[In the struggle for visibility, differentiation and engagement, financial advisors and asset managers have been pursuing proactive marketing in the form of website blogs, informational email campaigns and social medium messaging. According to a Kurtosys digital marketing survey, two-thirds of asset management firms are planning to increase their investment in content marketing, determining that it is the most important channel for generating more website traffic and leads. But many are realizing their posts are not heat-seeking missiles going to the hearts and minds of prospects and clients.
The fact is that retail customers have increasingly been evolving in their resistance to being sold. But they do want to learn before they buy. They want to be educated instead of being pitched. While traditional marketing approaches tended to be product-oriented and talk at people, a well-designed content marketing strategy can develop conversations by engaging readers. The bottom line for success seems to be in consciously crafting the nature and quality of your messaging by understanding that content, for the sake of content, is not effective.
The Content Marketing Institute reports that top marketing performers get that content marketing must connect to the core business. According to their 11th Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2021, they see a promising trend where more content marketers through the pandemic are recognizing the value of strengthening their relationship with their audiences:
“Two years ago, only 68% of all respondents said building trust was a goal. In this year’s report, the number has jumped to 81%. I honestly can’t think of a more important goal right now. Also, two years ago, only 54% of all respondents said building loyalty with existing customers was a goal, while that number jumped to 68% in this report. With trust comes loyalty. If this isn’t a top priority, it’s time to rethink your content marketing strategy.”
To get a better understanding how to rethink and implement a more strategic and efficient firm strategy around content, we reached out to new Institute member Scott Rogerson, CEO of UpContent—a powerful content curation platform. In a hyper-competitive marketplace, it is essential to transform a time-consuming manual process into a strategic engagement approach to cut through the noise and demonstrate your value to your target audience.]
Bill Hortz: Can you tell us about your motivations in starting UpContent?
Scott Rogerson: UpContent was initially inspired by an internal need by a small group working within a marketing agency. Namely, the process of discovering, vetting, seeking approval for, and then distributing valuable curated content that will stimulate, engage, and add context to our clients’ original perspective, was taking way too long!
As part of a client’s content mix, we knew the strategy of leveraging curated third-party articles worked from both an engagement and conversion perspective, but we needed a way to more easily discover the articles that would matter to our clients’ audience and easily review and distribute them to these individuals. After evaluating several other solutions that were available, we concluded that we would have to build our own solution to get what we needed.
Once the initial version was created, we spoke with our agency teammates again about how they would see it fitting into their workflow. These conversations quickly highlighted that adding another tab on their browser was not beneficial. They already used far too many disparate technologies to deliver on our clients’ goals. Further, nearly every client’s technology stack was slightly different based upon their internal preferences and needs.
It was from this feedback that the strategy around UpContent was formed—to serve as the “air traffic control” solution for an individual and organization’s often iterative content curation process. Rather than trying to own the “last mile” distribution to social media, email, website, or other digital channels, we decided to partner and integrate with the best in class in a way that both amplifies the value our clients get from each of those technology investments and allows the curation process to shift from a single team member’s perspective to one the entire organization can influence and be proud of.
In 2017, this same small team made the leap to leave the agency and focus entirely on achieving that goal. The market’s perception of how best to leverage third-party articles has evolved quite a bit since we began this journey and, through the many amazing customers we work within all areas of the globe, we are humbled to think we may have helped to influence at least a small part of that transformation and are excited for what’s to come as momentum accelerates.