channel proved most popular? Has the audience that engages with your audience shifted or any clear trends emerged?
It’s vital that this review is objective, data-driven and honest. Regardless of how much you loved a finance content marketing campaign, if your audience didn’t, then it should be re-cast—or cast out.
Get serious about data
Data—and data only—can tell you how many likes, follows, shares, conversions and/or sales a finance content marketing campaign inspires. It’s the best way to measure success.
Data is key to understanding your audience, providing tangible insights into their interests, needs, challenges, as well as both their past and future behaviours. However, not all data is created equal.
While mountains of data are readily available, most of it is unlikely to serve your purpose. To determine which data to focus on, create a data strategy—driven by your unique goals, target audience and competitors. Then, as new data emerges, use the insights that arise to modify your finance content and strategy, ensuring it remains relevant all year long. You can learn more about building a finance content marketing program around customer data here.
Test, learn, document, repeat
The enemy of successful finance content marketing is complacency.
“ The enemy of successful finance content marketing is complacency.”
The key to optimising the performance of any piece of content is to constantly test and learn. Not only will this help you work out what makes your audience tick, but it’s also a resourceful way to extend the life of your content by repurposing rather than always creating new content.
One of the easiest ways to get started is A/B testing, which involves changing one element of a piece of content, then measuring its impact on engagement over time. For a newsletter, you might change the subject line; for a blog post, you might re-write the headline; for a banner, you might re-word the call to action (and so on—the sky’s the limit).
It’s also important to trial content in a variety of different forms, measuring how your audience responds. For example, a blog post on, say, ‘5 ways for saving for millennials during a pandemic’, could serve as a theme for a blog post, a video, a micro podcast and an infographic.
Every test should be documented against your goals, and every document stored in a central location, enabling ease of access.
Plan for the unexpected
2020’s pandemic demonstrated that our everyday lives can change quickly and without warning. And, when the unexpected happens, audiences turn to finance content for guidance, security and advice.
While every new year’s resolution needs a clear plan for how you will achieve it, your finance content marketing strategy should also include scope for you to respond to the unexpected. To help plan for the unplannable, consider marking out regular spots in your calendar for news-driven content, developing a plan for how your content team will respond to a crisis and generally embracing an agile mindset.
If you have new year’s goals or resolutions you need help sticking to, we can help. Get in touch.
