August 24, 2021

What I have learned in the past year about Content Marketing?

Roshni Nayak

Founder, Goalbridge

The biggest cardinal virtue (fundamental) required in our advisory profession is great communication skills. And not just oral but written communication as well. Here, I am specifically talking about content marketing i.e. sharing relevant content with an intent to educate, coach, persuade, act and inspire prospects and clients in their financial lives. It is an excellent way to market yourself, your brand and to pull customers. You need not hard sell anything.

Thanks to the digital revolution, there has been a seismic (earthshaking) shift, more so in the past decade, in the way we communicate to our potential customers. From newsletters to one-pager physical pamphlets, we have evolved to blogs, videos, infographics, and now podcasts. Having started my own financial planning practice last year, content marketing helped me to improve visibility, receive prospect queries, and successfully onboard a few clients in the first year amidst the pandemic. Let me share my experience and learnings of this past year.

How do you generate ideas and create eye-ball-grabbing content?

Amidst the pandemic lasting too long, a kind of social media fatigue has set in leading to severely fragmented attention among people. So how do you grab their attention to view your message? How do you get powerful ideas? Candidly speaking, ideas will not come from reading personal finance content in newspapers or following blogs of other advisors.

Original content ideas come from experience – your experience with your clients and even conversations with prospects. It will probably come to you in a flash, maybe while you are ruminating over your thoughts.

Another great source of getting original ideas is personal finance forums/groups on social media. Young beginners, DIYers now increasingly use these platforms to seek guidance and get their questions answered. It can help advisors to learn about a wide variety of financial problems people face.

Let me give you a concrete example. Amidst the 2^nd wave of the pandemic, people faced a lot of issues in having access to the bank account of their deceased spouse and there were many financial & legal questions related to it on a forum. Many shared their experience and this helped me to do a bit of further research. And I got a great idea for my next video topic about how having a joint account with a spouse can help in uncertain times. I received a good response to this post and the best part is I learned a lot in the process. Watch the video here

Who is your audience?

When you create your content, keep in mind your target audience. And it should not be your existing clients or even your natural market. Natural market refers to people whom you are familiar with or related to. If you want to expand your business, you need to think beyond your natural market. There is a limit to reaching a wider audience base beyond your natural market organically on social media. Unless you are lucky if any of your posts with unique content goes viral. Till then, to reach a larger reader/subscriber base, you need to step aside a small monthly budget for ads on social media.

Further, on a specific note, if you are using a professional platform like LinkedIn to connect to a wider audience, having a majority of advisors in your contact list will not help. You are not creating content for the advisory fraternity. So, ensure to add professionals from diverse backgrounds if you are seriously targeting prospects on LinkedIn.

The Do not’s in content marketing 

• You need not spend gobs of time on all social media platforms. Focus on those one or two really well where you are getting a good response from your audience.
• Do not focus on the quantity or frequency of your posts but the quality of the content. People really do not have time to read and will get tired if you bombard them with messages. Besides, you will end up compromising on the core business activities as priorities get crowded out.
• Avoid topical posts like savings in Diwali, buying gold during Akshaya Tritiya, filing tax returns, tax-saving tips before the end of the financial year, etc. You will end up repeating the same thing that your audience is likely to be aware of. They do trend on google for a while but there is nothing new and original you can offer in topical posts.
• Do not restrict your content to anyone’s standard format. You need not write a big 600-800 words article to enlighten your audience. What is important is that the message you want to convey should be bang on. Even little nuggets of wisdom would do like one-liners accompanied by a visual. It could be a thought-provoking question in the form of a poll. It could even be a 250-300 word post. For e.g., a chance conversation with my 8-year old daughter on saving money gave me an idea. I just briefly wrote about my experience in a few words to convey the right message and received a good response as many could relate to it.
• Do not consider content marketing as a task. You learn when you write. So, consider it as a part of perpetual learning and thoroughly enjoy it.

Can one become a great orator and a writer?

Communication be it oral or written is a must every advisor must possess. Needless to say, it is great leverage to have in these digital times to reach out to the world, scale up your business, make an impact, and that too with little cost. As Warren Buffet says, “the one easy way to become worth 50 percent more than you are now is to hone your communication skills.”

Developing great communication skills takes time. While I started content marketing over the past year, writing on personal finance is something I have been doing for the past 10 years. What I want to pontificate (emphasize) is that the compound result of these 10 years started to show results in the first year of my business itself. Compounding works everywhere. You just need to be consistent.

As popularly quoted by Brian Tracy:
“Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you are willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life”.

Read the last two articles here –

Understanding Technical & Fundamentals can generate Alpha for your clients by Venkatesh Puthige – Click here

The hunt for a coach by Jinay Savla – Click here