The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Financial Advisors

Published on March 23, 2023
By Paul Henriquez

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As a financial advisor to business owners, you may have come across content marketing as a tactic to grow your business.

But, you probably have questions.

What exactly is content marketing? Will content marketing bring in new business? How can financial advisory firms, like mine, get content marketing right?

In this article, we offer a comprehensive guide to content marketing for financial consultants who work with business owners. We cover important topics like: what content marketing entails, types of content you can use in your content marketing strategy, and tips for success – specifically geared for financial advisors. Let’s get started.

What is Content Marketing for Financial Advisors?

In order to understand what content marketing for financial advisors entails, let’s first back up and answer a fundamental question: what is content marketing?

Definition of Content Marketing

Content marketing is essentially a type of marketing that involves the creation and distribution of content online, with the aim of building brand awareness and generating leads for your business.

Content marketing is usually one component of a larger digital marketing strategy. It should take into account the needs of your target audience, and provide them with useful information that keeps them coming back for more.

Content Marketing for Financial Advisors

Content marketing can be used effectively by financial advisors as a way of finding and winning new business.

The goal of content marketing is quite different from traditional outbound marketing, which focuses primarily on finding new business using ads, cold calling, billboards, trade shows, and so on. With content marketing, the idea is to build trust with your audience through education and useful information, slowly and steadily over time.

So, rather than trying to directly sell financial advisory services to your audience, you want to warm them up by delivering a steady stream of content they enjoy engaging with – and that makes them think: this person knows what they’re talking about, I trust them, and I want to work with them.

With that, let’s dive into some of the benefits of content marketing.

Benefits of Content Marketing for Financial Advisors

Here are 6 key ways content marketing can benefit your financial advisory practice:

1. Establish Credibility and Trust

Establishing credibility is paramount for financial advisors. After all, your client is putting their business’s financial future in your hands.

Content marketing is a good way to provide proof that you know what you’re talking about, you’re established in your field, and you have your clients’ financial well being top of mind.

Through content marketing, you can educate your clients, keep them up-to-date on market news, and position yourself as not only an expert in your field, but the expert they want on their side. Once you’ve demonstrated credibility, your audience will start to trust you to be the financial expert they need.

2. Increase Visibility

Increasing visibility is another important benefit of content marketing. As you produce and share content across your website, blog, and social media channels, you’ll be creating new opportunities for new clients to find you.

This can be especially effective if you pair your content marketing strategy with a well-researched search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Using SEO can dramatically increase your visibility in search engine results pages, which can help drive more traffic to your firm’s website.

By consistently producing and distributing new content, you’ll increase your odds of finding new clients and winning new business.

3. Generate New Leads

Next, content marketing can help you generate new leads, which is ultimately what’s needed to grow your financial advisory firm. In fact, content marketing can often generate even more leads than traditional outbound marketing.

Content that’s valuable, educational, and rich with actionable insight helps move prospective clients through your marketing and sales funnel. In fact, if you add email marketing automations to the process, you can actually nurture your leads down this funnel without lifting a finger.

4. Improve Your Return on Investment

As an independent financial advisor, you probably don’t have an unlimited marketing budget, nor do you have unlimited time to put towards your marketing efforts. Maximizing your marketing resources is something most businesses strive for.

With outbound marketing, you’re casting a wide net – and that doesn’t always work. With content marketing, however, you can closely tailor your efforts to target your ideal clients, as well as measure the results, with the aim of improving your ROI year after year.

As you generate more valuable content through blogs, whitepapers, eBooks, podcasts, and so on, you’ll be building a robust library of content that will continue to earn its keep.

If you want to boost your ROI even more, performing a regular audit of your existing content can also help. Reworking old blogs is a quick and cost-effective way to keep your content relevant and, ultimately, generating leads.

Tip: Don’t have time or resources to create your own content? Try Value Builder’s ready-made Smart Content and get all of the benefits with none of the added work.

5. Retain More Clients

Has your content helped you win new clients? That’s great! But the benefits don’t end there. Content marketing is a heavyweight when it comes to all stages of the sales funnel – and that includes after you onboard new clients.

As a financial advisor, once a client has retained your services, the work doesn’t stop – in fact, that’s when it really gets going. Now’s the time to provide ongoing education, solidify trust, and stay top of mind.

Content marketing can help you do this. Using your content to provide tips, guidance, and information will augment your services and help your clients achieve their financial business goals sooner.

6. Create Assurance During Financially Volatile Times

Of course, periods of market volatility are always extra difficult for financial advisors. Clients are looking to you to help manage their financial business decisions, while also answering questions and mitigating their anxieties.

Content marketing offers a beneficial way to provide news updates and reassurance on the current market conditions. This can go a long way in positioning you as an expert and keeping your clients coming back for more.

Types of Content Financial Advisors Can Create

The types of content that financial advisors can create are numerous and, depending on your goals, will serve different purposes. When used together, a variety of content marketing tactics can help create a strong and effective overall marketing approach.

Here are 6 main types of content that financial advisors can produce:

1. Blog Posts

When it comes to content marketing tactics, blog posts are usually top of mind. Blog posts serve several purposes: they can improve your website visibility in search engine results (providing SEO benefits), showcase your expertise, and provide content you can share on social media and in email marketing.

While continuously producing fresh content is important, what you produce is just as important.

When writing blog posts, a few considerations you should ask yourself include:

Is this content relevant to my target audience?
Is this content valuable or sharing something new?
Is this content aligned with SEO keyword research? (If SEO is part of your strategy)
Does this content showcase my values?
Does it respond to what my audience is looking for?

2. Social Media Posts

Creating an effective social media presence can feel like finding the needle in a haystack. Yet, social media is an important part of today’s marketing landscape.

As financial advisors, choosing which social media platforms to use is just as important as the content you put out there. Social media platforms that financial advisors commonly use include LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter.

Other platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, aren’t used by as many B2B (business to business) financial advisors, simply because they may not reach your intended business owner audience. However, there’s nothing stopping you from experimenting with these platforms if you think your target audience is active there.

When creating social media content, aim to post on a regular schedule. That could be once per day, once per week, or even once per month – whatever is feasible for you. The important part is to keep it consistent.

Some ideas for social media content include:

Advice and insight
Your own blog posts
Your firm’s news
Industry news
Reposts of your clients’ content if it aligns with your thinking
Polls and interactive content
Other interesting blog posts

3. eBooks

eBooks are a great way to showcase your expertise and services. They can be used as gated content in exchange for an email to build your mailing list, or simply as a free resource for readers. Either way, in the financial advising industry, eBooks can go a long way in keeping your firm top of mind.

If you use eBooks as gated content, they can pave the way towards more outbound marketing while also qualifying leads so you’re not spending your energy on marketing that won’t get you anywhere.

Some ideas for eBooks include:

How-to guides
eBooks that answer common questions
eBooks that help solve common problems clients are facing
State of the industry eBooks

4. Whitepapers

Whitepapers are typically longer than eBooks and often share more original data or information. Whitepapers can serve as a report or guide about financial topics that interest your intended audience. They can help solve common problems, answer questions, and showcase your expertise in the industry.

Whitepapers are different from other content on your website in that they are usually comprehensive and thoroughly researched documents that educate. The creation of whitepapers generally takes a particular skill set as they are tightly focused and in-depth.

Here are some examples of whitepapers developed by Value Builders, which may give you ideas for your own.

Tip: Don’t have time to write your own whitepapers? Value Builder’s Smart Content will equip you with pre-written whitepapers, plus everything you need to distribute them.

5. Podcasts

Podcasts have been on the rise for the past couple of years now, and have proven to be an effective tool for B2B (business-to-business) content marketing.

What makes podcasts so effective is they offer an opportunity to deep-dive into niche topics and showcase your knowledge, while also giving a sense of who you are and your firm’s culture. In short, podcasts marry the expertise with the people behind the services.

Plus, after you’ve recorded a podcast, the opportunities don’t stop there. You can repurpose your podcast into audio and video clips, pull quotes, and key takeaways to use on social media and across other channels, and connect them to content marketing campaigns with accompanying blog posts and email newsletters.

6. Your Website

Your website is the most valuable asset in your content marketing toolkit. It’s where your prospective clients will usually end up, and it offers a one-time opportunity to make an excellent first impression. If your website falls flat, you may lose those prospects to your competitors.

Business owners who are in the process of investigating financial advisory services will be doing research. They’ll be spending time on your website, and will be searching for content to gain a deeper understanding of you, your offerings, and your expertise.

That’s why creating compelling and engaging website content is important. Here are some examples of content to include:

Your company’s vision, mission and values
In-depth information about your services
Professional biographies of you and your team
Reasons why prospects should choose you
Case studies and examples of results
Resources that are ungated (accessible to all readers) such as blog posts
Resources that are gated (made available in exchange for the reader’s email address) such as eBooks and whitepapers

5 Content Marketing for Financial Advisors Tips

Now that we’ve covered what content marketing is and the types of content you can create, it’s time to look at the how. For financial professionals, creating a successful content marketing strategy takes some finesse.

Here are 5 tips you can follow when getting started with content marketing for your financial advisory business:

1. Identify Your Target Audience

The first step in any successful content marketing plan is to identify and understand your ideal audience. What types of new clients do you want to secure? What problems are they facing? What do they wish they knew?

Answering these types of questions will help you map out what content to create, and where and when you’ll distribute it.

Essentially, you want to establish a good knowledge of who your prospects are, where online they frequent, their pain points, and what solutions they need (even if they aren’t quite sure they need them yet; this is where they need you).

Some marketers like to take this information and turn it into a buyer persona. This isn’t necessary, but it can help refine a clear picture of your audience.

2. Create a Content Calendar

As we mentioned previously, it’s important to be consistent when it comes to your posting frequency on social media. It’s no different with other forms of content.

Consistency goes a long way in building trust and sustaining a conversation with your audience.

After you’ve identified your target audience, create a list of finance-related content you think they might find useful. Think about this in the context of current market trends, your services, and valuable information you can offer them that others can’t.

Next, determine what format is best suited to each of these content ideas. Formats you could use include:

Blog posts
Videos
Infographics
Podcasts episodes
eBooks and whitepapers
Webinars
Other forms of multimedia

After you’ve created a plan, map it out on a calendar so you know exactly what topic you’ll be posting about, in what format, on what channel, and on what day.

And don’t forget: When creating your content calendar, you can repurpose content in many different forms. For instance, you might write a blog post, then make an infographic and video using the information from it. You might also combine it with other blog posts to create an eBook. Or, you might repackage it into a webinar for prospective clients.

3. Automate Your Content Distribution

You’ve spent considerable time creating content for your financial advisory business (or you’ve saved time by relying on Value Builder’s Smart Content to do it for you). Now, it’s time to distribute it.

After all, content production is all for naught if people don’t actually consume the content you’ve made.

Taking a moment to plan how you’ll distribute your content is important, and there are some shortcuts you can use along the way. By adding automations to your content distribution process, you can save considerable time and avoid making mistakes.

Here are some ways you can automate the process:

Use a social media scheduler
Use an all-in-one email marketing platform
Schedule your blog posts to publish automatically
Hire a virtual assistant (VA) to manage it for you

4. Promote Your Content

Thought your work was done once your content was published? Almost…but not quite.

Once your finance content is published, now’s the time to promote it. Promoting your content will help it get found by your existing audience, as well as new users.

You can promote your content using “organic” (non-paid) or “paid” means. An example of an organic method is posting your content on your LinkedIn page, while a paid method would be serving your content as an advertisement across LinkedIn.

Whether you choose organic, paid, or a mix of both, it’s important to tailor each post/promotion to the platform you’re using. For example, a caption you use on Instagram should be different from one you use on LinkedIn. The audience is different across each platform, and they expect you to speak in a different tone as well.

5. Monitor Your Results

Last but not least, it’s time to track your outcomes.

Now that you’ve promoted your carefully curated content, continual monitoring is a good idea. By arming you with the information you need to pivot your strategy, you’ll be able to double down on what’s working and eliminate what’s not. This will help you get the best ROI.

Tools like Google Analytics – which is a free web analytics platform – allow you to track the performance of your content on your website.

Additionally, most social media platforms offer analytics so you can track your key performance indicators, allowing you to reassess your performance and tailor it to your audience.

Finally, if you’re using a tool like Value Builder to manage your content marketing, you’ll get real time feedback and alerts when people interact with your content.