Full-Service Content Marketing Agency for Financial Services

Unlike other agencies, we focus on Pain-Point SEO to produce SEO content that drives conversions. We prioritize content ideas around high-intent keywords over high-volume keywords with the goal of driving conversions.

Financial services businesses that have grown through outbound selling or referrals frequently reach a point where they ask, “How do we scale this?” But how can we scale it?

They’ll then generally choose one of a few various methods to scale.

They may look to create marketing initiatives or test out a few channels independently. After all, shouldn’t the founders and early employees be capable of performing lead generation via outbound sales?

I mean, shouldn’t they be able to switch and do demand generation through search engine optimization (SEO), sponsored media, or executing on a content strategy since that’s what they’re good at.

They could also have considered employing an inside marketing team. This is generally based on the belief that a marketing executive has a lot of expertise and can produce qualified leads because they worked at a different firm. Alternatively, a marketing team should solve the issue of earning enough leads to more than cover their salaries.

Thirdly, many financial institutions consider engaging a content marketing firm or even multiple SEO and content marketing firms to meet demand. Typically, those who attempt this approach assume that employing someone to improve calls before hiring internally and replacing their agency would be less expensive and more efficient.

Many businesses have gone through all of these options before discovering that, in the end, each had unforeseen difficulties.

In this post, you’ll discover:

• The most common mistakes that financial institutions make when they reach a scaling point in their operations.
• Why hiring a marketing agency isn’t always the best solution for scaling your business leads.
• Why Content Takeoff is considered to be a world-leading financial services content marketing agency

After this post, you’ll learn how to avoid the most common mistakes that financial companies make while selecting the best agency.

Looking to work with a financial services content marketing agency? We have a team of SEO and Content experts that would be happy to talk with you. Head over to our  Work With Us page to start a conversation.

The classic pitfalls that financial services firms fall into when they reach a scaling point in their businesses

Finding the initial $400K in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is not unusual for financial firms. They may reach $400K MRR without planning any marketing or demand creation strategies into their operations at all.

To be honest, this is quite amazing. It’s no easy task to see long-term development without any marketing.

However, once a company reaches this stage, it usually encounters a scaling difficulty. To continue growing recurring income and business development, they must significantly scale demand to keep up with the growth.

The most popular answer at this point is for the founders or executives to attempt to solve the problem on their own. This happens since those who have developed businesses are more likely to act quickly.

Unfortunately, this seldom works as they anticipate.

While they may have excelled at scaling a sales model, it is tough to develop a marketing strategy for a financial services business. There’s a lot of room for error.

When you’re employing SEO and content, the cost of making a mistake may be months of lost time while you wait to find out whether your marketing efforts are working. And if you want to expand through PPC, it’s easy to waste a lot of money before you realize it’s time to bring in some specialists.

It’s usually at this point that they’ll consider bringing in a team of marketers from within.

It is challenging for several reasons:

1. The onboarding process takes time – For a marketer to be integrated into the firm – marketing hires arrive cold. They need to figure out the company’s inner workings and undergo cultural training, limiting their effectiveness in the first six months of their new career.
2. Mishires are pretty common, even after a marketer has been onboarded.- Many financial companies frequently hire the wrong individual. Perhaps the position they were looking for isn’t what’s really moving the needle. Or the new employee appeared confident at the interview but failed to produce the desired results or even viable leads.
3. The content marketing talent market is extremely competitive.– Since the market for contractors is so attractive to content marketing experts, financial businesses have difficulty finding full-time employees.

When trying to grow their financial firm, many people choose to hire an outside agency as the final option.

While this is usually the ideal approach, businesses encounter a few typical issues while selecting the best financial services content marketing agency for them.

Related: Best Way to Generate Leads Using Content Marketing for Financial Services (Our Methodology)

Hiring an agency isn’t always the best option for developing an effective content marketing strategy.

When hiring an agency, several major blunders may waste clients’ valuable marketing money, causing them to stall development due to their inability to attract high-quality leads and, eventually, good-fit consumers consistently.

No specific financial expertise

You probably found this page on Google, and if you did, you’d know that when you type in ‘financial planner for small businesses,‘ you get a lot of people claiming that they’re the top financial planners.

You even likely saw a page with an extensive list of 9 Financial Planning Tips for Small Business Owners.’

But here’s the thing: the biggest failure of financial service providers on the first page of Google for this search term is that they cannot connect the financial services business model with their tactical approach to lead generation.

Many financial service companies’ blog posts on their site have beginner-level information that the target audience cares less about.

Look at the tips the writer above covered.

Remember: The decision-makers in a small business are busy CEOs, Finance Directors, etc. Is it necessary to tell them they need to separate personal and business goals?

Do experienced CEOs need not know that? Is that even a problem in their business?

Let’s look at some common indicators of a financial services company.

• Using the term’ financial planning for small businesses to describe themselves
• The bulk of content about related financial terms on their blog does not address actual customer pain points.
• Their content lacks originality and credibility. The content is too generic.
• They frequently speak about ‘growth hacks.’

There would be no issue if the financial business model didn’t demand a specific knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. After all, marketing a financial firm isn’t the same as e-commerce or product companies.

Getting more leads for a financial company necessitates specialized skills that aren’t readily available in horizontally integrated agencies (i.e., agencies lacking substantial financial marketing knowledge).

This gets worse when you consider all of the non-marketing elements involved in growing a financial company:

• What was the challenge the customers were trying to solve
• What challenges do your customers have before buying?
• Why did customers choose your firm over the alternatives?

Unfortunately, many financial businesses obtain the same services and tactics as their marketing agency provides to mom-and-pop eateries. This results in significant amounts of money being spent on ineffective PPC campaigns and time, effort, and energy.

Offering tactical hacks without proper customer research

Hiring for tactical execution without strategic insight through customer research is another high-risk area where financial firms go wrong when hiring an agency.

It’s extremely common for financial service providers to hire a content marketing agency specializing in SEO, PPC, or content marketing. While that’s fantastic to have someone working on a channel you believe will expand your business, the fact is that unless the firm can generate content ideas aligned to your best customer’s actual pain points, you’ll continue wasting money.

Tactics without customer pain point strategy are like throwing darts blindfolded: you might hit the bullseye once in a while, but you’ll frequently miss the entire board.

No fool-proof methodology for converting leads to customers

The lack of a clear growth strategy is the final area where most content marketing agencies fall short: no proven methodology for growth.

It’s important first to establish whether you have a financial services marketing agency that understands the business model and can also deliver on sponsored media, content, SEO, and demand creation. There are simply not enough agencies with a consistent methodology that they can point to and say: “This is how you’ll grow if you hire us.“

Without that approach, every project begins from scratch. This is most apparent when:

• The staff or contractors the agency hires will have their own ideas on accomplishing the task.
• There is no formal method for getting started. (We’ve discovered that the first 100 days of a client engagement are important to its success or failure.)
• Scattergun style of determining which marketing efforts to prioritize and which to de-prioritize

Unfortunately, this happens far too frequently, and many clients who have engaged Content Takeoff to assist them in growing their business have previously been disappointed by other ‘content marketing agencies.’

Why Content Takeoff is considered to be a world-leading financial services content marketing agency

We’ve established where founders and executives go wrong in their quest for financial services content marketing services.

Next, we will look at how Content Takeoff avoids the common pitfalls and why broadly considered to be one of the top content marketing agencies for financial services in the world.

1. Deep grasp of financial services marketing

We only work with financial services clients, unlike other marketing firms.

That is why, over the years, we’ve acquired a deep and detailed knowledge of how financial businesses grow.

Related: Why I Created a Content Marketing Agency for Financial Services

We do this by openly documenting our whole approach, as well as significant expertise, on our blog (much like you’re doing right now).

This isn’t simply about winning inbound leads. Our expertise and insight are some of our most important resources. We’re delighted to share them with financial service entrepreneurs looking to expand their businesses.

Here is a good example to prove our expertise: Best Way to Generate Leads Using Content Marketing for Financial Services (Our Methodology)

Any content marketing agency you work with should help you think about your best customer’s pain points.

For us, customer research is to discover who your best customers are and their pain points. Thinking about conversion rate optimization is not just academic- we know exactly how it impacts your ROI.

We know how to learn from customer research and produce blog posts that strategically attract your best customers and directly attribute our content to positive ROI.

2. Content Strategy vs. Content Hacks

We differ from many other firms in that we place a high value on strategic versus tactical thinking.

Many agencies treat each channel they’re working on as a unique and autonomous initiative.

However, growth in the financial sector does not work this way.

In fact, when you’re thinking about content marketing, you should also consider running sponsored social media ads to that content to generate revenue.

We are considered one of the best content marketing agencies for financial services in the market because we lead the herd. We don’t just publish content and wait for Google to do its magic. We also don’t just post on the client’s social media accounts a few times.

Instead, we drive significant traffic to our own articles.

We combine paid ads to give a short-term boost in traffic, followed by long-term sustainable organic traffic that helps grow traffic over time.

We provide a unique service that is both cost-effective and efficient. Clients do not have to spend extra money because we offer it as a package. We believe that it distinguishes us from the competition as one of the world’s best financial services content marketing organizations!

3. Our Uniques Growth Methodology

Our unique methodology may be why we are one of the most reputable financial services marketing firms in the business. We can forecast growth and generate leads for financial services businesses.

While every single client is unique, every financial service company has a similar set of needs: generate more leads that will turn into high lifetime value (LTV) customers.

Using this approach, we go through six stages to achieve… you guessed it… consistent lead generation for your business:

1. Evaluating Site SEO Performance, so you know exactly what to focus on to increase your leads.
2. Understanding Your Customer’s Goals and Pain Points
3. Finding Out Why Your Visitors Aren’t Converting
4. Writing content that specifically addresses your best customer’s pain points. Not just generic content with stuffed keywords.
5. Driving Right Fit Traffic through Paid and Organic Channels
6. Measuring Results, Generating Insights and Reporting on Results. You’ll judge us by the leads we generate, not just the content we create.

We’ll jump into a new project and start working on it right away because we have previously completed work in the same area. This means that with each client engagement, we don’t have to start from scratch—we already know how to sequence our activities, and all of our team members can think about a client’s business goals and objectives.

Closing words

Many financial service companies will fall into the trap of hiring a content marketing agency that:

1. Doesn’t understand the financial business model
2. Isn’t able to connect content ideas to customer’s real pain points
3. Has no proven methodology for financial services growth

Content Takeoff is a world-leading financial service content marketing agency with a proven methodology for growing leads for our clients through content marketing and SEO.

If you’re ready to commit a minimum of 3 months to content marketing, have a strong product customer market fit, and want to make lead generation a priority, we can help you scale your conversions at record-breaking speeds.

What you should do now

Whenever you’re ready…here are four ways we can help you expand your financial service business using a content marketing strategy:

1) Claim your Free SEO Audit. If you’d like to work with us to turn your website into your best lead generation tool, claim your FREE SEO Website Audit. Our content strategist will understand your current lead generation situation and then suggest practical content marketing strategies to double your leads, traffic, and conversion fast.

2) If you’d like to find out how to enhance your website SEO, get our Comprehensive SEO Audit for $299. The targeted suggestions you’ll discover are simple to understand and follow, allowing your company to make better decisions about where to invest its time and energy in order to gain a competitive advantage.

3) If you want to double your leads, we’ll use the exact system and formula we use to transform other websites into powerful lead-generating, money-making marketing machines in just a matter of weeks – AND for a fraction of the cost you usually pay.

4) If you know another marketer or financial service provider who’d enjoy reading this post, share it with them via email, Linkedin, Twitter, or Facebook.