How Can Content MarketingDifferentiate Your Brand?January 2016Niels Footman I Senior Writer Find out more at copylab.co.uk

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Received Wisdom in Marketing… @CopylabUK

Commoditised products can’t be differentiated

Heavy regulation = impossible to be distinctive

@CopylabUKBut How True Is It?

Despite being a $500bn company operating in increasingly commoditised markets – PCs and smartphones – Apple manages to embody an utterly distinct identity: innovative, design-obsessed and even slightly counter-cultural.

You may not like him (you may hate him!) but one look and you immediately know who he is and who he represents – despite Compare the Market operating in a sector that is both commoditised and highly regulated.

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Real differentiation comes not through its products Or even through its design Real differentiation comes through…

VALUES

For Apple…

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It’s very difficult to differentiate on products It’s tough to differentiate on values (as most finance companies would

espouse similar values) Real differentiation comes through…

How you show your VALUES

For Finance Companies…

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For obvious reasons, every finance company wants to place trust at the heart of its identity. In content marketing, a highly effective way to show this value is with consistent use of that trusted staple, tone of voice.

Value 1:

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Open Bold Distinctive Authentic

For tone-of-voice to work, it HAS to be authentic, the kind of tone people believe you’d use, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, even when your customers aren’t in the room.

A Trusted Voice Would Be…

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Outspoken

Through its blog and insights section, Woodford provides a series of timely and candid takes on current economic developments. Woodford’s writers frequently come from the most senior levels of the company, write in an accessible manner, and encourage and respond to questions. This allows each fund manager (frequently Neil Woodford himself) to become a real, fully rounded character with a distinct voice, lending credence to the idea that these are people you can trust.

Authentic Voice: Woodford

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To see how engaging Woodford aims to be, look at its Christmas quiz. Of course, having a quiz at Christmas is no huge innovation, but Woodford’s team clearly goes to great lengths with theirs. It is fiendishly difficult, with pictorial questions that are both clever and practically Google-proof. It encourages (indeed, requires!) group effort, and Woodford releases teasers before and during the event, engaging with its 25,000 followers via Twitter.

Authentic Voice: WoodfordEngaging

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Woodford’s profile is based on the fact that Neil Woodford is well known for his success as a fund manager. But rather than rest on this reputation, airily dispensing wisdom via viewpoints every quarter, Neil Woodford makes himself a visible and accessible presence, even appearing as a guest on Jazz FM. Not only does this demonstrate Woodford’s adherence to openness, it also – crucially – sends a clear message to the entire company to embody these values, not just profess them.

Authentic Voice: WoodfordPersonable

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In its tone-of-voice document, M&G adopted the idea of being an “Independent Spirit”:We are not bound by a single ‘house’ fund management style which means we can afford to be bold in our statements.With its Bond Vigilantes blog, M&G embodies this aim. Written by top managers on M&G’s fixed income team, each writer has a distinct, outspoken voice, which can sometimes lead to differences of opinion. It is the “independent spirit” writ large.

Authentic Voice: Bond VigilantesIndependent Spirit

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Finance firms love to say they’re customer-centric but their content – heavy on corporate-speak, product push and self-promotion – often suggests otherwise. Content marketing provides the perfect tool to show it, with personalised, helpful, invaluable content.

Value 2:

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Directly addressing one of the single biggest issues families will ever have to face, Wells Fargo’s Student LoanDown offers reams of practical advice for students – and their parents – on the pitfalls and choices around going to university. Combining such useful information with a very human face, Student LoanDown shows that Wells Fargo is a customer-centric company more effectively than any slogan could.

Customer-Centric: Wells FargoStudent Loandown

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OPEN Forum offers a huge range of useful advice for small-business owners. With much of its content written not by American Express staffers, but by independent experts, OPEN Forum has genuine credibility and a distinctive voice. American Express clearly wants to bring these small businesses on-board as customers, and figures that a good way to do that would be to help them make money. And what could be more customer-centric than that?

Customer-Centric: American ExpressOPEN Forum

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Whether it’s called expertise or thought leadership, insight is a value that all financial firms want to convey. Despite that, they will often produce content that is too dense, or insufficiently distinctive. Showing insight can require a bit of punch and innovation – whether in tone or format.

Value 3:

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Recognising the need to create highly insightful content, BNY changed its writing team into a “newsroom”, employing experienced financial journalists to ensure output is timely, newsworthy, and keenly focused on what will interest readers. In close collaboration with fund managers, BNY has also created a blog based entirely on infographics, providing an accessible and shareable platform to disseminate its managers’ rich expertise.

Insight: BNY MellonBNY Newsroom

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In a clear example of the insight that investment firms can generate, Toby Nangle, a multi-asset fund manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments, discovered that by calling and refinancing a “War Loan” dating from World War I, the government could save the taxpayer £300m. Toby wrote a blog on the issue that was picked up by the FT, among others. By working closely with the corporate communications team, Toby’s research did much to distinguish him and Columbia Threadneedle Investments as genuine thought leaders in their field.

Insight: Columbia ThreadneedleWar Bond

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1. In a highly commoditised market, values can be an enormously powerful way to differentiate a financial brand – IF they are shown, not just told. Produce content that shows your company is trustworthy, customer-centric and insightful – and not just looking to sell – and customers are more likely to believe you.

2. In crystallising these values, a tone-of-voice document can be a very persuasive tool. In order for it to work, however, it must be embraced and endorsed by the highest levels of the company.

Takeaways:

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Niels Footmanniels@copylab.co.uk