Social media is an alternative marketing vehicle that enables your business to connect with clients and prospects. For many financial services professionals, adding a business blog to their social media marketing is a highly effective and measurable way to reach a whole new audience.
Having the right presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn is crucial to create social engagement with the right kinds of prospective clients. Once you have established a relationship on these sites, the important next step is to get them to your blog where they can get to know your business and service proposition a little more intimately. Once they are on your blog, they can then navigate your website to explore your portfolio of products and services in more detail.
This is called permissive marketing, not interruptive marketing like general advertising, radio and TV adverts. Your social media connections should arrive at your blog by their own free will. It is this type of marketing strategy that is helping financial services businesses increase their revenue streams on a much larger scale.
Think of your blog as the nucleus to your online marketing efforts and all the other social media sites as the outer wall which surrounds and directs them back to the centre; or think of this analogy, a blog is that important business lunch that is derived from a cocktail party (social media).
The benefit of your blog to your reader is that it provides informative and relevant content that will help them make more confident buying decisions. But what are the specific benefits to your business? Here are 6 of them:
Blog benefits for your business
1. Gives you a personality – blogs do an excellent job of branding you. They aren’t corporate websites, so they are meant to be more casual and hence more engaging. Financial bloggers should relate to their new and existing clients problems and share solutions to these problems. What better way to humanise your business than a blog that talks and interacts like a human being.
2. Thought leader influence – blogs allow you to promote the fact that you are an expert in the financial services field. Good bloggers will update their readers with relevant information on industry matters and give them useful tips accordingly, so you should too. For example, a mortgage broker may share the latest mortgage interest rates, or an accountant, new tax incentives. This creates a sense of trust that you are an expert in your field.
3. Building a community – blogs are interactive and readers can leave comments on your postings which increase their emotional investment in the blog and keeps them coming back or encourages them to subscribe to your newsletter.
4. Engagement with returning clients via newsletters – almost every blog you see has a little opt-in webform box that will have a unique call-to-action and offer if someone subscribes to their newsletter. Your reader will hand over their contact information (usually email and name) and then you have a more devoted following that you can send exclusive information to. The idea is to add value to your clients and prospects so they think of you when they want to seek further advice.
5. Organic search engine optimisation – blogs are a constantly changing entity, making them more appealing to search engines. A good blogger will also include strategic keywords within posts, and inbound and outbound links, which further increase your chances of getting found by search engines. When done right, you will get your business in front of potentially thousands of prospective new clients that can find out more about your products and services. When you coordinate a powerful social media presence with your blog, this also generates free traffic and creates influential inbound links to your blog which the search engines will favour.
6. Low-cost investment-blogs are very affordable – Getting a blog up and running doesn’t take a tech savvy person. WordPress.org (highly recommended) is fairly user-friendly. However, you can hire a professional to create a purpose built branded site.
Just about every business is blogging these days, so make sure you are not missing out!
A guide to consumer blogging for financial services
Click here to download our beginners guide to business blogging.
