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87% of buyers state that online content has a moderate or major impact on their selection of vendor or product
Ok, you accept that your online content will have an impact on brand reputation, customer engagement and bottom line business outcomes, so you’ve developed a content marketing strategy for your financial services firm. Now you are busy posting excellent, engaging, relevant and interesting content to your digital channels.Job done, right. Well, not exactly. Now it’s time to think about leveraging your content, increasing its reach, and ensuring that it is being seen and heard by your target audience. With the aim of cementing a positive image of your business and creating strong relationships with your existing and potential customer.
Sounds like what you need is a PR strategy, so here are some simple tips to help PR your content strategy.
1. SEO optimisation is king
Last week’s blog, “The unlikely marriage of PR and SEO”, describes the new reality of integrated public relations, which is that PR and SEO go hand in hand.
After all, they are both about reaching the right people, making connections and creating visibility, which means that your search results and your reputation are directly linked.
Page 1 of Google search results is the new “front page”, so working out ways of appealing to Google’s algorithm is your best shot at getting front page coverage. For our five tips to achieve this, look here.
2. Owned content or earned media – it’s not an either/or
There’s never enough budget for everything, so it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you should either produce content to fill your owned publishing outlets, or take the traditional approach of preparing stories for media. Our recent eBook, “The new PR narrative and what it means to financial services” talks about the need to embrace the holy trinity of owned, paid and earned media because the reality is that a successful integrated public relations strategy uses a mixture of both.
Content marketing drives thought-leadership, page-ranking advantage and develops trust between your brand and your target market, but PR plays just as important, complementary role. Because media outlets rank highly on search engines, earned media can be very powerful in amplifying your messages and driving potential customers to your brand.
3. Think PR to make your content more appealing to the public
We all know that good content is engaging, relevant and useful to its audience, but it can be easy to become increasingly inward and less outward-looking over time. It’s tempting to focus too much on getting your own brand messages out there, and lose sight of the bigger picture.
By thinking like a PR professional, you start to think about what stories will be of most interest generally, what the media would be interested in, for example, what has public appeal, and what will catch your audience’s attention.
If you can create this kind of interesting content, your audience, and the world at large will love it.
You can also download our six-step guide to content marketing for financial services here:
