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Why finance brands are so hot on content marketing

With more and more companies — startups and legacy firms alike — increasing content marketing for their customers, it’s no longer much of a “differentiator” as it once was for some fintech startups trying to distinguish their offerings.

For example, Acorns recently ran an article called “First-Time Home Buyers Share What They Got Right—and Wrong.” Chase ran something similar under the headline “How this millennial woman bought a home on her own.” Meanwhile, Wealthsimple ran “How To Know What Kind of Mortgage You Can Afford.” A sea of sameness engulfs these companies, a problem when you’re trying to stand out.

Firms from Chase to Acorns to Bond Street are on a mission to educate customers and promote financial literacy through content marketing — something previously done, for the most part, by employees of the bank — to keep up with customers’ increasing need for control and self-service. It’s clear they’re trying to keep emotional ties with customers strong, since most opt to manage their money digitally now, through a banking app or roboadvisor.

“They don’t want people to park their money and go,” said April Rudin, chief executive and founder of wealth marketing strategy firm The Rudin Group. “Content is one way to make people return back to their site to add more money, to add value… The problem is there’s no one-size-fits-all advice for customers, and the majority of the firms haven’t figured out how to serve up content that’s not one-size-fits-all.”

Good advice — and content — will ensure people will return back to their site to see new updates, buy new products and invest more money. Many of the accounts being targeted in the content are on the lower asset level, but to keep business running, firms need more investors, larger investors and ultimately to grow their assets under management.

“Content marketing is not a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have, but it costs money,” said one conference goer at the Digiday Content Marketing Summit this week. “Where is that money supposed to come from? A sale makes it easier to justify, but you can’t always be selling. That’s a huge turnoff.”

Fintech firms love content marketing. Acorns, the popular micro investing app, has an online magazine called Grow that features news, financial how-tos and interviews with celebrities like Kevin Durant, Ian Kahn and Tony Robbins. Online lending company Bond Street has an online magazine that looks at the cultural and economic impact of independent businesses in New York as well as a podcast. Investing app Stash has a Learn page that aims to help “build a community of confident investors” that includes tips and primers on different money matters and concepts. Last year, Chase redesigned its online banking website to offer news stories as well as advice, guidance and support “the way we have a banker relationship at a bank,” the bank said at the time.

And at a time when people are consuming more content more frequently than ever — and all with one bias or another — so-called advice, education and information offered on their financial services platform can start to become just as noisy as the content coming through their various news streams on their various devices.

“The question is how frequent should it be? They have to figure out what the value is of the content they put out based on how people react to it and if they’re building more confidence and putting more money into their account,” Rudin said. “The fact is that they’re really trying to replace, to some extent, the advisor.”

It’s not just millennials that want advice, and every customer wants to consume advice differently. That’s why despite the popularity of robo advisors, there’s still a role for advisory relationships in financial services, hence the need to create online “communities.”

USAA is addressing this differently. With the creation of its Alexa skill for Amazon Echo devices earlier this month, it’s pushing insights — not advice — to help customers make more sound financial decisions.

“You’ll start to see spending advice as more of a mechanism to make a decision than to get some help,” Darrius Jones, assistant vp at USAA Labs, told Tearsheet at the time. “We think conversationally is the best way to deliver it.”

About 42 percent of ultra high net worth investors will change advisors if they don’t like the digital interface of the company, Rudin said, citing research by Capgemini. But the idea of a digital interface is broader than what people think, she said. It includes communication, not just advice.

In a way, depending on the consumer and his or her needs, content marketing reformats the traditional model of advice. By bringing in technology, as USAA has done with its Alexa skill, financial firms can figure out what customers really need.

“All these things need to be evaluated by banks,” Rudin said. “All that does is give it a remodel instead of a retool. Banks need to take a step back and retool themselves and think: how does this stuff really work?”

 

 

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Inside robo-adviser Wealthsimple’s content strategy

A visit to the online magazine of Canadian robo-adviser Wealthsimple can send a reader on a trajectory far beyond the usual tips and tricks that customers have come to expect from a bank or asset management company. Wealthsimple’s articles are targeted and edgy, with headlines such as “How to work in the gig economy and still save like a corporate lifer” or “How to blow your holiday bonus.” The articles go beyond just advice — interviews with popular personalities such as Anthony Bourdain and Kevin Bacon on personal struggles with money help humanize the personal finance experience.

“We don’t talk to people about oil prices and interest rates, we talk to people about interesting stories about money — we do a series of money diaries where we interview celebrities and interesting people to help break down the taboo of talking about money,” said CEO Mike Katchen.

Wealthsimple joins a league of brands that tell stories without the need to constantly link to a line of products and services. Other finance companies have also opted for organic storytelling, including Charles Schwab, whose magazines focus less on the nitty gritty of finance than the “shared values” that the brand has with its customers’ lifestyles. It’s an approach that’s worked for Wealthsimple, whose content has been cited as a credible source by mainstream media outlets, including stories from Business Insider, Money, CNBC and MarketWatch. The site gets 300,000 page views a month, according to the company.

Wealthsimple’s branded content shop is an in-house operation run by 10 full-time employees and headed by former GQ editorial director Devin Friedman. The team also includes two Wieden+Kennedy alumni, the agency known for its work for Nike. As Tearsheet reported in February, Wealthsimple’s move to bring in design talent is a trend among financial advisory companies seeking to add a human touch to customers’ experience with money. Katchen said the target audience is professionals between 30 and 45.

“It’s about how to create a brand that resonates with a younger audience and speaks to them in terms they understand,” he said. “The classic example is the person who knows investing is something they should be doing, but they don’t have the time or interest in doing it themselves.”

To marketers who develop branded content for banks and finance companies, Wealthsimple may be onto something.

“When you go there [Wealthsimple’s website], there’s a cohesive editorial feel to it, which I think really helps them as they are expanding to a new market,” said Michael Grimes, svp of editorial strategy at Hill Holliday, the lead creative agency for Bank of America. “If you look at their imagery, they could have taken stock photos, but a lot of them are hand-drawn illustrations or treated photos — everything feels like it’s coming from same place editorially, and it has the same visual identity as a magazine.”

Grimes said customers are less likely to shy away from branded content if it’s seen as useful and the information is accurate.

“People want solid, accurate information,” he said. “If brands have the bench and the access to expertise to give that information, that gives them a leg up.” 

In the competitive market for millennial investors, content that’s not seen as useful can easily turn off customers, said one analyst.

“We see a saturated market of ‘tips and tricks,’ ‘five things you need to know about,'” said Jeff Baker, director of digital marketing for content marketing agency Brafton. “People want to read in-depth pieces of actual use cases of things that worked and things that didn’t.”

Wealthsimple, founded in 2014, hopes its approach to digital marketing, combined with traditional advertising and Facebook ads, will give it a needed push as it expands to new markets. The company, which is backed by a CA$100 million ($77 million) investment from Power Financial, expanded to the U.S. in February of this year and plans to launch in the U.K. this fall. Despite the challenges of growing the company’s reach in new markets, Katchen said there’s room for more players.

“We’re not building a business to solve the problem for early adopters only — we’re in the business to solve the problem that investing is complicated for the average person,” he said. “We’re trying to create a lifestyle brand around financial services that’s broadly relevant to the masses out there, and that’s informed our strategy and given us confidence that the market is wide open for a player like us.”

Image: Money Diaries series from Wealthsimple’s online magazine, courtesy of Wealthsimple

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Why robo-advisers are looking to former magazine editors for the human touch

Robo-advisers Wealthsimple and Ellevest believe in the human touch after all.

Both have plucked editors from top publications in order to personalize the often-dry world of investment advice by focusing on lifestyle matters. Ellevest hired chief design officer Melissa Cullens, who was an independent design strategist that Vogue.com recruited to lead the re-design of its website. Canada-based Wealthsimple, which expanded to the U.S. last week, hired Devin Friedman, a former GQ editorial director, as brand editor to lead its section that features interviews with people about the role money has played in their lives.

“The human side is something I don’t think a lot of people in our space have done a great job of, and it’s one where we excel,” said Wealthsimple chief product officer Rudy Adler. “It’s easier to do when you have a great voice; you’re coming at them with humor and not boring them with dull finance articles. We’re trying to find an emotional way in.”

At Ellevest, the investment platform for women launched by Wall Street vet Sallie Krawcheck, Cullens focused on the role money plays in helping people feel safe and express their values, like having control over their lives. That thinking was expressed in the design of the platform but also the user experience, including how many steps users have to take in the on-boarding process, what information they hand over and what the form field experience is like.

For example, similar services often ask questions about a user’s investment experience and risk preferences, and they’re usually laden with jargon and can take at least 10 minutes. Cullens designed the Ellevest on-boarding experience to include the client’s life goals, not just financial goals, and streamlined the process.

“We wanted to try to create an interface and experience that gave her the reins she was already taking and make investing work for her instead of making her learn more, work harder or be better to fit into the mold of a system that ultimately has excluded women,” Cullens said.

Robo-advisers, which dole out artificial intelligence-driven investment advice through a website or app, have been one of the fastest-growing parts of the U.S. fintech market. But that growth has leveled off as banks and other traditional financial institutions have piled into the space, creating new competition for customers.

Traditional financial services have mostly targeted high-net-worth individuals. But fintech depends on being able to relate to young people who are new to investing and may have lived through the last recession and distrust traditional finance. That’s where people with luxury brand experience can help robo-advisers differentiate.

“In the early days, no one thought about client experience; they just thought that if you log in, then you can make a transfer,” said April Rudin, chief executive of wealth management marketing firm The Rudin Group. “By bringing talent that has experience in creating a luxury experience, the idea is [fintechs] will take their functionality and give it client experience.”