Is Financial Services Content Marketing The New Black?

Orange may be the new black in streaming video, but is financial services content marketing, and digital marketing in general, the new black online?

Probably not. But it does seem as if content marketing produced about financial services content marketing is in vogue lately.

When you toil in relative obscurity, as most mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers (and those who support them on the outside) do, the spotlight can be jarring. The initial reaction may be giddiness that somebody is paying attention...and then there's unease, “Hmm, let's hope they’ve paid close enough attention to get this right.”

Most of what's being published is "right." Some of the reports include useful insights. What I object to are the sweeping generalizations, the reports that are lightly researched and/or derivative, and the errors. If this is financial services content marketers' day in the sun, I'd like to see the breakthrough work that's being done, including the creative and innovative solutions that are being identified, get acknowledged. 

Financial Services Trails And Often Fails...

In March, I took exception to the start of a Content Marketing Institute post that sized up the state of content marketing in the financial services industry this way:

…financial service providers often fail to build and execute dynamic content marketing programs. Instead, they frequently rely on tried-and-true, but far less creative, tactics. Cue the deluge of exceedingly dry white papers and webinars, and the direct mail magazines that often just wind up in the trash.

To be clear, the problem isn’t a lack of effort, and it’s certainly not a lack of high-quality content. Instead, it’s the way the industry seemingly operates under the misconception that its heavy regulatory burdens both preclude and exempt it from taking a creative approach to content. Remember, those regulations are predominantly focused on what’s being said, not the style and delivery of the message.

Another problem is a palpable anxiety about the unknown that clearly stifles innovation and discourages a clear point of view.

The absence of a point of view? Uh, no, that doesn't characterize 90% of the work I see. I felt that this was a narrowly informed assessment. It partly redeemed itself by singling out three examples of creativity from Putnam Investments (the Retirement Savings Challenge blog), Credit Suisse (The Financialist digital magazine) and SunLife Financial's BrighterLife Website.

Or Maybe Financial Services Is Pioneering...?

A few weeks ago, an entirely different sentiment was expressed.  

In what must be one of the least commented (1 comment) and shared Huffington Post posts ever (financial services marketing may not yet be a mainstream topic), a strategist from Contently.com on October 15 proclaimed: "Over the past few years, we've seen some of the biggest brand publishing success stories come from the financial industry and across the full spectrum of financial services.”

You can download the 26-page ebook Banking on Content: How the Finance Industry is Pioneering the New Marketing for Contently’s take featuring mostly U.S. examples from BlackRock, Prudential, Fidelity, Putnam (again with the Retirement Savings Challenge blog) and Credit Suisse (The Financialist again).

They lost me on page 4 with the statement: "…the industry has to contend with two major agencies that regulate their media use: the Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Financial Industry Regulator Authority."

The FSA was a regulatory body in the UK abolished six months ago. It’s the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. And, there's no mention of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) or the SEC?

The Rise Of Digital Marketing In 2013?

It’s not unusual for marketing automation provider Marketo to publish ebooks focused on digital marketing and verticals. There’s “The State of Content Marketing & Social Media in the Medical & Fitness Industries” and “The Doctor Will See You Now: Lessons for Marketing in the Healthcare Industry.”

Marketing automation makes sense for many firms in this space and I know of implementations where it's adding value. My issue is limited to Marketo’s financial services ebook, which starts with the title: “Don't Get Left Behind: The Rise of Digital Marketing in Financial Services.”

According to the Financial Brand, 40% of financial marketers’ budgets was devoted to digital in 2013. In order to command that much of the budget this year, the rise of digital marketing would have been years ago.

I'll also push back on the assertion that “…financial institutions are holding themselves back by being unwilling to change with the times.” The statement appears on the same page as a bar chart that shows one of the top concerns in adopting digital marketing tactics is "inability to prove ROI." Seems like a legitimate concern, and one that's more on-point than willingness or unwillingness to change with the times.

You can download the report, which cites Credit Suisse (whose The Financialist is cited again), SunLife (BrighterLife again) and Allianz among others.

A Smarter Take

As I was wrapping up this post, I heard from someone who’s in the B2B content marketing business. Angela Long of Reputation Capital and I had talked several weeks ago, and she was following up with her whitepaper titled—wait for it—“Content Marketing for Financial Services.”

Although most of the content is directed to financial institutions, one of the case studies is about Putnam. I’d rank Putnam as one of the top content marketers in this space, and this pieces shows they have more to talk about than just their retirement blog.

There’s little to fault in this information-packed paper, which includes a few quotes from me. You can download it here.

Take It From Someone Who Does It

Ultimately, industry practitioners may be the most reliable source to turn to for an accurate, real-time look at how financial services digital marketing, including content and social tactics, is evolving.

Slowly, the investment strategists, money managers and product people are finding their public voices. I can't wait until CMO-types start getting out there, pointing to what they recognize as ground-breaking and promoting their own firms’ good work. This will help all around but most especially in recruiting the kinds of creative and innovative talent that mutual funds and ETFs need to go forward.

It’s from August, but here’s a best practice presentation from Augie Ray, Prudential’s Director of Social Media Strategy that I came across in a post published last week on Social Media Today.

How are financial services firms, including Vanguard, Fidelity, Ameriprise, USAA and Zurich, using social media to help resolve the trust gap? Ray provides excellent context and good examples.

LIMRA/LOMA Conference Presentation: Rising above the Noise: Facebook’s EdgeRank and Solving the Trust Gap

from

Augie Ray

Marketing, IT Need To Work On Their Relationship

Given the digital nature of every business today, there is no more important a function for Marketing to align with than Information Technology (IT), says an Accenture research study released last week.

And yet, according to its provocative findings, CIOs and CMOs can’t even align over that statement. Nearly eight out of 10 CIOs agree that Marketing/IT alignment is needed, compared to just over half of CMOs surveyed.

Financial services represented the biggest sector (35% for CMOs and 37% CIOs) in the 2012 Accenture Interactive CMO-CIO Insights survey of more than 400 senior Marketing executives and 250 senior IT executives across 10 countries.

Is The Marketing Function A Priority For IT?

The study details CMO and CIO priorities and where the disconnects occur. Even though 45% (still, less than half) of CIOs report that they put Marketing near or at the top of their priorities, more than six out of 10 (64%) CMOs think Marketing is at the bottom of the CIO’s priority list.

More than three in 10 CMOs (38%) feel that IT keeps Marketing out of the loop. In fact, one-third of CIOs agree that’s what happens and 35% say they don’t provide the time and technical resources to help. For their part, CIOs also believe that Marketing bypasses IT to work directly with vendors.

The graph above shows the “Internal obstacles faced by CMOs in implementing solutions to further Marketing effectiveness.” There’s a companion graph from the CIO perspective.

A few other findings:

• The CIO’s #1 priority is advancing platforms to aid in Marketing measurement and campaign optimization. That ranks #8 out of 16 priorities for CMOs.

• The CMO's #1 priority is deploying better Marketing execution and operational systems and platforms. That ranks #6 for CIOs.

• Some 30% of CIOs want to further the use of social media and online listening and contact systems; only 24% of CMOs do. (Sorry, Marketing peeps, I have to throw in with IT on this one.)

There is a lot here that ran true for me and may for you, too. Download the PDF to read the full report and recommendations for how improved trust and transparency can save this relationship. For an earlier Rock The Boat Marketing post on one solution posed by others (Chief Marketing Technologist), see “Would This Help Avoid Marketing/IT Collisions?”

Good Example: Morningstar Experiments With Vine

For an example of digital experimentation in our space by a company you know, check out Morningstar’s “Investing is…” campaign.

Two weeks before its annual conference (which wrapped in Chicago Friday), Morningstar started to promote the use of the relatively new mobile app Vine. Conference attendees and others were encouraged to download the app and then use its 6-second looping video format to complete the line “Investing is…” Finished videos were to be tweeted to @MStarAdvisor.

Embedded below is one of my favorite contributed Vines (un-mute using the control in the upper right-hand corner) and then go here to see more. Be sure to click on the Older link at the bottom of the page, I prefer the homemade videos to those shot at the conference. I’ve also subscribed to the RSS feed.

When I first heard about Vine, I don't remember thinking that the format was particularly obvious or even suited to financial advisor communications. Vine is too new for Morningstar to have established an elaborate business case in support of its adoption. This is just Morningstar taking a flyer.

Brevity Inspires Creativity

According to Twitter, which acquired Vine in January, “it’s the brevity of the video that inspires creativity.”

Markets, investment opportunities and products—mostly that’s what the Morningstar conference is about. The conference makes the assumption, almost never stated and rarely explored, is that the advisors have the requisite relationship and communication skills.

But, in a bit of scheduling magic, creativity was the subject of Thursday’s luncheon speaker. Graffiti artist and corporate thought leader (love the title!) Erik Wahl encouraged attendees to break out of whatever structure that constrains them and to allow themselves to create. He delivered this message while painting no fewer than three paintings as he spoke. The audience loved it.

And, that’s where the call to creativity might have dead-ended, if not for the conference sponsor’s promotion of Vine. Vine enables the kind of creative construction that Wahl would approve of. To make a Vine, all of us windbags (present company included) in this space need to strip down to what’s essential.

Short can sometimes be more meaningful, as tweeting has already demonstrated. This is a message with wide resonance, as suggested by the popularity of Vine. Released for iOS in January, Vine Sunday ranked #4 in the Apple app store. It was introduced for Android devices just on June 3 and, by Sunday, shot to #5 in the Google Play Store.      

A Good Fit

Introducing Vine was a social-savvy thing to do, for these reasons: 

• It aligned with what Morningstar does. Morningstar supported conversations about investing well before social networking platforms and in print pre-Web. Demystifying investing is at the core of the company's value proposition.
• It was an open invitation. All were invited to contribute, not just advisors registered for the conference and not just advisors. A few in the broader ecosystem have already made Vines, but I'd expect others (including asset managers) to make more. 
  
  Similar to the Morningstar conference hashtag that’s used in the flurry of tweets commenting when the program content is underway, this extends Morningstar’s reach beyond the conference venue. Vines have a longer life than conference hashtag tweets, though, which extends the reach of the conference over time.
  
  In fact, I’d wager a guess that last week there was more Vine awareness online than onsite among attendees. Morningstar’s post-conference communications can fix that.
• The “Investing Is…” Vines are being aggregated on a Tumblr blog. Even the Morningstar content machine can benefit from a new source of user-generated and user-promoted content.
• Introducing the Vine campaign demonstrates a nimbleness that not all organizations have. Major legacy (Morningstar was celebrating its 25th year) events seek to shorten not lengthen the list of outstanding items in the final weeks leading up to the event. A last-minute brainchild is not a program planner’s friend. Yet, this idea was announced at the end of May.
  
  The Vines that have been produced thus far are a ragtag collection and probably don't represent the full extent of the creativity we are going to see. Until a few days ago, Vines by Morningstar staffers outnumbered others'. The Vines weren’t as integrated into the conference as they might have been with more time. But, sometimes you just have to go with it, and evidently social media whiz Leslie Marshall (official title: Director – Events, Magazine and Social Media) has that license. Credit for the idea itself goes to Jerry Kerns, Morningstar's editor-in-chief.

I mention all of the above not because I think Vine is transformative or even long lasting. I like this as an example of a quick hit. So many digital projects are War and Peace epics—based on extensive vetting, consensus-building and research, featuring a large cast of characters and years in the making. And yet, the very nature of digital lends itself to fast track, quick hit experiments.

Even while understanding and respecting your communications structure/constraints, I’m still going to ask: What has your digital marketing organization experimented with lately?

A Few More Notes 

• More than #MIC25 8,000 tweets were sent during the Morningstar conference. Yet—and while I don’t have the data to back this up—my sense is that fewer asset managers used the hashtag this year than in previous years. An exception: @Vanguard_FA, which also mixed with tweeps at the tweet-up.
  
  Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms were well represented on the conference program and they were out in force as exhibitors and as advertisers. But I think more could have contributed to the online conversation.
• Morningstar’s Social Media Center was hopping again this year, thanks to the RegEd team headed by Blane Warrene. Blane recorded several podcasts from the conference floor, including with ETF strategist Christian Magoon, Carl Richards of The Behavior Gap, Morningstar team members and me. 
  
• On the occasion of Morningstar's 25th anniversary, Vanguard co-founder John Bogle was scheduled as a general session speaker (in conversation with Don Phillips) to provide a historical perspective. But he's far from pleased with how the industry has evolved, including the marketing of investment products. RIAbiz covered the session, including reactions, one of which is from me. 
• My thanks to Morningstar for the invitation to attend the conference.  

You Know You're A Digital Marketer If...

Recently MarketingProfs asked its Facebook group to finish the sentence: “You know you’re a marketer if…” About 17 responses were then illustrated and shared yesterday in the presentation embedded below.

You Know You're a Marketer If... (17 Signs You're a Marketer) from MarketingProfs

I’d like to flatter the feature by imitating it, sort of. Digital marketers can benefit from a self-awareness exercise, too, but Rock The Boat Marketing doesn’t have the reach that MarketingProfs does. We'd be waiting quite a while if I tried to crowdsource responses to the “You know you’re a digital marketer if…”

So, I’ll go first with my list, shown below. But, please don’t leave me hanging out here all alone—mutual fund and ETF digital marketers (others welcome, too!), add your own contributions in the Comments below.

You know you’re a digital marketer if…

QR Is Never Far From Your Mind

You’re sitting in a pew at Catholic Mass, joining the choir in a spirits-lifting song. Your sister leans over and whispers, “I want this song sung at my funeral.”

Your response, also whispered: “Each song in the songbook should have a QR code so whenever there’s a random statement like this we could capture it. We’d just scan the code and the code could be added to a funeral service page layout assembly program on the Web. So, the program can be built over time and not all at the last minute and in fresh grief.” Bewildered, your sister nods her head and looks away.

Digital First—And Sometimes Only

You mark the sale of your house (after 2.5 years on the market) by hosting a mammoth two-day garage sale featuring all kinds of abandoned tech (digital pens, early ebook readers, MiniDisc players, you get the idea). You press friends and family into donating a few hours of service to staff the sale. But the turnout is disappointing, and idle talk turns into an inquisition about what kind of advertising was done.

“What do you mean that you didn’t advertise in the community newspapers? What? The only advertising you did was online? Are you serious? Not everyone is online, Pat. Typical.”

Gifts That Endure

You give domain names to children as gifts, certain that these will be treasured for years to come. And, gradually realize that the gift is a lot like giving a magazine subscription. It has impact the first year. But the enthusiasm and thanks fade as you dutifully renew year after year. Meanwhile, the domains don’t even have Google AdWords running on them!

But It’s So Pretty To Look At

You’ve added the Analytics HD app to your iPad mini, enabling you to share Google Analytics insights with friends at dinner or during lulls at parties. Only the super-nice feign interest, and then not for long.

Parallel Universes

Your brother is a financial advisor. His Website is barely findable in the search engine results, let alone on page 1. He’s not on LinkedIn, doesn’t use Twitter, enjoys YouTube for recreation only. And yet he is crazy successful. You're a digital marketer if you find this maddening.

Your turn: You know you're a digital marketer if...?