It seems that most companies have come to the realization that they need a solid content marketing strategy but few companies (especially in the financial services sector) seem to be able to get it right. 
HSBC is one of the few. Their award-winning content marketing strategy has put them into the spotlight as the best practice model of how content marketing is done.
Before we get into what HSBC did to crack the content marketing nut, let’s look at the challenge that all marketers face with content and why most fail.
The phrase “Content is King” might be old-hat to most marketers but that doesn’t make it any less true. In fact, it’s as true and important as the day the phrase was coined. Content is the key component to driving customer interactions and CMOs realize it. Companies are spending billions on content. According to the Content Marketing Institute, in 2013, B2B marketers spent 33% of their marketing budgets on content marketing.
Unfortunately for most of these companies, the bulk of that cash is going down the drain. SiriusDecisions tells us that 70% of B2B content goes completely unused. So what are these companies doing wrong? We could write a book (as many have) on this topic but let’s break it down to the top problem.
The primary problem is that companies are churning out product-centric content that remains irrelevant to customers and prospects. This content is far too often a one-way spewing of narcissism, rather than an engaging two-way conversation with customers. On the occasion that the content isn’t product centric, it still often performs poorly because there’s little analysis going into the decisions on what content to create.
So, how did HSBC avoids these pitfalls and go on to create such a successful content strategy? Firstly, they did their homework. They dove into the data to determine exactly who their audience was (i.e. persona research) and just what kind of content their audience wanted. Can you guess that their audience did not want product centric content? Their audience wanted content that would add value to their jobs and lives. Go figure, right?
From there, they determined the format of their content. Considering where the content would reside and how audiences would interact with it. They then used their employees, partners and customers to source new content. In addition to this, they made it very easy for their customers to create and engage in conversations about the content, which pushed crowd sourcing to the next level. Finally, they published the content to their web properties and then leveraged LinkedIn groups and LinkedIn sponsored posts to selectively promote content to people that the content was most likely to resonate with.
This approach of selective promotion was a bit of genius because it not only ensured that the content was promoted to the people who were most likely to consume it but also saved them heaps of advertising cash by having a laser focus on the right audience, rather than the traditional (and costly) shotgun approach.
And what was the result of this effort? How about over 40,000 new interactions with the content? Or a 1500% increase in organic update impressions and over 900% increase in social interactions? Also, adding over 3700 new followers to their LinkedIn page isn’t such a bad thing.
Pretty impressive. Especially for one of the largest banking and financial services companies in the world. Even though there was a lot of work behind those numbers, it really all comes down to the simple concept of creating meaningful and valuable conversations with your customers and prospects.
So, how about you? What is your content marketing strategy? Have you cracked the nut or is your company still stuck in the product-zone?
