A big thank you to LinkedIn Finance Connect in New York City for having me as a speaker! While my talks often feature a range of companies and industries, I was excited for the opportunity to delve deeper into best practices in content marketing for financial companies.

Financial companies, like their counterparts in other industries, are united by the same content marketing challenge: standing out amidst the constant churn of information shared.

In our book, The Power of Visual Storytelling, we call this, “The Era of Infobesity,” in which consumers are faced with more messages across more channels than ever before. Even with paid media solutions to help get more eyeballs on a piece of content, savvy consumers stretched for time will always prioritize engaging, relevant and personalized content that adds value to them.

So how do financial companies stand out? Follow these three tips and you’ll increase the effectiveness of your content marketing in no time.

Tip 1: Embrace a Customer Centric vs. Sales Centric Content Strategy

With consumer attention the ultimate commodity, companies need to ask themselves if they have a customer centric vs. sales centric content strategy. In a time where Gartner predicts that 89% of companies will compete mostly on customer experience, the secret sauce to a successful content strategy is – you guessed it – your customers.

So, how do companies create customer centric content? Financial companies can take a page from Hubspot’s playbook by incorporating these three tactics:

Develop Thought Leadership That Adds Value
Hubspot focuses on adding value with massive Slideshare presentations (some 140+ pages!) dedicated to helping its target audience be better at their jobs. In doing so, the company not only creates demand generation for its software, while establishing credibility.

Keep Your Community Updated On Trending Topics
Part of Hubspot’s content mix is targeted at industry news and trending topics. The key here is how Hubspot reports on trending topics – by sharing how the news impacts its customers. For example, as you can see here when Facebook changed its Newsfeed algorithm, Hubspot quickly put together content sharing what the changes mean for marketers.

Drive Leads In A Customer Centric Way
Sometimes your lead generation goals – e.g. email acquisition – aren’t inherently customer centric. By sprinkling in a customer friendly incentive – e.g. a chance to win a LinkedIn profile makeover, it offers an added value while supporting the desired goals.

Tip 2: Leverage Visuals To Tell Your Story

Once you’ve established the ideal customer-centric content mix, the next step is bringing that content to life with visuals – and for good reason. The average human attention span on social media and digital channels is between 2.8-8 seconds. Interestingly, humans are hard wired to process visuals more quickly than text alone – 60,000x faster – making high quality visuals a great way to captivate attention quickly.

Look no further than LinkedIn to see how visuals translate into increased engagement.

Not All Visuals Are Created Equal
However, not all visuals are created equal. On LinkedIn, it’s easy to default to stock imagery – fight the urge! Unique visuals can shape your story and act as lead-gen to pull the customer into the post and drive the desired action.

The Magic Is In The Visual Mix
A good tactic for keeping your content feeling fresh is by using different visuals. If you constantly used the same type of images each and every time, it wouldn’t feel fresh and exciting. From infographics, to quotes, videos and Slideshare presentations, let the story and budget dictate the best visual medium.

Target Content To Relevant Audiences
The beauty of advertising solutions is that they offer the ability to serve up personalized content to a target audience. LinkedIn really excels here with the ability to target in a number of ways – including profession. This offers companies a fantastic opportunity to personalize messages, like this post from Bloomberg.

Tip 3: Don’t Just Develop Content – Create Experiences

In the era of infobesity, the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. It’s timely, relevant, entertaining and adds value. One of the best strategies to ensure that marketing doesn’t feel like its namesake is by creating customer experiences. Take a page from the playbooks of these three companies as you’re taking your content marketing to the next level.

Citi Connect: Professional Women’s Network

After years of success with Women & Co., a service that provides ¬financial content, commentary and community that gets women thinking and talking about personal-finance, Citi was looking for new ways to deepen this engagement.

In April 2012, Citi and LinkedIn launched Connect: Professional Women’s Network, a LinkedIn Managed Group moderated by a LinkedIn community manager. Discussions in the now closed group were user-generated, and based on news content, polls, and videos seeded in partnership with Citi and their content teams. News content in groups is also shared with a special edition of LinkedIn Today – the site’s news product – called Special Edition: Professional Women.

Just four months after launching, the group had 43,000+ users – a figure that grew to more than 260,000 in late 2014. Furthermore, research from Citi and LinkedIn showcase that more than 60 percent of group members could cite Citi as the sponsor of the group. The group has also inspired more than 30 real life meet-ups over the years. It’s a shame that the group was eventually closed!

According to Vanessa Colella, Managing Director and Head of North America Marketing, Citi, “LinkedIn provides the perfect environment for helping us ignite conversations with women – and judging from the phenomenal growth of the group in just a few months, we’re giving them the community experience they’ve been waiting for, The combination of social sharing tools, fresh and relevant content, and highly professional audience gives Citi new ways to weave our brand into the social fabric of LinkedIn.”

L’Oréal Celebrates The Unique Qualities Of Its LinkedIn Community

In celebration of reaching 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, L’Oréal took a unique approach to activating its community in an experiential way with the, “Are You IN?” campaign. With the goal of positioning L’Oréal as a top place to work, the company has created visual way for its community to share an “IN word and “IN moment” that best describes themselves and share it across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The ten best IN moments were also shared on the L’Oréal company page at the end of the campaign.

The campaign is unique because it provides L’Oréal with a way to activate its sizeable community on LinkedIn, while showing them some of the qualities they value in candidates. L’Oréal is keeping itself top of mind to a community of potential jobseekers while encouraging its passionate candidates to stand out and showcase what makes themselves special. Regardless of whether or not you’re looking for a job at L’Oréal, the visual status update also offers a nice way for LinkedIn users to share something special about themselves or their careers to their connections. After all, isn’t that part of the reason we’re all on LinkedIn?

Following this promotion, L’Oréal can probably glean ideas about the types of content its LinkedIn community is interested in. The company can analyze the data about the top qualities shared and curate relevant articles to post, or create a series of unique content (e.g. interviews, how-tos, expert guest posts) on those qualities to extend the length of the campaign and help continue engagement.

Key Takeaways

In a time where consumer attention is the ultimate commodity, savvy financial companies should embrace these three tips to make their content marketing more memorable.

A huge thank you to LinkedIn Finance Connect for having me present at your event. A full copy of my presentation can be found on Slideshare. For more content from the event, read this great LinkedIn recap, which includes highlights from my talk.

Jessica Gioglio is the co-author of The Laws of Brand Storytelling and The Power of Visual Storytelling. Professionally, Jessica has led innovative marketing and public relations programs for Dunkin’, TripAdvisor, Sprinklr, and more. Today, Jessica is a keynote speaker (book her here) and founder of With Savvy Media & Marketing, a strategic branding, storytelling, and content strategy consultancy.