Staying ahead of the competition often hinges on the ability to deliver meaningful, informative, and engaging content to your audience. Wells Fargo’s Diverse Businesses content stands as a shining example of successful financial content marketing, having clinched the Content Marketing Awards Best Content Marketing Launch. While its approach is tailored to banks, the marketing lessons can be applied to all finance brands. We delve into the strategies, execution, and observations that make Wells Fargo’s approach one to watch.
Assessing the strategy
Wells Fargo’s Diverse Businesses content marketing strategy is a testament to the power of audience-centricity. It has created a specific blog devoted to a singular audience: diverse small business owners.
At its core, its approach revolves around three key pillars: Running Your Business, Growing Your Business, and Money and Your Business. These pillars are designed to address the immediate needs and concerns of small businesses, offering practical, valuable information.
Audience-centric pillars: Wells Fargo’s success lies in its keen understanding of its audience, primarily small business owners. The content pillars are structured to provide solutions to common challenges faced by these businesses. This strategy showcases the importance of tailoring your content to your target demographic’s specific needs and interests.
Customer feedback as a guide: One of the cornerstones of Wells Fargo’s content strategy is being informed by customer feedback. This customer-centric approach ensures the content remains relevant and useful. It’s a shining example of how finance brands can benefit from continuous feedback loops with their audience to refine and improve their content.
Diversity and inclusion: Wells Fargo’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is evident throughout its content. It embraces a wide range of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences, making its content relatable to a broader audience.
Assessing the execution: content and delivery
While the strategic underpinning of Wells Fargo’s Diverse Businesses content is stellar, there’s room for improvement in the execution, especially regarding content style and delivery.
“ Wells Fargo’s Diverse Business Solutions’ content marketing strategy is a testament to the power of audience-centricity.”
- Engaging delivery: The content’s style leans towards the traditional and somewhat dated. Incorporating more visual, interactive content into the mix such as video content, podcasts, or infographics would help drive engagement and also open up opportunities to build retargeting pools using video. Adopting a variety of content methods can inject new life into your finance brand’s content, hooking audiences in on an engaging story.
- Easy-to-understand content: One of the strong suits of Wells Fargo’s content is its simplicity. It effectively breaks down complex financial concepts into digestible pieces, making it accessible to a broad spread of business owners. However, it could still be enhanced by incorporating more multimedia elements like animations or interactive tools to further demystify financial jargon. Infographics are a fantastic way of delineating complex financial information with studies showing visuals can improve learning and retention by 400%.
Distribution strategy
An integral part of Wells Fargo’s content marketing success lies in its distribution strategy, ensuring its valuable content reaches its target audience effectively.
- Cross-platform approach: Pushing potential clients through the consideration phase is about delivering valuable content often while ensuring every interaction is a positive one. Wells Fargo achieves this via a variety of distribution channels, including its website, social media, email marketing, and partnerships with business organisations. This comprehensive approach ensures its content is shown and accessible everywhere its target audience spends their time.
- Content personalisation: The content is tailored to cater to different segments of its audience. Wells Fargo understands not all businesses have the same needs, and by offering personalised content it increases the chances of engaging its audience effectively. Wells Fargo has done this effectively by creating separate dedicated blogs and sections of its website. In this instance, Diverse Businesses offers value-driven information that’s specific to diverse small business owners that can often be overlooked.
What else Wells Fargo did well
Beyond its delivery and distribution strategy, Wells Fargo’s Diverse Businesses offers several noteworthy lessons for financial marketers.
- Consistency is key: Consistency in delivering valuable, relevant, and accessible content is a crucial factor in maintaining audience engagement.
- Transparency and trust: The finance industry relies heavily on trust. Wells Fargo’s content prioritises transparency and a genuine desire to help its customers. Its video series ‘Amplifying diverse small business voices’, offers diverse small business owners a voice to share the challenges and difficulties facing small business owners.
- Cultural relevance: Wells Fargo’s embrace of diversity and inclusion not only makes ethical sense but also strengthens its brand. Specific articles like ‘Resources to help Black, Asian-American, and Latina women entrepreneurs’ showcases challenges facing minority communities and offers support and solutions. By not delivering generic information for small business owners, Wells Fargo recognises the differences in communities and offers proactive content to benefit them.
Ultimately, Wells Fargo’s success is a testament to the power of content marketing when executed with precision and authenticity.
