Financial services firms have a unique opportunity to create compelling, informative content using the massive amounts of industry data at their disposal. However, many firms don’t take advantage of their data to engage their audience with visual content marketing.
Whether it’s market trends, industry statistics, customer figures or other financial information, financial services firms have access to a large amount of data. This data can be leveraged to create impactful visual content for their content marketing. Humans are visual creatures and visual content is highly engaging and effective in making your message memorable. Here are four ways to make your firm’s data into visually compelling images for maximum impact.
1. Infographics
Infographics are a great way to make a large amount of data engaging for your audience. They are a visual way for financial services firms to show stats like current market trends or results from a specific survey in an impactful and visual way.
Here’s an example of an engaging infographic about women-owned businesses from Amex OPEN Forum, a site targeted to helping grow businesses.
2. Whitepapers / eBooks
Whitepapers and eBooks give financial firms an opportunity to focus on a specific topic, provide engaging content and create impactful visuals to showcase supporting data. These provide a way to build thought leadership in the financial services industry. Further, by putting your premium content behind a form on a landing page optimized for conversion, you can capture a prospect’s information to begin to build a relationship and send relevant content to them in other ways.
3. Videos
According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, video had the largest increase of any content marketing tactic in 2012, jumping up to 70 percent from an already impressive 54 percent increase in 2011. Using video in your content marketing is a valuable and compelling way to showcase data in a way that resonates with your audience. They are specifically helpful for more difficult financial topics that are easier to understand verbally and visually.
TD Ameritrade is one financial firm that is an excellent example of showing short, engaging videos on specific topics that include data in a visual way. Most of their videos are under five minutes, which is long enough to give detailed information but short enough to keep the audience’s attention. They even break down their videos into levels of expertise from new investor to expert investor.
4. Social media images
One way to engage your followers on social media is to include impactful visuals as a part of your status updates. Posts with images tend to have more clicks and engagement from followers than posts that do not.
Mint.com’s Facebook page shows how great visuals can encourage likes, clicks and shares. Each of their posts includes a visual component and has resulted in a lot of engagement on their page. Below is an example of one of their posts with an impactful visual from data.
Marketing for financial services firms doesn’t have to be boring or mundane. Being able to visually represent data in an impactful image or video can add vibrancy to your social media pages and marketing materials.
