Content Marketing for Financial Services: Strategies and ROI

Content marketing for financial services spans a broad range of activities. Whether you’re a financial planner, an insurance agent, CPA or a wealth manager, you may be using blog and social media content, videos, podcasts, newsletters and other content creation channels to promote your business. Developing a content marketing strategy that produces the results you want sometimes requires outside-the-box thinking to keep pace with competitors. Your expected return on investment also factors into decision-making, as you don’t want any of your marketing budget to go to waste.

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Content Marketing Strategies for Financial Services

Your approach may depend on who you want to reach, what they need to understand and how you want them to engage with your business. The strategies below offer different ways to create content that is targeted, useful and adaptable across channels.

1. Cluster Content

Content clustering simply means creating multiple pieces of content around the same topic. This is significant for search engine optimization (SEO), as it can potentially help your business website rank higher in search results. But more importantly, clustering can keep prospective clients interested in what you have to say while demonstrating your authority on a particular topic.

For instance, say you’re a financial planner who specializes in life stage planning, and you’re hoping to attract clients in their 30s who have started a family or plan to. You might create a cluster of content on distinct but related life stages and the various financial decisions that may arise with each one.

This strategy isn’t limited to written content. While blog posts may be the foundation of your content marketing plan, you can supplement your clusters with short and long-form video content, social media posts and interactive content, like quizzes or calculators. Each new piece of content you add to the cluster builds on the previous one to provide prospective clients with a well-rounded view of the topic.

Keep in mind that while you should be showing value, you don’t want to give everything away. Hold something back and use that to steer prospects toward an in-person or virtual conversation. For example, if you’re sharing a retirement planning quiz with your audience, you can include a call to action encouraging them to schedule a chat with you to discuss their results.

2. Share Curated Content

Content marketing primarily revolves around creating original content to share, but there are no rules against sharing content from other sources if it’s helpful and relevant to your audience.

For example, an insurance agent who relies on email marketing to engage with prospects may share a Friday message that includes a round-up of recent insurance news stories. Ideally, these are stories that are designed to pique interest and get the prospect questioning whether they’ve adequately met their life insurance needs.

So, if you’re the agent in question, you might share a story about the pitfalls of using AI to determine your life insurance needs, or a fresh take on life insurance planning for affluent families if that’s your target audience. And as with the previous example, you can include a strong CTA in your message encouraging prospects to reach out to discuss their life insurance needs.

3. Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content or UGC is brand-related content that’s created by regular people, rather than the brand itself. Using UGC for content marketing in financial services is cost-effective, since third parties create content for you voluntarily. Each new piece of content generated for your brand adds to your business’s social proof and credibility.

Some of the most common types of UGC used for content marketing among financial services professionals are client reviews and testimonials posted to third-party sites, and text or video social media posts. Discussions held in community forums can also fall under this heading.

How financial services professionals can use this content to their advantage depends largely on the type of business they run. Registered investment advisors, for instance, are permitted to use client testimonials to promote their business under the SEC’s marketing rule. However, they must make clear disclosures about how those testimonials are obtained. If they’re soliciting reviews from clients directly, they must avoid cherry-picking and give all of their clients an opportunity to respond.

Insurance agents may be bound by the rules if they sell securities-based products; financial planners may also be subject to SEC compliance guidelines if their services include investment or securities advice. A financial services compliance consultant can offer insight into which rules and standards may apply to you and how to navigate them as you execute your content marketing plan.

4. Develop a Content Series

In addition to content clusters, financial services professionals may use a content series to hold prospective clients’ attention. A series can have a specific number of segments or continue indefinitely, depending on the topic.

So, let’s say you’re a certified financial coach and you specialize in helping people in their 20s to 40s make smarter decisions about how to manage debt. You might create a content series of short videos that feature one targeted, helpful tip and post it to your TikTok channel on Tuesdays and Fridays. (For examples of this strategy in action, check out some of the finance influencers using TikTok to grow their businesses.)

Creating a series that you post regularly is a chance to show just how much you know about a subject, without overwhelming prospects with information. And because you’re posting useful content that’s part of the same series on a regular schedule, your followers learn not only to show up for your latest upload but look forward to it.

5. Use Automated Content for Marketing

Sometimes you don’t have time in your busy schedule to brainstorm new ideas for content marketing. That’s when you turn to automation tools to help lighten the load.

For example, you may use Claude or a similar AI tool to generate content based on the specific characteristics you share about your ideal clients. You can ask the tool to provide you with a list of ideas to work from, or create the full content from scratch. Keep in mind that if you’re using AI for content creation, a human touch is still necessary to check for accuracy and ensure that whatever you’ve created reflects your brand voice.

Lead generation platforms can also provide you with content that you can share with prospects through automated email drip sequences and text messaging campaigns. SmartAsset’s Advisor Marketing Platform (AMP) now offers the ability to create automated email newsletters on thousands of topics that may resonate with your target client base.

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Calculating ROI for Content Marketing

Your return on investment for content marketing matters if you’re working with a limited budget. The formula for calculating ROI on content marketing is similar to the formula for digital marketing ROI:

ROI = [(Revenue – Content Investment) / Content Investment] x 100

Assume, for example, that you spend $10,000 on a digital ad campaign for your wealth management firm. That campaign brings in $60,000 worth of new client revenue. Your ROI calculation would look like this:

[($60,000 – $10,000 / $10,000)] x 100 = 500%

In this instance, the $10,000 invested in content marketing would have generated a 500% return. That also aligns with what’s typically considered to be a “good” ROI for marketing, which is a 5:1 ratio or a return of $5 for every $1 spent.¹

Determining a good ROI for individual content marketing activities in financial services is difficult because different strategies may produce different results. A financial planner may see an excellent ROI from building content clusters on their website, for example, but struggle to achieve the same results with curated content shared to their email list.

Tracking performance metrics for individual content marketing campaigns and channels can help you determine where your efforts might be paying off the most or least. Some of the KPIs you may track include social shares, time spent on different pages of your website, email open and click-through rates and conversions. Together, these metrics can provide a clearer view of what is or isn’t working in your content marketing approach.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What Is Content Marketing for Financial Services?

Content marketing is marketing that’s done through content. For example, a financial planner may turn to social media content to promote their business, while a CPA may prefer to engage with their target audience through YouTube. Content marketing is an opportunity to share your knowledge and connect with prospects who may be interested in your services.

What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing for Financial Services Professionals?

Content marketing, when paired with digital marketing strategies, can help financial services professionals reach prospective clients they’re best equipped to serve. Written and video content can enable you to share your expertise and knowledge, and build a rapport with people who have financial questions or challenges your services may address.

How Can Financial Services Professionals Get Help With Content Marketing?

If creating content is outside your wheelhouse of skills as a financial planner, insurance agent, wealth manager or other financial services professional, you’re not out of luck. Marketing agencies, freelance writers and independent marketing experts are some of the resources you may turn to for help with developing a content plan. You may also incorporate AI tools into your content creation process to save time.

Bottom Line

The secret to good content marketing for financial services is the same as any other type of marketing: know your client. When you understand what a prospective client needs, values or worries about most, you can create content that’s tailored to their situation. While it’s important to have a regular schedule for publishing content, quality ultimately outweighs quantity when it comes to gaining trust and converting prospects to clients.

Article Sources

All articles are reviewed and updated by SmartAsset’s fact-checkers for accuracy. Visit our Editorial Policy for more details on our overall journalistic standards.

“What Is Marketing ROI?” Salesforce, https://www.salesforce.com/marketing/analytics/roi-guide/.