Overcoming the last-mile challenge for financial content

Amazon and other e-commerce companies spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to solve the last-mile challenge. This term refers to the difficulty of getting a package from a local distribution hub to the customer’s doorstep. The logistics involved in covering the “last mile” often account for 50% of the total fulfillment cost, according to Amazon.

Financial services marketers face a similar challenge with their content. While much of the heavy lifting goes into creating the content (i.e., interviews, research, writing, and editing), completing the steps required to publish and distribute content as part of an integrated campaign can be a time- and energy-consuming process in its own right. When marketing teams aren’t effective at navigating this last mile, it impacts the timeliness and ROI of their content.

That’s why providing content activation services is a central part of our value proposition at Wentworth Financial Communications.

What is content activation?

We define “content activation” as the steps required to bring content to life and deliver it to the target audience through the appropriate channels. Sometimes activation work can be creative in nature (e.g., writing social posts to promote a white paper). Other times this work can be operational (e.g., getting content approved by compliance and then posted to digital channels) or consultative (e.g., auditing existing content; recommending ways to optimize content-production workflows).

When we started evaluating the need for these services, we debated what to call it. We initially considered “content operations” and “content execution.” But we landed on “content activation” because we feel it effectively captures the role we can play across the content lifecycle—from strategy to creation to activation.

What are the benefits of content activation support?

Every day, financial marketing teams are asked to do more work with less. Marketers are tasked with deploying content about complex market dynamics across new channels using an ever-expanding array of mediums. At the same time, marketing teams are often short-handed because of budget constraints, employee turnover, organizational restructuring, or the scarcity of marketing professionals who truly understand the financial services industry.

As a result, marketers often spend too much of their time pushing content through operational and regulatory steps required to publish new content while struggling to maintain existing content. These demands limit marketers’ ability to focus on the areas where they add the most value for their firms: refining content strategy, bringing new ideas to market, and managing relationships with key internal and external stakeholders.

As a trusted partner and outsourcing solution, we expand the bandwidth of our clients’ marketing teams and empower marketing leaders to focus on their highest-value roles. We’ve seen this support deliver tangible benefits for clients, including enhancing their content’s:

• Speed-to-market: By creating distribution materials for integrated campaigns and working directly with compliance, design, and digital teams, we can reduce the time between when a draft is completed and when the content “goes live.”
• Technical precision: Our team’s knowledge of the technical and regulatory aspects of financial services allows us to collaborate with compliance and design teams to ensure that the most compelling messages are conveyed in the final content.
• Consistency: Whether auditing existing content or creating new materials, we ensure that our clients’ style and voice are consistently applied across channels and mediums.

Expanding our core to solve the last-mile challenge

Even though content strategy and content creation will always be our core capabilities, we know that fulfilling our mission of helping financial services marketers produce investment-grade content requires supporting them through every step of the content lifecycle.

If you’d like to learn more about how we help financial marketers solve their last-mile challenge, please contact me or download our brochure about our content activation services, which includes four case studies of content activation at work.

About the Author Scott Wentworth, CEO at Wentworth Financial Communications. Scott leads a team of writers and editors at Wentworth to help firms across the financial services industry build their brands and articulate their expertise by creating investment-grade content.