Content Marketing for Capital Markets - It is not about You

Successful content marketing answers the only questions buyers have:
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1. Do you know what my problem is?
2. Do you understand what specifically makes this problem hard to solve for me?
3. Can you describe 1 and 2  in language that is precise and easy to understand?

​The reason software and service providers spend money on marketing is simple: to increase sales.  Marketing that does not deliver this simple goal can be carried by vanity drivers such as prestige, market expectations, or CEO ego trips. But not for long, and not in a market that has seen regulation erode sales and profits across the board.

Marketing must deliver qualified leads to sales, and in financial technology this simple maxim has killed off trade press and third-party events. Advertising and sponsoring do not work, nor do the majority of by-vendors-for-vendors events. The confusion between mass consumer markets and a niche B2B environment has been settled by the brute reality check of post ’08 markets. Brand recognition, visual identity, snappy slogans and the like may be esthetically pleasing to marketing insiders, but irrelevant to the primary goal of selling to highly informed specialized buyers. The capital markets technology market is not a supermarket shelf.
 
Building financial technology is hard: it takes our teams of engineers and domain experts years to do it well. As a result, we like our products very much, and we want to tell the world about every function, feature and tech differentiator they offer. I have sat through hundreds of product and service demonstrations, and can count the number of truly effective ones on the fingers of one hand. Most of the time, it is all about the product.
 
This is a mistake. Buyers do not care about your product and all the things it does, or how it does it. The only thing they care about is the problem they have, and their working lives are spent thinking about how they can solve their unique challenges.

After the demise of visibility and influencer marketing, our industry has settled on content marketing as the best way to achieve the primary goal of increasing sales. Content marketing focuses on content, not packaging. The glossy brochure, prestigious event, or influential magazine ad are being replaced by the hard-working blog, white paper, or breakfast briefing.
 
But clarity of intent and quality of execution matter even more now. As with visibility and influencer marketing, not all content marketing is created equal. It turns out blogs, white papers and breakfast briefing are just as likely to contain chest-beating feature-function essays in bloated corporatese as last decade’s full page 4-colour adverts.
 
Successful content marketing answers the following questions buyers have:

1. Do you know what my problem is?
2. Do you understand what specifically makes this problem hard to solve for me?
3. Can you describe 1 and 2  in language that is precise and easy to understand?

 
You do not need answers, but you do need a superior understanding of the right questions. Does your content marketing answer the only questions your buyers care about, or does it talk about you?