Now more than ever, it is important for any organization to have a content market strategy surrounding the creation of consistent, valuable content for target audiences. Over time, content marketing has transformed the way brands are doing business.
While the importance and effectiveness of content marketing are clear, there are several challenges associated with content creation. This could be a lack of resources, unrealistic expectations, or maintaining consistent publishing schedules.
In 2018, Drive Research partnered with Brandpoint, a content marketing agency in Minneapolis, MN to uncover these common challenges regarding content creation, specifically for those in the financial industry. This year, we were lucky to partner with this organization again to complete a second wave of the financial services survey project.
The survey showed us key themes in what does and does not lead to a successful content marketing strategy for banks and credit unions. Drive Research was also able to detect commonalities and differentiators between both reports. This wealth of valuable data allowed Brandpoint to re-purpose the information into its own internal publications.
Content marketing research allows organizations to re-purpose valuable data into various marketing materials such as blogs, press releases, infographics, and more. Take a closer look at how Brandpoint utilized this type of service.
Objectives
The objective of the research survey was for Brandpoint to gain a better understanding of marketing and content strategy trends among those working in the marketing department within banks and credit unions.
It was important to find those who were part of a financial institution’s marketing team because it is their responsibility to produce blog posts, reports, infographics and other types of marketing material for their bank or credit union. Those working in this role would, in turn, provide the best insight to common discrepancies in their content marketing strategy.
It was also important for Brandpoint to uncover what has changed for financial marketers within the past year such as knowledge of what content marketing is, allocated budget set aside for marketing efforts, and challenges they are currently facing.
Goals
Brandpoint was hoping to recreate the success of the survey research we conducted last year. This would be the second of an annual research study. The goal of investing in continual market research for Brandpoint is to collect definitive, measurable, and compelling data points to feature in their own marketing and lead generation strategy.
Keeping this goal in mind Brandpoint created a 2019 research report titled, “The State of Content Marketing for Financial Services” with the insight collected from the survey. In doing so, Brandpoint is able to represent themselves as a thought-leader in the financial sector.
Here in lies the importance of content marketing research. In fact, content may be the most underutilized result of market research. By collecting proprietary data for your business, organizations are able to re-purpose this information into a multitude of marketing materials such as sales collateral, press releases, and e-books.
Approach
Being that this is the second wave of research, Drive Research recommended the same approach of collecting feedback through an online survey. Utilizing paid social media and a pre-recruited online research panel of participants, Drive Research was able to find our target audience of those working in a financial institution’s marketing department.
The survey fieldwork lasted three weeks, beginning on Tuesday, March 5 through Monday, March 25, 2019. The online survey consisted of 15 questions, asking participants to answer a variety of multiple-choice, open-ended, and rating scale questions.
The online survey included questions such as:
- What are the largest challenges your organization faces when marketing financial products or services?
- How do you anticipate your overall marketing budget will change over the next year?
- What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you hear the term “content marketing”?
The survey collected 410 responses who were screened again to verify their job role within a bank or credit union.
Findings
The online survey lead to a variety of key findings regarding marketing activities among banks and credit unions. This included themes such as largest challenges in marketing, budget changes and search engine optimization (SEO) allocation, familiarity with content marketing and more.
Here is a highlight of some of the key findings:
- Hiring top marketing talent (+11%) and keeping up with new marketing techniques (+9%) were more likely to be mentioned as challenges compared to last year.
- 52% of financial marketers say keeping up with new marketing techniques is their largest challenge.
- 91% of participants stated their marketing budget will increase in the next year.
- Nearly half (45%) of respondent’s website budgets are dedicated to SEO.
- Two in three bank and credit union marketers indicated a high level of knowledge regarding content marketing.
- The largest room for improvement with regard to content marketing effectiveness is infographics.
To learn more key findings and statistics from our survey, download the full State of Content Marketing for Financial Services.
Drive Research is a market research company located in Syracuse, NY. Our team has the knowledge and tools to design a robust market research study, should it be the right fit for your business.
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