Financial Education & Content Marketing
Banzai's perspective on creating a culture of financial education in your community, and why content marketing is the most effective way to do it.
Creating a Culture of Financial Education
The state of Utah, where Banzai is headquartered, is home to some of the world's premier rock climbing destinations. The Wasatch Front holds thousands of climbing routes, all of which are accessible for free to anyone, anytime. Guide books and online apps contain detailed "beta" — climbing tips — about nearly all of these routes.
Who takes care of these routes? Most of the safe, accessible climbing routes in Utah are created and maintained by a handful of climbing gear shops. They don't own the land. No one pays them directly. But for these local business owners — who sell ropes, harnesses, and safety equipment — it is in their best interest to support a culture of climbing and in turn, education surounding the hobby. A vibrant, active, growing population of climbers is essential to their livelihoods.
This is content marketing.
Traditional marketing (ads, direct mail, bait-and-switch offers) no longer works the way it once did. How can you expect to be heard over a clamor of digital voices in a modern market? Like Utah's climbing shops, you need a strategy that establishes you as the leader in your community for financial expertise. As a bank or credit union, you are uniquely positioned to create a culture of financial education.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the art of generating leads by giving something useful for free. Experts add that it's a way to "attract and retain a clearly defined audience." Gallup's Chairman's Blog, John Deere's The Furrow (first printed in 1895, now published in 14 languages), and Gates Notes are each examples of commercial-grade content marketing — publications that educate and share ideas with no strings attached. On the other hand, they exist to drive interest in their brands. They exist to drive business.
Content marketing is ubiquitous, and by no means cutting edge. According to a HubSpot study, most surveyed companies allocate the greatest share of their marketing budgets to content creation. Content beat everything — even advertising, public relations, SEO, and telemarketing. Organizations exceeding their revenue goals were much more likely to attribute their success to content marketing.
But what is "content"? Vaguely "uploading content" to the internet isn't enough to drive business. Content needs to be relevant to the audience you want to attract. Your account holders are busy getting jobs, renovating homes, paying off cars, and planning vacations, hence you need educational content that helps them accomplish these goals.
Financial Education
As adults, we struggle to talk about our finances. A Wells Fargo study found that nearly half of Americans consider personal finance "the most challenging topic to discuss with others." Culturally, we've inherited an intuition that seeking financial advice reveals weakness.
On topics like credit, insurance, and investing, we'd rather remain ignorant than reveal ourselves.
And yet we all have questions: How much life insurance should I carry, even though I'm not married? How do I save for retirement on a meager salary? I buy things impulsively — how do I control myself without becoming a fanatic? These questions are deeply sensitive and personal, and seeking advice makes us feel vulnerable.
You, a financial institution, stand in a uniquely human position. You watch a newly married couple form their first joint checking account. You authorize a cashier's check as a down payment on a starter home. You help a widow sort out her husband's leftover business liabilities. In your community, who is better positioned to help individuals solve their most vexing personal finance problems than you?
For many banks and credit unions, frontline staff tend to be the least financially literate — and they're the ones interacting with your customers the most. Putting your best foot forward also means training and helping your staff so they can train and help your customers.
Principles of Education
Having worked with 45,000 teachers, millions of students, and now thousands of adults nationwide, Banzai has noted several concrete principles for teaching personal finance.
People internalize finance through real-world examples
People are hooked when they navigate dilemmas that relate to their own lives. Math principles like compound interest, when taught in an abstract way, bore them. What better way to teach the same principle than by taking students through a realistic scenario: their car breaks down on the side of the road, and they have to clean up the mess either by fixing the car or buying a new one. We make it hard.
The textbook definition of gravity is useful — but unexpectedly flying off a trampoline into the dirt leaves a scar you can't simply forget.
Education researchers have discovered that learning by analogy is the foundation of all learning. To teach personal finance, use real-world examples.
People need practice
Kids need practice. Adults need practice. Repetition. To master a skill, we must repeat it again and again. Banzai courses repeat activities many times over, each varying the gameplay by small degrees. When a student gets paid for her job at the bookstore, she decides how to budget for bills, unplanned expenses, and savings. She'll be paid at least four or five times, each time budgeting a little differently depending on her circumstances.
Practice makes perfect.
Your Solution
To capitalize on a content marketing strategy, you need the right content and a plan for executing.
Content library
The beautiful thing about the internet is that when you post an article, it becomes part of a permanent record that can be indexed and searched. As you write, you'll build a reference library of financial wisdom that's useable in many contexts: printed handouts, partnerships with local businesses, employee onboarding, youth groups, and seminars.
For content, you have options: videos, blog posts, slideshows, infographics. Each is important, but a word of caution: the temptation to believe you need video is natural, especially when so much of what we consume online is flashy, fast-paced, and viral.
Videos can impress viewers, but they suffer from numerous flaws: they're difficult to digest quickly, almost impossible to index for search engines, not interactive, and hard to change with time. Production costs are expensive, labor intensive, and risky.
Instead, we suggest a less speculative approach. Finance is careful. It's deliberate. Think how much time adults spend combing real estate listings and running mortgage calculators. An individual with a financial problem or goal will take time to solve it. She'll find what she's looking for. Your content needs to respect readers' adulthood — speak to them about things that actually matter.
We recommend starting with editorialized articles. Creating well-written, researched, illustrated articles is difficult, but worth it. Start small. Pick topics that resonate. Find unique angles in your area — for example, you might share research based on institutional data: "Did you know three in four Wisconsinites prefer debit cards over credit cards?" Run a survey. Share it with your members and customers.
Calls to action
No content marketing strategy is complete without calls to action. You're making content? Great. Now, what are people supposed to do when they read it?
The great thing about articles is how flexible they can be. Want to insert an invitation to subscribe to your library? No problem. How about a $50 gas card for opening an auto loan? Place your company offers in articles that match best — increasing the probability that an active reader engages your expertise.
Your audience's interest will ebb and flow.
Some articles (and your efforts to promote them) will work better than others, depending on lots of factors. But the most important feature about your content strategy is that it has no strings attached. Readers act on your invitations when they see the value of what you're offering in context of what they're learning.
See the Calls to Action and Offers configuration pages for how to set these up in your Wellness Center.
Collecting leads and analyzing progress
A CTA isn't useful if there isn't a way to collect a lead. Banzai's Manager captures CTA submissions in the Leads section. Make sure you can look at the leads and understand where they come from, what offers they're acting on, and how they found out about them (i.e., the online referral source).
Following up
Create a process by which you'll follow up on your leads. Upon receiving a lead, a user's interest immediately starts to wane. Speedy follow-up is essential.
In Closing
If you've caught the vision of creating a culture of financial education, you'll naturally see that content marketing establishes you as the leader in your community. A comprehensive plan has to have great content, invite people to take action, and give you a way to follow up — measuring your success as you go. It's marketing through education.
A financial institution that masters content marketing through financial education will earn the trust of its community and drive growth in the process.
Adapted from Banzai's "Our Take" white paper on Financial Education & Content Marketing. © Banzai Inc.