You’ve invested in great financial planning content – perhaps articles, videos and newsletters. How do you get a large audience?
Of course, numbers are not everything. It is better to have a smaller, highly relevant audience than a large, irrelevant one. However, if you are able to grow the first audience over time, this is likely to yield better results for your business.
Remember, you do not want readers just for the sake of it. Ultimately, you want these readers to take some kind of action. Perhaps you want them to refer your content to other relevant readers. Or, maybe you want them to reach out with a consultation request.
Below, our team at Clients+ shares some ideas about how to maximise the readership of your financial planning content.
We hope this is useful to you. If you’d like to check out our content library of articles, videos, guides and newsletters for financial planners, log into Clients+ to browse our online content range.
Revisit your SEO strategy
Want more readers for your financial planning articles? Organic channels – such as Google Search – can be a great option.
There are many moving parts involved with search engine optimisation (SEO). Here, the aim is to increase traffic from search engines to your website. Part of this process requires that you publish original, high-quality and relevant content that appeals to users.
You need to be careful here to craft bespoke content for your blog (off-the-shelf content will not help with SEO). Moreover, these articles and landing pages need to target keywords used by your audience. Careful research is needed to uncover what these are.
Over time, Google will start to notice your website content and start “crawling” it to check the quality. If the algorithm determines that your content is better than other content currently displayed in its search results, then they might push your content up the rankings.
With high search engine rankings in decent search results, your financial planning content can steadily receive more readers from organic search. The good news is that this type of website traffic is usually very high quality compared to many other digital channels.
Bear in mind, however, that SEO takes a lot of time and work to get right. You need a good strategy, and patience, to make it work.
Try display advertising
Google Ads can be a great tool to increase your brand reach – if you know how to use it.
Display advertising is a particular way of using Google Ads. Instead of showing ads in Google search results, it shows your graphic-based ads on other websites (e.g. in the side-bar) to visitors, based on specific criteria that you define in your account settings.
Display ads can be great because the cost is typically much lower for financial planners compared to search ads. Also, it has the power to get your content in front of more pairs of eyes, since your ads are not just limited to the people actively making searches.
The drawback, of course, is that this approach is more “interruptive” than search ads. However, display ads are not usually intrusive to the user experience on another website (unless that website, itself, is poorly-designed).
There are many ways you can use display advertising with your financial planning content. For instance, perhaps you can promote your latest pension transfer guide to people who visit certain financial-based blogs, forums or media outlets.
By clicking on the ad, the user can be directed to your content page. Here, they can download your PDF and subscribe to your newsletter.
Optimise your social media
Want to get your financial planning content in front of social media users? Consider publishing on your Facebook, LinkedIn or other business accounts – e.g. once per week – to try and get more referral traffic from these channels.
You need to manage your expectations with social media, however. In 2022, most popular platforms in the UK will limit how often business content (e.g. blogs from company pages) appears in users’ news feeds. To gain more exposure, you are going to need to pay.
Facebook, for instance, lets you do this through the “Boost Post” feature. You can also try tools like Facebook Ads to be more targeted and specific with your content promotions. Whatever you try, however, make sure you have a clear strategy for your social channels.
In particular, what do you want social media users to do when they see your financial planning content? One option is to try and direct them to your content on your website. However, bear in mind that this is not in the interests of social media like Facebook, which want to keep users on their platform (i.e. to continue seeing advertising).
It might be better, therefore, to focus on using your content promotions to try and build up your social media “followers”. These people, over time, can start to become a community of brand advocates who really value – and look forward to – seeing your content.
Build your subscribers
Your client newsletter is a great way to increase readership for your financial planning content.
If you have not yet started one, then consider creating a strategy for a monthly (or quarterly) client newsletter. This should contain great content that will appeal to your clients – answering questions they have, and addressing their pain points.
You can also use a newsletter to gain new prospective clients. For example, you could include a powerful call-to-action (CTA) on your website to invite people to receive more content – similar to that which they are enjoying on the blog.
Social media and display advertising can also be useful avenues to build up your newsletter subscribers. The great benefit of having an email list (unlike having social media “followers”) is that this truly “belongs” to you, and is not subject to the whims of an algorithm.
