Content Marketing for Banks: What You Need to Know
If you work for a bank and are doing research on content marketing, you may relate to the following situations:
Your team may have invested a lot already into content and haven’t seen the results you were hoping for.
You’re looking to get started with content marketing at the bank you work for and want to make sure you get it right.
You’ve done content marketing in a different industry and have now joined a financial services company, and want to see how content works in this industry.
At Mint Studios, we’re a content marketing agency that specialises in helping financial services companies and financial corporates with their content marketing. Specifically, we help fintech companies and financial institutions use content marketing to acquire customers and establish themselves as experts.
Based on our experience working for a wide variety of financial firms, we’ll be sharing what’s unique about content marketing for banks, the best way to get started and examples of banks that are doing a good job with their content.
Banking and financial services is one of the oldest industries on the planet. As more people bank online than ever, customer acquisition and getting deposits from customers are relying more and more on digital marketing – which includes content marketing.
As we’ll see in this article, banks are uniquely positioned to provide customers with financial education via content marketing. Personal finance touches everyone, and yet few of us learn about taxes, mortgages and investing in schools.
Combine the complexity of personal finance with the fact that money is still quite a taboo topic, and people have no option but to do research online to understand what’s happening with their money. As a bank, this is your opportunity to educate prospects, build trust and create a customer for life with online content marketing.
In this article, we’ll be covering:
What’s unique about content marketing for banks
The issue with how most banks approach content marketing
How to get started with written content marketing as a bank
Examples of banks doing great content marketing
Note: looking to work with a content marketing agency that knows financial services inside out? Learn more about what we do.
What’s unique about content marketing for banks (and why it’s especially important now)
Content marketing includes written, video and audio content. In this article we’ll be focusing mostly on written content as this is still the communication and marketing form that still dominates in financial services.
Content marketing is the art of educating and attracting potential customers with digital content. The mindset is: educate, be transparent, be trustworthy, and potential customers will come to you when they’re ready to buy. With the internet, buyer behaviors have changed and customers now prefer doing their own research before making a purchase. This is why content marketing is so powerful and key to digital customer acquisition: you’re helping people do their own research, educate themselves, and empower themselves with knowledge about personal finance.
Marcus Sheridan, author of They Ask You Answer, explains the power of content marketing best:
Prior to the 1990s, people relied on salespeople and books to get their information.
When the internet became mainstream in the 90s and 2000s, it democratized information. People could suddenly find all the information they needed online, rather than talking to salespeople. This led to a change in buyer behavior as people started doing their own research online before buying.
Fast forward to the 2020s, and younger generations like millennials and generation Z much prefer doing their research online, educating themselves and then buying a product when they’re ready. They don’t like talking on a phone and being sold to. They don’t like being interrupted via an ad. They like to “opt-in” and reach out to a company when they’re ready.
When a potential customer is ready to buy, they will pick the brand or company that they trust the most. In this day and age, this often refers to the company they've been getting their content from. The company that’s sharing content that is transparent, educational and that they trust to answer their questions.
What’s unique about financial services and banking is that it’s an industry that affects everyone, and yet money remains a topic that people don’t understand well. Because of the lack of understanding and often taboo topics, people are even more likely to go online to get answers to questions like “how much should I be saving?” and “is my salary high enough for my age?”.
People are spending time educating themselves, doing research and they want to feel in control of their money. And if the relatively new financial technology industry has taught us anything, it’s that they also want financial tools that will help them better control their finances – some even want a relationship with a financial company.
Considering all this, what’s unique about doing content marketing as a bank?
Even more so than in other industries, it’s incredibly important your content is trustworthy and authoritative: Opening up a bank account is not like opening up a Facebook account. When it comes to money management, people do their research and need to trust the brand they’re opening an account with. Your content needs to be educational and build trust with potential customers. This is especially true if you’re wanting to rank on Google with your content (more on this later).
Your content should answer questions. In order for customers to see you as trustworthy and to feel comfortable opening a bank account with your institution, they need to trust you and value you. One of the best ways to do that is to answer questions, even if they don’t always favor your institution.
When ranking on Google and doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you’ll be competing against big personal finance publications. Ranking for specific terms on Google is an excellent way to acquire customers. But the financial services and banking industry is very competitive because you’re competing with financial services content brands like the NerdWallets, Credit Karmas of the world.
Compliance is a big part of content marketing efforts. As a bank, you need to ensure your high-quality content adheres to regulations like UDAAP. That means ensuring that compliance is part of your content product process. Read more on this here: How to Navigate Compliance and Content Creation as a Financial Marketer
The issue with how most banks approach content marketing
Most banks and financial institutions believe content marketing is about creating articles that sit on the website blog. These are often articles that are based on general research rather than unique insights, and are written by someone who is not an expert on the topic.
This happens a lot because many content marketing experts will tell you that you need to “become a media company”. Essentially, that means you need to build a media team as part of your marketing: start a Youtube channel, create a magazine, have a podcast, and a lot more. They argue that the best way to acquire customers is when they come to you for information directly. They’ll point to JP Morgan and TD Ameritrade as examples of banks that are doing a great job with this.
Although it sounds like a great idea in theory, the issue with this advice is that building a media company is only a realistic proposition for banks with enormous budgets. When your budget is in the nine figures, it’s a lot easier to run 2 podcasts, a video channel and magazine. Without these big bank budgets, “becoming a media company” is unrealistic.
So what if you’re a mid-size bank that doesn’t have $100M+ to invest in content marketing? There are three recommendations we have:
Pick one content marketing channel and do it very well. Spreading your bets across a lot of channels will cause a huge drain on resources and will return mediocre results. You’re better off focusing on one or two and doing them very well.
Start your content marketing strategy by targeting potential customers who are close to buying. Many marketers will put together a content strategy that focuses on creating content that cover very high level topics. Although those may be interesting, it’s a difficult way to get deposits. If you’re looking to acquire customers, start with those who are already close to converting.
Have a distribution strategy for every piece of content. Many financial institutions make the mistake of creating great content on their website and hoping people will find it. In order for content to work, you need to know how you’re going to get it in front of the right people, whether it’s via social media, an email newsletter or Google.
How to get started with written content marketing as a bank
Considering the unique aspects of content marketing in financial services, and the common mistakes we’ve mentioned above, what’s the best way to get started with a bank?
There are obviously so many different variables, and no bank is the same. To answer this questions we’ll be using a fictional example bank: RuralBank is a mid-size bank that offers checking accounts to individuals and businesses specifically people and businesses in rural locations. Their Head of Marketing wants to start creating website content to rank on Google for specific terms their target market is looking for to acquire customers and increase deposits.
Here’s how we would get started:
Start by create content targeting people who are closer to converting
A lot of marketers will start their content strategies by starting off at the “top” of the marketing funnel. In other words, people who aren’t actively looking for a solution to their problem. This is usually brand awareness content, and covering financial topics like “what is a bank account” or “what are transaction fees”.
Although this is valuable content to create in the long term, almost anyone could be doing research on those topics – and they may not be your target persona. Anyone could be doing research on “bank transaction fees”, it doesn’t necessarily signify they could become your customer.
That’s why we advocate for starting with the bottom of the marketing funnel instead. That means: targeting people who are closer to buying. Ideally, they know they have a problem and are actively looking for it.
In this case, RuralBank is better off starting with useful content that answers the questions that their Bottom of the Funnel target customers are looking for. Examples of this type of content includes:
RuralBank vs Competitor
How to open a bank account in [rural area]
Top business loans for farmers
If RuralBank’s objective is to increase deposits, they need to be targeting people who are closer to opening a bank account. By creating this kind of content and ensuring it gets in front of your target audience – whether by ranking on Google or any other methods – RuralBank will see results sooner.
Once they’ve exhausted all the BOFU phrases and people who are ready to buy, they can then work themselves up the funnel and start creating MOFU and TOFU content.
2. Work your way up the funnel
By starting with BOFU, and then moving up to MOFU and TOFU content topics, you’re able to focus on getting customers earlier on. This also will give you results sooner than if you only ever did TOFU content.
Content marketing takes time, usually years before you see results. But by creating first BOFU content and starting by targeting people who are close to converting, you’re likely to see results sooner.
Because the Head of Marketing at RuralBank is targeting people who are close to converting, they’ll start seeing an increase in deposits and conversions from their educational content early on. The HoM can then use these results as a business case to invest more in financial content marketing, or other marketing activities. These types of results also help a lot with guiding the overall marketing strategy, since the HoM now knows which topics and phrases bring in the highest number of deposits.
3. Create content on unique topics
One of the challenges with content marketing for banks is that a lot of the content is similar. Since a lot of banks and credit unions offer similar product, a lot of the content topics are recycled on the same topics:
How to save money
What is a mortgage
How to use a credit card
Again, you’ll probably end up having to create content like this when creating TOFU content. But that doesn’t mean it has to be bland and generic. What is it that your bank does better than any other bank? What’s unique about it? It could be that you target a specific segment of the population, or that you have a unique mission.
In the case of RuralBank, they can cover a lot of content topics that focus on personal finances for someone who lives in a rural area, or a farmer that’s looking to take out a loan. Since RuralBank has worked with a lot of rural-based individuals and businesses, they can also create content that has a unique perspective.
We advocate for creating content that is based on interviews with experts. This avoids the issue of copycat content. RuralBank marketers can interview employees at the bank who know a lot about rural banking to ensure they’re creating content that comes from a position of experience and expertise – rather than just being regurgitated from somewhere else.
You can read more here: Why You Should Create Content Based on Interviews With Experts
4. Offer calculators and online interactive tools
People love using tools to better understand their personal finances. Although there are a whole host of personal finance tools on the market today, as a bank, your institution is in a unique position to be able to use real data and finances that the customer can use.
In the case of RuralBank, they could put together calculators that help a farmer compare business loans that depend on what crops they have, the size of their land, etc. Not only does this help the end customer, but it keeps them engaged and will encourage them to return to your website.
5. Track the right metrics
One of the challenges with content marketing is that it’s hard to attribute and measure results. Marketers usually use marketing-only metrics to measure success, such as traffic, backlinks and time on page. Although these are important for overall strategy, it makes it harder to build a business case for content, and it also makes it harder to attribute deposits to your content marketing efforts.
For example, RuralBank must make sure that they can track first and last click attribution via their marketing CRM so they can see which pieces of content brought in and influenced new customers. With these metrics, it’s a lot easier for the HoM to make a case for content marketing and also understand its contribution to the overall marketing.
Using sales-related metrics like deposits and customers acquired is super important for content marketing. Even though not everything can be tracked, tracking as much as you can allows you to prove marketing’s contribution to acquisition, and also helps direct your marketing campaigns.
Examples of banks doing great content marketing
A lot of the content marketing examples of banks are of banks with enormous marketing budgets. You can’t really copy the content marketing strategy of JP Morgan Chase if you don’t have the same multi million dollar budget. You’re also probably under more pressure to deliver results and with much fewer resources.
It’s also hard to tell whether a content marketing programme is genuinely good without having the full picture. In other words, whether the programme is delivering results on the bank’s marketing goals.
Having said that, here are some examples of banks that from the outside seem to be doing a good job with their content marketing:
1. Live Oak Bank: ranking for keyphrases for business banking
Live Oak Bank’s mission is to become America’s small business bank. Their website has an extensive resource center that covers all topics when it comes to business banking, and you can see that they aren’t worried about getting technical about certain topics.
You can also see that they’ve done a good job of ranking for phrases that they know their ideal customer would be searching for, such as:
People doing research on “expansion business loans” are clearly more ready to buy than someone doing research on “what is business loan”. By targeting keyphrases their ideal market is looking and ranking highly on Google, Live Oak Bank is well positioned to turn a searcher into a customer.
2. Bank of South Texas: interactive calculators
Bank of South Texas is an example of a bank that has gone full on with digital tools, like calculators. You can see examples here:
These types of interactive content encourage readers to interact with your content, and also use tools to better understand their personal finances. Again, a great way to build trust with potential customers.
3. Wise: content that targets people doing research on their competitors
Although Wise are technically a money transfer app rather than a bank, they do allow residents to open a US bank account.
Their content strategy is very clever: target people who are closing or doing research on a bank account with a competitor. Here are some examples:
It’s clever because they are targeting someone who is at the bottom of the marketing funnel and is likely to be ready to buy. Someone who is closing an account with a competitor is more likely to be interested in a Wise account than someone doing research on “savings tips”.
In these pieces of content, Wise answers the searchers’ questions, gives them the information they are looking for and then talks about Wise. By helping the reader answer their question, they can own the narrative and get an opportunity to target “low hanging fruit”.
This is something we’ve done for our financial services clients as well and is consistently the type of content that brings in the most number of customers: Why You Should Write About Your Competitors as a Fintech Company
Content marketing for banks: a must-have for your digital marketing strategy
In this article, we’ve explained why content marketing is so essential for a bank’s digital marketing strategy. Modern day consumers do their research and buy online, and they use brands that create the type of content they want. As a bank, you are uniquely positioned to create authoritative, unique content that helps build trust.
We also went through an example case study to explain how we’d approach written content marketing for a bank, as well as real life examples of banks that are doing a great job with content marketing.
If you’re looking to implement a content marketing programme and need expert support, reach out to us below!