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Written by: George Cooper
Particularly for smaller firms, the biggest barrier to pulling off an effective marketing strategy (and doing so consistently) is often, and simply, time...or lack of it to be specific.
However you organize your marketing as a firm, one thing’s for sure, somewhere along the funnel you will need content, and plenty of it.
And let’s face it, that can be a challenge.
Particularly in our space, where content simply has to be valuable. It has to be in-depth, credible and useful. Prospective high net worth investors aren’t going to connect with something stale, bland and simplistic. No simple content farm for thou.
Now of course, there are syndicated solutions for advisor content out there, and that might work well for you. However, it can be challenging to find content that is engaging and specific to your clients or prospects.
Even if you are using syndicated content, it’s important to ensure that you incorporate a healthy dose of good quality, original content which is helpful and valuable for your clients and target prospects.
Trust me, I’ve implemented original content strategies into advisory firms once or twice in my time and it’s very satisfying to watch engagement go through the roof. Valuable content is not just a ‘nice to have’.
But how do you actually create it? Particularly as a small firm with no dedicated marketing team.
Introduce what I refer to as ‘the content multiplier effect’.
This is the idea of taking a single piece of ‘pillar content’, a long-form piece such as a blog post, podcast or article and creating multiple pieces of ‘micro content’ with minimal time and effort.
With this approach, you can easily create a lot more content than you think.
Let’s say you or your team can commit to creating a long-form content-rich blog post per month. Well, from there you can easily fill your social media channels, create a client or prospect newsletter and more.
Let’s run with our example a little more. Assume your long-form blog post is your ‘pillar content’. From here we can adapt and easily create other pieces.
You might, for example, create a monthly email newsletter to clients or prospects. Simply add an intro paragraph to your blog post content and... congratulations you have a newsletter ready to send. That wasn’t rocket science.
How about social posts?
All you have to do now is take an idea, theme or quote from the post, create a banner image (ideally in your brand colours) and link back to the blog post.
As if by magic you now have an original social post too. Rinse and repeat 3-4 times and drip feed these posts across the month to keep your feed fresh.
And there you have it, an outrageously simple multichannel marketing strategy made entirely of original content.
Is it a sophisticated, segmented strategy? Absolutely not.
And of course, many firms are already well ahead of this, but for those who struggle to be able to create consistent, valuable content, this is an easy method to get you up and running.
Some tools and tricks:
Plan your content in advance: there’s nothing that creates writer’s block more than sitting down to write a piece without knowing where to start! Have a simple plan a few months in advance; it can be in a spreadsheet, fancy task management tool or the back of an envelope. Just have something.
Use Hemmingway: Hemmingway is a great tool to help you keep your content simple, clear and to the point.
Create Banners: Social media is visual and for your micro-posts, creating banners with quotes and images is always a good start. Try canva.com as an easy tool to get started, and for those of you into automation take a look at bannerbear.com (it’s pretty cool).
Drip feed your posts with a social media scheduler: Batching tasks is great, so create all your posts in one go and schedule them to be drip-fed over the course of the month. Buffer.com and publer.io are great options; these tools also give you analytics so you can see what’s performing well.