Content marketing for banks
Open Forum is my favorite example that I often give to my customers when I try to explain to them how continuously publishing helpful content can get them a loyal following.
Open Forum is the business help publication from American Express. They regularly publish high-quality information to help small and medium-sized businesses.
In fact, when I recently visited their website, I saw that their tagline is: “Insights, Inspiration and Connections to Help You Get Business Done”.
This information in the form of articles and blog posts isn’t necessarily about banking. In fact, most of the information is about how to improve your professional life, how to do your business well, and sometimes, even life hacks.
For example, recently they published this: 3 Qualities That Can Make or Break High-Performance Teams
The point is, creating positivity and encouraging productivity and through this, building a loyal readership that repeatedly visits the website and gets exposed to the American Express brand.
This Forbes article talks about why, to target young millenniums, it is very important that banks invest in good quality content marketing.
The article lists many reasons – the millenniums spend most of their time on their mobile phones, etc. – the most important reason is being visible in the times when content in all forms has exploded.
Every social networking platform or companies these days wants you to post some form of updates, whether they are images, videos or text. Just post, post and post.
We have become a civilization of content consumers and content publishers. People these days purchase good camera phones, even expensive camera phones, just so that they can publish good-looking photographs and videos on Instagram.
So, with so much content going on, you cannot ignore it.
But, posting random content doesn’t help your brand, especially when you are a bank. Personal content may help or may not help, depending on how strongly that personal brand is built. What do you do?
Content marketing for banks – educate your customers and clients
Educate your customers and clients.
I know, this sounds clichéd, but sharing knowledge and wisdom is a powerful tool.
Take for example the above Open Forum content platform by American Express. Very rarely they promote their banking services, though, you may say that they don’t need to promote their banking services because the brand is quite well-known.
They have built an audience. A loyal audience. Entrepreneurs and businesses can use the insights regularly published on the content platform to grow business and improve themselves.
This generates goodwill. Normally, such useful content isn’t available for free. These are very high-quality blog posts and articles.
Sooner or later, entrepreneurs and businesses have to use financial services. When the right time comes, why go to someone else? You already have a brand you like. You feel like you owe to that brand because you have used its content to improve your business.
In fact, Morgan Stanley also publishes something similar like Open Forum. They call it Ideas.
In the banking sector, even if you don’t want to follow the exact American Express template for content marketing, there is lots of scope for publishing helpful content.
Help for various banking services isn’t easily available. Some helpful blog posts and articles are written by users, but from the banks, very little information is published.
Banks can publish articles on how people can productively use their services for the benefit of their personal lives, professional lives and businesses.
So many people get into credit card troubles. Why can’t a bank start a video series advising people how to productively use credit cards rather than ruining themselves with uncontrollable shopping binges?
Banks have massive amounts of interesting data. They can easily use interactive videos or even infographics with amazing amounts of information on various banking services.