For a trading platform, content marketing can be a kind of golden goose: it keeps generating a steady stream of customer acquisitions for as long as you remember not to strangle it. If you do a few things right and are careful to avoid some pitfalls, its return on investment can easily be an order of magnitude higher than that of paid advertising.

The first hazard you need to sidestep is the idea that writing engaging content is like drafting an email. You also can’t necessarily translate the sales pitch you’re used to giving prospective clients over the phone into an appropriate format.

Instead, you have to strike a particular balance of sophistication and approachability. You need to touch on the complexity of financial products without overwhelming the reader. This means that, for a trading platform, content tips which generally work in digital marketing won’t always be applicable.

This doesn’t mean that drawing up a trading platform content plan has to be hard, though. Financial companies and the digital marketing agencies that serve them tend to follow a specific workflow for developing and executing each campaign; as long as you follow the steps below, nothing much can really go wrong.

Key takeaways:

• Anyone can create reasonably effective content by following a certain roadmap.
• This takes into account that most prospective clients aren’t already primed to open a brokerage account.
• Writing or recording something that will get people’s attention requires some understanding of your audience.
• Try new approaches! Even if such experiments don’t always work out, surprising successes and the feedback you’ll gain make it all worth it.

1. Define a clear purpose for each article

Worthwhile trading platform content solutions don’t rely on sudden flashes of inspiration but require careful planning. This means that each of your blog posts, social media updates, and YouTube videos has to fit within an overall content strategy.

One model that illustrates how everything hangs together is called the sales funnel. Essentially, every new prospect is assumed to start out completely unaware of your company, its services, and the need these fulfil.

From this perspective, trading platform content marketing is all about gradually nudging potential clients closer to converting. This means that any specific piece of content serves a purpose: perhaps informing consumers about investing in general, strengthening your brand, promoting a specific product, or maybe influencing existing clients to spend more.

In other words, a trading platform’s content plan works in stages. Convincing someone who’s never heard of mutual funds to suddenly start buying them, in a single step, would be a neat trick but usually isn’t realistic.

2. Remember that everything starts with the reader

One of the most useful trading platform content tips has to be to remember that you’re talking to people who probably don’t resemble your colleagues, friends, or even clients. Depending on what part of the sales funnel they find themselves in, even relatively simple financial concepts may hold no interest or even meaning for them.

< From https://www.acorns.com/learn/investing/what-is-inflation/>

Acorns’ explanation starts from scratch and doesn’t assume that their audience already understands economics.

If you want to reach people, you have to begin by conceptualising and respecting their worldviews, needs, interests, fears, and whatever else makes up their subjective reality. When deciding what to publish, first identify and address the issues that matter to them – a trading platform’s SEO performance can always be addressed later, but content that doesn’t hook its intended audience is never going to be anything but futile.

3. Decide on a slant and tone

Now that you have an idea of who you’re writing for, you can start to speculate about what kind of material they may find engaging. Trading platform content, by its nature, tends to be rather dry. It often addresses questions nobody is really asking, at least not in a way that leads to the answers you’d like to provide.

Leaving aside the basic information your content provides, things like word choices influence how it will be received. Now, investing is an intimidating and esoteric subject. Approaching any such topic head-on is likely to make you sound like a textbook or a lawyer. Why not make the material more approachable by examining it from the reader’s perspective?

If your trading platform’s content plan includes telling people about the tax advantages of a British ISA or U.S. Roth IRA, for example, don’t start by rattling off statistics and legal principles – focus instead on how your clients can retire with more money in their pockets.

Of course, it’s best to remain within your overall brand identity, but you do have some leeway especially when speaking to less immediate prospects. You could, perhaps, continue to project a conservative, serious image for content hosted on your own website and publish more informal, accessible articles elsewhere.

4. Identify an emotional hook

A trading platform’s content marketing typically (and quite correctly) encourages potential clients to make rational decisions. Still, you need to intrigue them somehow, and you won’t gain their interest just by reciting facts. Take, for example, the logos and typefaces of Robinhood and Vanguard:

One is buoyantly irreverent, the other oozes stability and authority even if it takes most of us a minute to remember what “vanguard” even means. Both brands use every opportunity to indicate how their respective cultures align with those of a certain type of client. Note, however, that they do this subtly, implying rather than asserting their values.

While each trading platform’s content creation system should incorporate the emotional dimension, it’s important not to overdo things or resort to outright manipulation. People may smile at the idea of paying less tax, but suggesting that they’ll die in poverty otherwise isn’t going to fly.

5. Forget about ChatGPT

Feelings and values generally aren’t going to form the crux of any trading platform’s content solutions. Yet they are indisputably important to your clients and shouldn’t be ignored completely. Unfortunately, despite continuing advances in generative AI, emotions remain a foreign country to them.

Such tools are good at restating conventional wisdom and never miss a beat with grammar, but both search engines and human readers can spot this kind of content a mile away. Truly engaging trading platform content is still invariably written by people, who are able to connect with readers at a more meaningful level.

If you’re serious about creating engaging content, it’s probably best to hire a digital marketing agency; they can also help to promote your brand in other ways. At a minimum, though, a thinking, feeling human being needs to ensure that each article hits the right notes.

6. Think about fresh, new kinds of content

The unavoidable truth about trading platform SEO is that you’re not the only one doing it. In fact, rival trading platform content solutions continually get in one another’s way, making it ever more difficult to make your brand stand out.

Attempting to make your voice heard by shouting more loudly can only work if you’re willing to outspend your competition, and that just won’t do. There is another way, though, namely to address less obvious market segments that other financial companies tend to ignore.

Several topical debates – about the cost of higher education, whether it’s better to buy or rent a house, how we can pursue a better work/life balance, etc. – can all be used as lead-ins to investment topics. If you want to promote a trading platform, SEO opportunities are plentiful in each.

Source: Read Investment Advice

By offering a provocative and somewhat political viewpoint, Real Investment Advice invites its readers to think about investment issues while casting a wider SEO net.

If your content marketing efforts seem to have gotten stuck, a little brainstorming with a digital marketing agency will often reveal avenues that require only a little creativity to exploit. You could, for example, spice things up by conducting and publishing interviews. Many figures in the world of investing, even those who don’t just like the sound of their own voices, would love to promote their companies and personal brands in this way.

7. Seek out feedback and ways to improve

You can certainly get outside investment analysts and CEOs of smaller publicly traded companies to help with your trading platform’s content creation. Alternatively, you can use emerging news stories as inspiration and publish a podcast that places current events in their proper investment context. Who, though, is going to want to listen to what you produce?

There’s no shame in missing the mark sometimes, but monitoring the performance of each campaign should play a central role in your trading platform’s content plan. Determining whether something is working as well as it should is usually easy.

The harder part is figuring out what exactly is wrong and how you can fix it. Often, there are no straightforward, unambiguous answers, leading to the temptation to simply keep doing the same things using the same channels even if they’re not yielding the right kind of results.

In this case, and even if your trading platform’s content marketing seems to be performing well, it makes sense to get a digital marketing agency to review your strategy and make some suggestions. A fresh perspective, and perhaps some practical assistance, will often help you get the most out of your budget.

Final thoughts

The single most important trading platform content tip is surprisingly simple: add value to people’s lives. If you can explain to someone how to do something, why they might want to do it, or what they can expect once they’ve done it, most of the rest falls into place rather naturally.

This is harder than it looks, though. Promoting a trading platform using content marketing requires a special approach; it’s quite different from outbound marketing techniques like cold calling or running ads. It takes time to do well and can’t be mastered overnight. Nevertheless, there are huge rewards to reap: once you’ve engaged a prospective client’s interest and earned their trust, their business is as good as yours.