How to win at financial services marketing

Picture the scene - you’re running the financial services marketing strategy for your brand. You’re creating content to help drive your SEO, and of course you want to rank as highly as possible. So you’re firing out blogs faster than Aldi checkout staff scan your weekly shop, squishing and squashing short tailed, long tailed and curly tailed keywords in as many places as you can find. 

Financial services marketing can implement inbound strategies to reach out to new audiences, investors and clients. A creative, transparent and bespoke campaign can target a huge volume of high net worth leads, at a high quality that won’t waste your sales team’s time. For more information on how you can create a high performing investment campaign read our guide to financial marketing strategies.

There are plenty of images, links to other blogs or websites, a family photo album, and a video of pennies being squashed by a hydraulic press - anything to increase the chances of you climbing up the Google rankings to the first page of search results.

However, new research suggests that when it comes to financial services marketing, less is more in regards to SEO.

Google is man’s new best friend 

Google seems to be getting smarter (I won’t go discussing a robot apocalypse again, or I’ll get a reputation). The search engine knows what people are actually searching for better than ever before, and can direct them to the right answers straightaway. This means it will look right through copious amounts of technical SEO witchcraft and financial jargon.

Cramming in all those unnecessary keywords can make content read in an unnatural way. Once upon a time, Google couldn’t judge linguistic flow, but seems to be changing with the help of machine learning. In the financial services sector especially, specific keywords appear on average 2.1 times, as opposed to generic searches where they can be repeated  an average of 7.4 times, according to Searchmetrics.

So you can’t just baffle Google into thinking you know what you’re talking about. Your content actually has to be valuable and relevant, especially when it comes to financial services, as the top ten results in this sector are more competitive than in generic searches.

What people want from financial services marketing

We are a fickle race, easy to taunt and easy to trick. If your blog takes too long to load, say bye bye to a reader and potential customer or promoter. Hold off on clutter, don’t put anything in there that will distract the reader or add to the time it takes the page to load.

Taking a closer look at financial services search queries, pages have on average 29% less interactive elements and 30% lower page file size. This all helps for some super fast loading speeds.

Also going against the grain is the lack of images and videos within financial services marketing. While we believe these elements can play an important role in promoting financial products, it seems you can’t beat good old fashioned text. While video is great for capturing a lead’s attention, studies suggest it’s not ideal for complex decision-making.

It seems the medium and the authenticity of content is massively important, at least when it comes to financial searches anyway. Quality over quantity cannot be stated enough.

Winning friends with an inbound marketing strategy

Just publishing content and hoping for the best won’t cut it anymore. Yes, it’s good that you’re providing information for your audience, but in the long term, Google is one of your greatest allies. To truly have them on your team, you need a solid inbound marketing strategy in place.

In essence, you need all of your content efforts to be coordinated, using the right tone of voice, targeting the right kind of people via the right channels. This is something we pride ourselves on, and we’re not afraid of having an honest and upfront conversation when it comes to making changes to your financial services marketing.

I guess the point is if you’re putting together a financial services marketing strategy, don’t rock the boat too fiercely as to fall out. Instead, maybe have a think about how many sails you have flying from the mast, and if all that rigging is necessary.*

*Disclaimer, I am not a sailor so that sailing terminology is likely to make no sense, but I like confusing metaphors. 

Financial services marketing can implement inbound strategies to reach out to new audiences, investors and clients. A creative, transparent and bespoke campaign can target a huge volume of high net worth leads, at a high quality that won’t waste your sales team’s time. For more information on how you can create a high performing investment campaign read our guide to financial marketing strategies.