Banks are facing a real trust problem. Only a third of UK citizens trust their bank. US citizens trust their banks even less. Customers don’t expect banks to work in their best interests. That’s a serious problem. Part of the reason is many bank customers feel frustrated when trying to get guidance about their financial situation from their bank. People want more than just blogs explaining what an interest rate is, and is a perfect use case for content marketing. Banks need to start using Content Strategy Platforms that include content intelligence tools to build smarter content marketing strategies if they want to bridge the trust gap.
What are Content Intelligence Tools?
At this time, their main focus of these tools is on topic curation, but it has the potential to go much further than that. Imagine that in the future an AI could read the CRM data you have on a customer and deliver a custom piece of content for the exact place they are on their financial journey. Pretty powerful, no?
Content marketing is about generating a positive relationship between the reader and the company. This is the fundamental feeling that persuades customers to trust, and when a customer trusts a company they are much more willing to explore the company’s other products or listen to their advice.
However, Curata says that 45% of banks are using content marketing on an “ad-hoc” basis. This means they’re only publishing content when the mood (and topic) strikes them. That doesn’t do much to serve the customer’s interests because ad-hoc articles are based on assumptions. Content intelligence throws out the assumptions and uses data to bridge the gap.
Beyond the Blog
Content intelligence tells us that different forms of content beyond text can communicate concepts quickly that would need a boring blog post otherwise. We’re not just talking infographics, though that is a powerful technique; JPMorgan and Chase has specialized in delivering interactive content pieces.
SoFi, a completely online bank, has developed a series of calculators and interactive activities to help their major market segments find exactly the information they need.
It’s good that banks are experimenting with other content forms to differentiate. But they do take more effort to create. Before investing the time to create fancier pieces, banks should use a Content Strategy Platform (CSP) that incorporates content intelligence, like CONCURED, to discover content gaps or examine what their market segments are talking about online at the moment to create stronger pieces. Morgan Stanley’s Ideas page does this very well. It is a blog, but it’s filled with intermediate and expert topics on finance and investing.
We foresee that Content Strategy Platforms (CSPs) will help bloggers of all kinds go beyond basic information to intermediate topics that their readers want to see but may not have been able to articulate. This will make blogs far more interesting to readers who are already familiar with the basics. When a savvy bank customer sees that a bank is talking about more than the basics, it will create trust because the bank is making an effort to reach someone like them.
Read More: How Financial Sector Marketers Use Content Intelligence To Increase Audience Engagement