Any business in the financial sector must understand that when it comes to customer success, more is always better. You need your website before more eyeballs, and you need more customers for your business to experience increased growth.
With the internet, there are so many ways to grow a financial services company and begin to draw in customers instantly. But if you’re thinking the inbound marketing way, guest blogging is one of the most appealing ways to go.
Given the fact that the financial service industry has not always been the biggest when it comes to content marketing, finding success with guest blogging might be tougher than in other industries.
However, that may change very soon. And there are two factors to it: traditional media is no longer as effective for the financial services industry as it used to, so a shift to digital is necessary. According to stats from CMO.com “77% of financial marketers believe high-impact ads can breakthrough as much as TV/print ads. 67% say digital is more efficient, believing that it costs less to reach targeted consumers online than off.”
The second factor being the growth in the digital is attracting increasing budgetary allocations. In turn, over one third of CMOs want to allocate 75% or more of their spending within the next five years to digital marketing.
What this means is, whether the financial services industry is slow to adopt content marketing or not, if you’re not yet using the medium, you may soon be left behind by others in the industry.
If you’re considering marketing your financial services business using content marketing, this post will show you the best tips on how to use guest blogging to grow your financial services business.
#1. Selling Your Boss on the Idea
This is probably one of the biggest obstacles marketers face when it comes to exploring new areas. You have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you’re not about to make a wrong decision with the company’s future. So you need more than the excitement in you to get everyone, particularly your boss, on your side here.
Here’s how to sell the idea of guest blogging and content marketing to your boss:
- Prepare to do a presentation: you should tackle this like you’re proposing any other big change to the business. So a level of seriousness should be expected. Your presentation, instead of boring chats and stats, could start with a story.
- Align your pitch to the company’s goals: your boss definitely holds the goals of the company dear to his heart. This is one area you can leverage to make a successful pitch for content marketing in the company. By aligning your pitch with the goals of the company, your boss will easily show interest in your ideas. What are the goals of the company? Use it to sell the idea.
- Use case studies and success stories: using other company’s success with content marketing as a point, lay emphasis on how effective guest blogging can be for a financial services company. The other companies might be a competitor, you get the idea.
- Use data: finally, use data to show your boss how effective content marketing is when it comes to driving growth to a business. Many C-level managers do not understand any language other than data, and this might be the area you get to totally sell them in.
Once you’ve been able to sell the idea to everyone in your organization, your aim would be on how to make guest blogging work for your company. The following ways are how to actually use guest blogging to market a financial services business.
#2. How to Land Guest Post Opportunities
Successfully getting your guest post published on other blogs, particularly higher authority blogs in the financial services industry, is not an easy task. Your content needs to be very high-quality, filled with adequate data and stats. No one needs to tell you that blog posts like this take ample amount of time.
The last thing you want is your guest post article to be rejected. However, successfully landing a guest post on your dream blog can happen. By implementing the following tips, you can get high authority blogs in the financial services industry to not only publish your guest posts, but to also link back to your website in the process.
- Be Niche Focused: when you’re starting off your guest blogging efforts, approaching websites in niches that are not in the financial services might seem appealing. But you’ll achieve better and faster results by focusing on websites that are related to your niche. The goal is to only target websites in the financial services market for your guest blogging opportunity. Not only are these websites going to be more willing to host your content, you’ll also be getting targeted traffic and customers in return for getting featured on them.
- Target Pro-Guest Blogging Sites: when you’re looking out for other sites to guest post for in the financial services industry, it’s certain that some will not understand the benefits of guest blogging. Instead of just wasting so much time trying to convince them on why they should host your excellent blog post, invest that effort in trying to get featured on like-minded blogs. These are blogs that are fully aware of the win-win benefits that is in guest blogging. They will not only welcome your contributions, but are also more likely to give your guest post the promotion it needs to stand out.
- Be a Regular Voice in Your Industry: being an authority in the financial services industry will also help to convince other bloggers to easily trust your voice and accept your guest posts. This means you need to have a blog that is not only regularly updated with high quality content, but you should also be a regular voice in the community.
Usually, finding the right blogs to host your guest post is where the job starts when it comes to using guest blogging to promote a business. But convincing bloggers to accept your guest post is usually the toughest part of it. With the simple tips outlined above, you shouldn’t find it difficult to get your guest posts published.
#3. How to Reap Rewards from Your Guest Posts
Once you’re able to successfully land your guest post on another blog, you might feel that the job is finished. This is not true. Getting your guest post accepted and published is just a huge part of using guest blogging to promote your financial services business. You should now get to the actual marketing aspect of it.
Sure, guest blogging is also an inbound marketing effort, but you need to do some marketing for you to reap the best reward from your efforts.
- Use social media to boost awareness to your guest post: chances are the publication you just contributed to will promote the post on social media in order to drive more traffic to it. You should also do the same. You can even go a step further by using paid promotion to drive more traffic to the guest post. This will make sure more people see your content and get familiar with your brand.
- Mention it in other blogs: you don’t want to write a guest post and ignore it. When you guest post for other finance related websites, you should link back to the guest post in other guest posts you’re writing. This will keep the post relevant for as long as possible and help your site reap even more SEO rewards.
- Use CTAs to drive engagement: when you write for other sites, you can improve engagement by using call to action within your guest posts. This might be by offering them a download, or linking to some other content on your website that is relevant to the subject of your guest post.
In order to reap the best rewards from guest blogging, you should apply the methods above to promote and optimize each guest post. By employing a careful and optimized guest blogging approach, you will witness your financial services business grow.
Conclusion
Using guest blogging to promote your financial services business can be one of your best business investment decisions. If you find the tips on how to use guest blogging to market your financial services business that I covered in this blog post helpful, you will also love to try out my guest blogging services. We take care of the whole guest blogging process from content creation to publishing. Get in touch today for a free no-obligation consultation.
Image credit (Joethegoatfarmer)