The State of Play 2017

Content marketing in financial services has never been more competitive. Has the discipline reached a new level of maturity, or is the journey just beginning?

For three years, the biggest challenges for content marketers were: 1. Lack of measurable ROI 2. A lack of a coordinated strategy and 3. Producing content that is sufficiently engaging. Then the 2017 results came in…

It’s been a big year for content marketing as a discipline, a big few years actually. The idea of a marketing structure that would use ‘pull’ techniques to gather audiences around ideas was pretty revolutionary. No more need to spend fortunes on ‘push’ messages into audiences already held by some (ultimately self-interested) media owners.

Even above-the-line begins to lose its appeal when our B2B financial services audiences are so discreet, so hard to reach, so time poor and so focused on inflows over brand awareness. A six-figure or even seven-figure ATL budget suddenly didn’t seem to go too far – and as for measurement of effectiveness…
This is the fourth year that we have done our ‘State of play in content marketing for financial services’ benchmarking survey, produced in association with The Financial Services Forum and content distribution channel Dianomi. It began as an opportunity for marketers to share their pain and understand that they weren’t alone in the challenges they were experiencing around content marketing in this industry.

We have shared challenges to face – structural, technological and cultural – and as a content agency focused on answering customer need with a deep understanding of the FS industry and its audiences, the survey has been really useful in helping us tailor answers to universal questions.

This year, we were surprised to see that the content marketing discipline is entering a new phase.

Rowan Morrison

Rowan is Group Managing Director of Editions Financial. An experienced manager, content strategist and writer, she's dedicated to the successful management and future growth of the agency - overseeing a team of 50+ people across three locations. She also plays a mean ukulele.