You Need a Plan and the Right Components
Content creation is a lot like building furniture; you need a plan and the right components. Say you’re heading to IKEA to redesign your media room. If you skip past the showroom and grab whatever pieces look nice off of the warehouse shelves, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with an unusable conglomerate of furniture pieces that don’t combine to create anything useful, not to mention useless directions. The point? You need a strategy before you ever hit the store. Creating content for your business is no different! Here are seven easy steps to building cohesive content that works for your business.
What Are Your Goals?
Creating purposeful content starts by identifying tangible, reachable goals within a timeline. Figure out what your business goal is for the year. Pro tip: write it down! If you can’t summarize your goal in writing, it might be too abstract. For example, if your goal is “Grow my business,” that doesn’t necessarily give you a starting point or measurable success. Instead, narrow it down a bit to reflect your long-term goal: “I want to grow my assets under management by 20%.” By getting more specific, you have a target number you can use to track your progress and adjust strategy as needed throughout the year. You also have a path: attracting new clients.
Who Do You Need To Reach?
If you want to grow your assets under management by 20%, you’ll have more success by creating content that focuses on a specific demographic. A prospect will rarely choose to work with you after seeing just one post, video, or blog, so the more content you can create to reach your target audience, the higher your likelihood of converting leads. Let’s say you decide to focus on gaining new clients who are widowed women near or at retirement age.
What Action Do You Need From Your Target Audience?
Once you have a goal (your “what”) and a target audience (your “who”), it’s fairly simple to find your “how.” In order to grow your AUM by 20% by focusing on widowed women in their mid-60s and up, you need to get your target audience to engage before they’ll transfer their investment accounts over to your management. Start small, like inviting them to sign up for a monthly newsletter, interacting in an online poll, scheduling a call, or attending an educational event sponsored by your firm.
Where Is Your Target Audience?
Creating content with purpose is just as much about where you post as it is about what you post. Your main demographic is female, retired, and widowed; posting financial planning tips for women on Tik Tok or Instagram is not likely to do much for you. Facebook, on the other hand, is a platform that a large portion of your target audience is likely to use, so that’s where you should focus on posting and advertising. Get a deep-dive into advertising strategies here.
Are There Relevant Deadlines?
When planning out your content for the month, it’s useful to look at holidays or deadlines to make your content more relevant. Is it tax season? Consider creating content for someone who could be filing taxes on their own for the first time. Similarly, January is a great time to share content about Medicare Advantage enrollment or Financial New Year’s resolutions, like Fiscal Fitness 101.
What Are Their Needs?
The financial planning industry is just as much about meeting clients’ emotions as it is about managing their portfolios. Compassionately addressing the needs of your clients transforms you from a salesperson to a trusted ally. For example, UBS reported that while 85% of women manage day-to-day expenses, only 23% manage long-term planning. Since financial planning is new territory to the majority of your target demographic, they’re likely to resonate with content that educates and makes the unknown feel manageable. The bottom line? Build trust. Understand the needs of your demographic and offer real, valuable solutions.
Get Specific and Make a Plan!
Finding the needs of your target audience gives you a category from which to pull specific content topics, like “How to apply for Social Security survivor benefits for your kids” or “Tax strategies for inherited IRAs.” It’s also helpful to create a monthly blog and video on the same topic, from which you can pull quotes or clips throughout the month. Use our downloadable to help you create a content schedule, and take it from there!