You likely didn’t think content creation would be high on your to-do list when you decided to become a financial advisor. But keeping your advisory business thriving means attracting new clients, and, in today’s digital world, that means creating custom content.

Of course, content creation can take a lot of your time, so you want to be efficient and strategic in your marketing approach. But that is easier said than done. 

According to The Kitces Report’s “How Financial Planners Actually Market Their Services” report for 2022, the average advisory firm “appears to struggle with most content-based” marketing tactics but high-growth firms “are disproportionately investing in such tactics.”

So, hitting the right notes on content creation can be beneficial, especially over the long term, when it comes to growth. But what are those benefits? And how do you choose what content you should create so you don’t waste your valuable time? Let’s dive in.

Top 5 Benefits of Creating Custom Content

The cost to bring in a new client, according to The Kitces Report, was $2,167. And 70% of that was the cost of an advisor’s time engaging in marketing and sales activities to bring in that new client. 

So if you’re going to spend that time and money on creating content, we can’t talk about what kind of content you should create before we first explore why custom content is a good route to take.

Here are the top 5 benefits of creating custom content for your advisory practice:

1. Awareness: Custom content first and foremost brings awareness to your advisory business and helps you firmly establish and share your brand, including your voice and style. In this way, content becomes a digital billboard.
2. Thought Leadership: You also can use custom content to share your expertise and show your unique approach to helping your clients. This will help you differentiate yourself from all of the other advisors out there.
3. Education: Money is a scary topic for most people, so investing can be even more overwhelming. You have the power to break it down for them into easily digestible chunks. This is an extremely attractive quality in an advisor, because people need an unbiased third party who is also fighting to help them reach their financial goals.
4. Search Engine Optimization: SEO is a strategy focused on improving the ranking of your website for specific search terms on search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The more custom content you create and add to your website that helps you target keywords that attract prospective clients, the more you will improve your SEO rankings. And that content will continue to build views and authority from the search engines over time sort of like compound interest.
5. Repurposing: Once created, custom content can be repurposed in lots of different forms and in lots of different places. That is your intellectual property to use over and over and share everywhere. For example, a webinar topic can be turned into a blog, an entire series of social media posts, an email drip campaign, a one-page handout for new clients, etc.

Creating custom content has so many benefits and can unlock a lot of marketing avenues for you. But where should you start?

Choosing the Right Custom Content

You can’t possibly make time to create custom content for every marketing channel, so you need to pick and choose. And what custom content you choose to create should be determined by you and your target audience.

If your target audience is mostly high-net worth investors and they prefer a more face-to-face or at least hands-on approach, then craft your custom content around those needs. For example, you could offer webinars or even in-person seminars and create how-to videos featuring case studies on similar clients.

If your target audience are younger investors who are glued to their phones, you may want to learn how to make TikTok videos with quick tips or start a podcast they can subscribe to and listen to at the gym.

Here are also the top three tried and true custom content channels for advisors to attract new clients: 

• Blogs: Not only do blogs help you flex your expertise in the short-term through sharing on social media and email, but they typically have longer-term payoffs through SEO as well. 
• Videos: Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has gone more digital and video has become more important. You don’t have to have a studio to make a long-form video for it to have a high impact video either. Short videos posted to social media can go a long way.
• Webinars: These are definitely more time-intensive, but also can be repurposed into many other content pieces, and, in The Kitces Report, they ranked second in the highest revenue per client attributable to a single tactic behind just the often way more expensive client appreciation events.

Maribeth Kuzmeski, PhD, President of Red Zone Marketing, is a marketing strategist, advisor to financial services companies, bestselling author of nine books, and a professional speaker rated as a Top 25 C-Suite Speaker as seen in Meetings & Conventions Magazine. She speaks on topics including marketing, branding, sales, and customer service.

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