Don’t waste time churning out fintech content that doesn’t add value. Be systematic about it.

Fintech communications professionals and marketers rely on great content to drive lead acquisition, nurturing and customer success. But complex concepts are often at the core of your products and services. These ideas can often be difficult to get across when the opportunities to grab your market’s attention are sometimes fleeting. So you have to make the most of them.

When establishing your content program, start with the most compelling themes and topics that apply to your audience and customer base. Choose only 4 or 5 of the most intriguing ones, and lay out a program that speaks to these consistently over the coming year. These are the pillars of your content strategy.

What then are the key elements of solid content pillars? Relevance, expertise and timeliness. Cross-checking your content plans against these three markers will give you a better chance of producing content that is valued by your customers, lifts your profile and credibility, and ultimately wins you business.

Relevance
There are two sides when it comes to relevance – to your audience and to your business. Let’s tackle the latter first. Don’t spend time on content that has little to do with your services or products. That’s not to say you should only focus on topics that reference what you sell or do. Just don’t stray too far from narratives that support your reasons for being.

When it comes to your customer, relevance very much depends on what stage of the funnel you are seeking to engage with them at. Commonly, “top of the funnel” content will address broader topics that affect your customer’s business more broadly. These are the top-of-mind topics that keep your clients up at night. It’s what they might search for online and, if you are relevant, might encourage them to learn more about you. As they become more interested and move down the funnel – from awareness, to interest to engagement – the topics usually become more specific and focused on the problems you can actually solve for clients with your products and services.

Expertise
Underlying your relevance is, of course, the expertise you possess that can help your customer succeed. This is where you can seek to differentiate yourself from the competitors in your space. There’s likely plenty of content out there from your direct competitors that covers the same ground. What is it that your team of experts can hone in on and set you apart?

This is a good time to take a look at the SME’s you can call upon in your business. What expertise do they have that you can leverage? Who do you want to showcase and build a profile for? Sitting down with them and auditing their expertise is a good way to help you develop a stockpile of relevant topics and themes. You will also know who to call on for what.

Of course, extracting the information from your SME’s can be a challenge. Make sure to identify those SME’s who are more inclined to create content. They are your best friends. For those who are more challenging – make sure you have a strategy for how best to extract what you need with minimal pain all around. This is a blog post all of its own, so stay tuned.

Timeliness
The last piece of the pie is to try, as much as possible, to ride the zeitgeist. Topics and themes will wax and wane for a host of different reasons. Some of it you can plan for – such as seasonal changes or longer-term trends. But every now and then stories or news will break that disrupts the regular flow. It’s important to keep an eye out for these and be able to respond rapidly, as some may fade away as quickly as they appear. Also, these are the topics that will pique journalists’ interests and give you the edge in gaining broader media coverage.

Knowing your SME’s areas of expertise means that you can turn to them for a response quickly and be out in the market ahead of your competitors. Don’t forget, of course, to test for relevancy for both the business and your customer (and journalists). It will help you avoid wasting time on issues that make a lot of noise for little pay off.

Stick to your content pillars and avoid the temptation to go off topic. It takes time to build credibility and visibility for your business around a theme or topic. Engagement data and SEO tools will tell you if there’s traction. If not, it may be time to adjust course. But if it’s a theme that you believe to be very relevant to your business and customers then power ahead. Forging new paths, establishing credibility and a voice often takes time and consistency.

Developing a consistent publishing cadence that checks off every one of your content pillars over a quarter or set number of weeks will help you build visibility and credibility in these themes and topics that your customers care most about.