While you may not be familiar with the phrase “custom content,” you probably have encountered custom content at least once (and probably numerous times) today. Custom content is one of the many terms—along with content marketing, brand journalism, branded content, thought leadership, and native advertising—used to describe certain types of marketing materials that companies create to promote their brands.
Where custom content differs from other forms of marketing is that custom content is all about using a narrative format, similar to what you are used to seeing in a newspaper or magazine, to tell a company’s story and articulate the company’s expertise. Some of the most common forms of custom content include white papers, newsletters, and blogs. But custom content has now evolved to also include rich-media formats such as video, podcasts, and even virtual reality.
Custom content has become so prevalent and so important in the financial services industry that the Financial Communications Society hosted a luncheon on June 21 to examine “The State of Custom Content.” Wentworth Financial Communications CEO and head financial writer Scott Wentworth provided the keynote address for the event at Chicago’s Union League Club. The luncheon attended by approximately 80 marketing professionals from the asset management, insurance, investment banking, exchange and trading, and media industries.
Panel Discusses Challenges of Creating and Measuring Custom Content
Wentworth’s keynote presentation was followed by a panel discussion where senior marketing executives from across the financial services industry discussed the challenges and successes they are having in creating thought leadership and other forms of custom content. Josh Quittner, a veteran Time Inc. journalist who is currently the editorial director at personal magazine platform Flipboard, moderated the four-person panel, which comprised (pictured below from left to right):
- Erin Vogel, creative strategist and brand content specialist, Mediavest | Spark
- Tara Giuliano, global head of institutional marketing, UBS Asset Management
- Lindy Hood, head of marketing, Zurich North America
- Jennifer Larson, director of global brand management and governance, BMO Financial Group
In addition to discussing how their firms are using “internal newsrooms” and other approaches to create custom content, the panel dealt with two of the core issues associated with the medium:
- How to draw the line between journalistic storytelling and branded storytelling
- How to measure the marketing success of custom content
Quittner asked how branded content can both “tell the truth and sell the brand,” to which the panelists agreed that it is possible to do both. Vogel, of Mediavest | Spark, said that as a branded content strategist she trusts the customer to understand when a brand is involved in content and when it’s not. Giuliano, of UBS Asset Management, said she hires former financial journalists for her team’s content creation, and she encourages them to write objectively about a subject, just as they would in a traditional journalism setting. But, she added, the marketing professionals on her team often will adapt the writers’ drafts to include an element of brand messaging.
The issue of how to measure the effectiveness of branded content is a bit trickier, the panelists concluded. Many of their firms have established what they think are reliable metrics to determine if their branded content is working in driving sales and promoting the brand. Vogel said marketers can use traditional brand awareness measurement methods to determine the impact on branded content, and Hood said Zurich uses engagement metrics such as net promoter score and customer retention as a proxy of branded content’s effectiveness.
WFC’s View on Maximizing Financial Content ROI
In his keynote speech, Wentworth said, “In an age where every financial services brand is a publisher, it is becoming harder to create high-quality content that rises above the noise and connects with the audience.” Drawing on WFC’s experience working with companies across the asset management, investment banking, and private equity industries, Wentworth discussed five best practices that firms can adopt to maximize the ROI of their custom content efforts.
The first of those five best practices involves convincing your marketing teams to think like journalists. This means thinking about the audience—not the brand—first when creating content and making sure each piece of content passes the “so what?” test. “We need to be rigorous in making sure we clearly explain why the audience should care about the topic,” Wentworth said.
His talk, “Five Ways to Maximize Your Financial Content ROI,” laid out what WFC considers to be a solid framework financial marketers can use to get their process started. To learn about the five things that firms are doing to enhance the value of their content, download the e-book below.
About the Author
Frank Kalman is the chief marketing officer at Wentworth Financial Communications. Frank and the team of writers and editors at WFC help professionals across the financial services industry build their brands by creating investment-grade white papers, bylined articles, newsletters, blogs, social media posts, and other forms of content marketing.