Our audience needs answers, but we don’t know to what.
A large financial services company was challenged to provide updated useful content to the general population users to engage them and build their reputation and brand awareness with the audience as a trusted, independent source.
The Assignment:
Focus on their content library to ensure their users were able to find and understand information that was relevant to them, and further promoted the expertise and leadership of the brand.
The goal was during a time of financial uncertainty and recovery they were determined to offer information consumers were looking for, to build trust and attract new customers in a short time.
The Challenge:
- The directive was unfocused and the audience targeting was non-existent, but the need was absolutely clear: Offer information to consumers seeking to better understand financial choices.
- During the rapidly changing economic recovery period, the company faced the need to update content regularly to keep current.
- The needs and interests of consumers were changing fast as well.
- The challenge was to be able to respond to content needs and interests of the audience0 based on industry trends and engagement behavior.
The Approach:
The client desperately needed an understanding of their audience in real time, to allow them to provide cornerstone content as well as timely updates in a rapidly changing environment. They also needed to ensure the content they had and would develop needed to be consistent and reliable, both in quality and presentation, so that the audience could fully understand the information quickly, regardless of their level of understanding of the industry or markets.
This was personal for each audience member, and they were seeking information, not sales, not tools, not connection. They needed answers, and the ability to self-direct the next steps. So I needed to understand how the audience came to the the need, what was their state of mind, and triage their needs. Financial questions and situations are nerve wracking for everyone, and to gain their trust the content had to deliver.
The Work:
- I audited the client’s existing Knowledge Center and reviewed the content by topic, content type, and topic, and matched that against user data and trends to determine keywords and engagement rates.
- I developed new content models and templates based on content types, to ensure consistency, readability, accessibility, and changing SEO needs by the audiences.
- Using site behavioral and search data I pulled industry trend, engagement, and user search data to update keyword inclusion and developed standard recommendations for matching against conversions by topic.
The Outcome:
The user data showed more time spent on the site but a deeper analysis showed the users were spending more time on the pages they were consuming, suggesting they weren’t looking for answers, they were finding them and diving deeper into the content.
The soft sell as support offering, even as a self-serve option led to more conversions to paid products, especially when testing alternative messaging aligned with the on page content.
I developed additional recommendations and messaging tools, that would lay out the plan to automatically pull and parse behavioral data while comparing it against weekly industry search trends. This tool would also have the ability to update with world and regulated events, as well as tag content for updating schedules or expiration. These tags were added to existing content during the audit phase and would allow for regular scheduling of content reviews.
Based on this information, a pre-set time limit would allow for the creation of AI-powered recommendations, having used the data parsing in the prompt engineering process, to deliver a series of creative briefs for recommended articles.
This not only allowed the client to better stay on top of the industry and audience interest, but also allowed them to schedule, rather than scramble, their content development teams.
