By Stefano Marrone @ Nucco Brain (tech-led content marketing agency for brands including HSBC)

At a time when banking and finance brands need to build trust, always-on content marketing delivered through clever formats like playlists is the key to driving long-term engagement in a cost-efficient way

In a time of financial turmoil, it’s critical that banking and finance businesses build trust and brand leadership. But how? A proven way to engage banking audiences is through branded content. And despite the many regulations that are in place around finance marketing, banking brands are finally waking up to the fact that content doesn’t have to be dry.

However, there’s still a common mistake being made when using content marketing in this sector: too many brands do content on an ad-hoc basis, rather than taking an always-on approach. Perhaps this is partly because an always-on content strategy is perceived as expensive. But it needn’t be. Not when content is created in repeatable formats and playlists that can be shared across multiple online channels to build traction and credibility.

This approach, which is already being employed by forward-looking brands within the sector, means finance and banking businesses can attract greater audiences with every content episode to deliver on both long and short-term engagement.

The starting point should be making content that is open to sharing knowledge within the community. The more information and know-how that can be shared with prospective clients and the wider industry, the more respected and trusted the organization will be. And, let’s face it, finance and banking are in dire need of trust at the moment.

Although branded content delivers high value for bank and finance businesses by boosting awareness and building trust, in the digital arena, customers can feel overwhelmed by the internet’s all-consuming flow of information. So finance brands need to produce material in a way that sticks by making easy-to-digest content that’s published regularly and makes an impact through strong identity.

This means it’s crucial to avoid ‘campaign panic’, where organizations invest effort and budget in a one-off campaign, often around a certain seasonal period, thus neglecting the incredibly important and trust-building day-to-day communications with customers. The result is a rollercoaster graph of engagement, with peaks during launch campaigns and steady drops of customer interaction, sometimes even for months, while the next campaign is planned.

This on-off approach drives a very high price of customer acquisition, and a lost opportunity to develop rapport with potential customers over time. Instead, marketing budgets should deliver not only during the big campaign moments, but all year round.

The American Express ’Shop Small’ campaign has been incredibly successful as a long-lasting campaign that delivers content and results way past its launch. And it’s been achieved by focusing on ‘the format’. By that, I mean any defined type of medium, as long as it is highly recognizable in both branding, content style and structure.

Formats have helped both traditional and social TV channels, influencers and magazines alike, to be memorable since they existed, giving audiences immediate assurance of the quality and kind of content they are about to engage with. So here are some practical tips:

Highly Recognizable

As demonstrated by the American Express campaign, each interview has a defined look and feel that makes the viewer understand immediately what they’re about to see: a trustworthy expert sharing key information on their field. Just looking at the thumbnails of the next video on the brand’s YouTube playlist makes viewers want to click on the next video to get more of that knowledge, with the surety of knowing that the next video will be a valuable piece of content, rather than an ad or something different from the bank. Viewers’ brains tell them they’re watching a series, and if they like the content, there’s no risk of the brand stopping the binge with interruptive promotional messaging.

Lightly Branded

In the digital arena, five-seconds of a company logo is corporate suicide. Instead, the brand should be present in the content’s styling: font, colour, tone of voice. Slapping a logo everywhere makes content feel ‘salesy’ and puts viewers off. Successful formats and content series have their own recognizable name, separate from the brand that produces them. For example, “Spotlight on Markets, Episode 62. Powered by XXX” will resonate better than “XXX views on Markets”.

Speedy Production

Agreeing on a creative approach for each individual piece of content takes time, especially if many stakeholders are involved. And this time-intensive approach removes the opportunity to be reactive and on-the-pulse with current trends and news. But by having a pre-defined format where the structure and wording has already been approved by both legal and marketing teams, current and relevant content can be produced quickly. Furthermore, the more episodes of a format that are produced, the more elements are available to be re-used episode by episode further down the line. As the content develops, chances are that the next episode is going to be even stronger than the previous one.

Audience Segmentation

Taking the government’s Innovate UK initiative as an example, the organisation speaks to very different types of people seeking funding. Innovate UK understands that young digital entrepreneurs and more established institutions speak different languages, especially when it comes to consuming content. That’s why Innovate UK creates different formats for different segments of their audience.

For example, the Predictions playlist is a high-brow sci-fi video series that gives a broad overview of the future of specific industries and is perfect to spread awareness in large organisations. But the Essential Tips playlist is snackable content aimed at young SME entrepreneurs looking for practical advice. Audiences often have different preferences when it comes to consuming content, and creating a format that satisfies the content-consuming habits of each segment guarantees better results.

Longevity

When produced in the right way, a format has high longevity potential because it leads to ‘binge consumption’, especially when the content is presented in a smart way such as playlists or easy-to-access online repository. Don’t let YouTube’s algorithm choose what’s next. Organise content in a way that invites more and more consumption by, for example, suggesting specific videos at the end of each view. If the audience likes a format, there’s a high chance they will watch past instalments, which lets content deliver over-time, not just at launch.

Format Diversity

There’s more to formats than just videos. Businesses should also consider infographics, digital or physical live-events, written articles and gated content such as reports and whitepapers. American Express, for example, has created a standard format for its infographics on supporting various industries. And they proved to be a highly performing lead-generation tool for the company’s salesforce.

Investing in an always-on content strategy builds and maintains strong positioning, thought leadership and trust… qualities that are much-needed in these turbulent times. But just because the strategy is always-on, doesn’t mean the budget has to be too. Not if formats like playlists are used in intelligent ways to give content an extended shelf life.