Common misconceptions about content marketing in the banking industry

There are many consultants and marketing professionals that are talking about this new approach to marketing and PR. Some call it Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing or Content Marketing. What ever you call it, there are clearly those who don’t believe this is the right direction for their institution. Today I’m going to highlight some of my favorite rationals as to why this approach is nothing more then a flash in the pan. I’m taking these from my experiences in the financial industry but I’m sure that many of these same excuses exists in other industries.

1. “I’d rather my sales professionals tell my clients what they need to know versus giving the information away for free.”

This is a valid argument if you were living in the pre-Internet age. But the Internet has changed these rules drastically. Just ask your local newspaper how things are faring in the age of the Internet. People today have much greater access to information and because of this, it’s changed their mindset. Now they don’t just look for products when they have a need, they’re doing more to anticipate their needs by gobbling up massive amounts of information on a regular basis. A recent study from the University of California showed that individuals consume 34 Gigabytes a Day! Roger Bohn, a professor of technology management and co-author of the study says in this New York Times article, “Print media has declined consistently, but if you add up the amount of time people spend surfing the Web, they are actually reading more than ever”.

So the bottom line is, either you provide the information your customers are looking for or your competitors will do it for you.

2. “Nobody is going to read the information we provide”

This comes up more frequently in the banking industry because of the perception that financial information is boring and dry. This may be true if you’re talking about watching TV shows such as SquawkBox or reading newspapers like the Financial Times, but the content banks should be providing is your basic run of the mill personal finance – introduction to investing and savings, how to buy your first home and the steps to take. To get an idea of how interested people are in financial topics, one of the more highly competitive areas is retirement. The term, “retirement”, was searched 4,090,000 times in the United States this past year according to Google Adwords. And there is rarley a week or month that goes by where the search for information is slow as you can see from this graph taken from Google Insights for the term “retirement”:

Learn more about this report at the Google Insight page.

But remember, this is just the single term “retirement”. When people search they’re often more detailed then just one word so you have people entering terms such as “401k retirement” or “retirement plans for married couples”. You can imagine just by the shear volume of this individual term how much this subject is looked into by your customers.

3. “Why do I need all this content if it’s already available. Won’t we just be another needle in the haystack?”

A recent study was done by Custom Publications Council that showed 68% of individuals say custom publications influence purchases. For those not aware, custom publishing and content marketing are one and the same. What this tells us is that people are moved more by regular information then they are by advertisements. And many of these publications that use to rely on advertising are changing their business model because they’re starting to recognize that this approach no longer works. The old days of slipping your message into these trusted publications through paid advertisement is going to slowly be phased out.

Instead, banks and credit unions that use to do the advertising can now become the trusted resource for information. However, your mindset has to change. Instead of just being the delivery truck of products that help the readers of the publications solve their problems, you have to first act like the publisher and provide the information before showcasing your products. This approach will build you as a credible resource for financial information and over time, it will better position you to win their business instead of losing out to bigger competitors who already have a brand name in competitive markets such as retirement.

This is a foreign mindset for many bank marketers and it’s not an easy one to reverse. But those who are doing so are reaping the rewards and showing growth in a time when most of their competitors are shedding their assets left and right to stay afloat.