Many financial institutions—especially small, community-focused ones—have limited marketing budgets. As a result, every investment has to count, and every piece of content has to make an impact. Today we’re discussing five keys to effective financial content marketing that can help your institution get plenty of bang for their buck.

1.     Invest in mobility

Any millennial will tell you—and so will a lot of Gen-Xers and a growing number of boomers—that their phones are their lives. Consumers and small businesses are buying, selling, connecting, and transacting through their phones in increasing numbers every year. Having a mobile-first or responsive approach to design and development can make your phone and tablet experiences as usable and functional as your online offering. This means more positive account-holder engagement, more often. And a good mobile experience is more than transactional—it builds your brand as well as, if not better than, any marketing campaign.

2.     Interact

While you’re investing in technology, make sure you’re also driving as much interactivity as possible. Give your audience something to do—click, view, listen, answer, ask, “like,” and comment. This can be through your social media channels, online calculators for mortgage or loan rates, or goal-based savings apps that receive deposits based on customers accomplishing goals. Online interactions might not be quite the same as personal ones, but in the digital age, they’re crucial to creating engagement, gathering data, and growing your brand.

3.     Get personal

Your financial marketing content, whether it takes the form of email, social sharing, blogs, white papers, videos, or any combination of these and other methods, should be personalized. This requires more than taking a customer’s name to a field at the front of an email. To get truly personal means ensuring that the content is relevant to the customer—both who they are and when they are. After all, the same customer at 35 or 55 will respond to content differently, based on where they are in their life cycle. Gather as much data as you can—potentially through your mobile and interactive efforts—and use it to your advantage.

4.     Educate

In addition to relevance, financial marketing content must offer real value. Often this value comes in the form of education. Teaching your audience can be as simple as sharing your expertise through a blog or white paper, or as sophisticated as leveraging more interactive ways: through a webinar, a video, or an online or mobile learning application. The former, webinars, are a great way to engage in back-and-forth discussions and really get to know the issues your participants face, but they can be a heavy lift to do well. While online applications may lack some of the webinars’ face-to-face connection, they make up for it in other ways. Most are extremely scalable—able to reach dozens, hundreds, even thousands of learners quickly for a much smaller investment of resources on your part—and are able to be used by customers anytime, anywhere.

5.     Market targeted products

As an added bonus, strong content can help you market relevant products to willing customers. For example, learners seeking—or completing—online lessons about mortgages or credit scores are more likely to engage with additional marketing that targets them with specific loan offers. And their education has not only revealed what they may be interested in, but it can also help them interact with those products in a more sophisticated, educated manner. They’ll be better customers.

You may have noticed that these five keys to effective financial marketing build on each other. Each is a crucial piece of a greater holistic strategy that focuses on offering real value and creating better, more relevant engagement with your account-holders. The result is powerful, educational marketing that reaches customers where they are—on their own time. Want to learn more about creating financial content marketing? Download The Ultimate Guide to Financial Digital Marketing here.