By Lauren Arevalo-Downes
Financial services and insurance marketers today understand the imperative to create engaging content for consumers – to tell the story of your brand, to explain the utility of a particular product, to offer education about the wider marketplace, among other reasons. However, this drive to create content is not always matched with a strategy to ensure that content is leveraged to deliver the optimal bang for buck.
For instance, if you are putting time and energy into creating content for your customer, do you have a publication and distribution plan that effectively supports it and extends its shelf life and value? Being thoughtful about creating numerous touchpoints for your content and packaging it within different formats will maximize both its impact and how it resonates with your target audience.
Below are some key considerations as you evaluate your organization’s content strategy.
Not all the content is for the long haul, and that is OK. There is absolutely merit in creating content with a short shelf-life but high engagement value. Equally, it is important to be honest with yourself about how long your content might reasonably ‘live’ and be useful to consumers. For example, a product launch video is not going to have the same lifespan as a podcast on retirement investment strategies.
Inevitably your support strategy for content that will be relevant for a month versus your strategy for content that will be compelling and searchable for two or more years should be different. It is important to define those differences at the outset and create a plan that elevates a specific piece of content via the timeline that serves it best.
A paid media push with a defined start and end date to support a short-term content piece such as a launch video alongside cohesive organic support, for example, will prove a more effective strategy than it would for content that serves as a reference material and hence has a ‘long tail’ when it comes to potential searches and engagement.
Big-picture thinking is to be encouraged when it comes to where individual pieces of content should live. It is best initially to view your core concept as platform-agnostic, and then begin to identify how that concept could be shaped to fit a variety of platforms. Clearly you want the message that you are promoting to reach the largest possible audience, but that audience is almost certainly dividing its time between multiple different platforms. They use those platforms for different reasons – video on platforms like TikTok and YouTube to break down heady concepts or for deeper dives on niche areas of interest. They look to Google search for general reference or even just to identify resources, and to Instagram and Pinterest for visual references.
While it can feel intimidating to maintain a presence across multiple platforms and to create content tailored for each, I urge you to set those thoughts aside. It is more important to think about what the core messages are that you are working to convey and what value those messages drive for your consumer. How those messages finally take shape and where they should live suddenly becomes simpler.
What can you realistically support in the long-term and are those pieces of content going to provide real usefulness for your consumer in the places they need it? Thinking about your content strategy this way now will be important to keeping your brand adaptable to whatever kinds of platforms the future throws at you.