Transferring and protecting value for corporate customers and high-net-worth individuals demands compliance and assurance. The first thing content marketing teams in the finance sector can do is develop thought leadership for their lead generation strategy.

Secondly, it’s important to know that reliable long-term growth is now driven by inbound content marketing. Outbound tactics like cold calling, maildrops and newspaper ads no longer work as an efficient way to deliver sustained revenue.

If you’re looking to direct resources strategically, then you need a solid inbound lead generation strategy. Because digital tracks and reports on ROI, and automates and delivers exceptionally well, every marketing asset should be digitally produced.

Top strategies for finance lead gen

Your baseline marketing plan should include:

An easy-to-navigate, SEO-optimized website
Keyword-driven blogs showcasing expertise
Email marketing campaigns
PPC across relevant channels
Social media networking
A content marketing strategy built on displaying authority and trustworthiness

If there’s one content stream that financial services should fully invest in (pun intended), it’s thought leadership.

Thought leadership for finance

High-value thought leadership lead gen content educates and engages audiences already looking for advice. Above all else, thought leadership positions a financial services provider as an authority in its field.

Use in-house experts to outline ideas and drafts and offer quotes and video explainers. Using internal subject matter experts signals to Google that your content is rankworthy.

Subjects your customers care about might include discussion about wealth management, capital markets, or assessing risk for acquisition. Successful thought leadership (attractive to download and share), sparks conversation and is newsworthy.

Most thought leadership is published in ways that make tracking and managing leads difficult. It’s the same with another important lead generator for financial services – the faithful whitepaper.

Lead magnets for financial services

Whitepapers, reports, and thought leadership content are all typical gated B2B lead magnets and often published as PDFs that provide no digital tracking (reader data) to help streamline the backend of lead generation, ie. lead management via effective lead nurturing and building better lead scoring models.

Lead magnets keep your sales funnel flowing. Relevant, data-informed lead magnets fill your funnel so you can spend time pushing people through it.

Your ideal scenario is to have hot leads prioritized for sales follow-up. You can see who your warmest leads are if you use online documents to manage your lead magnet funnel.

Ungated lead gen for financial services

Lead generation normally means using a lead capture form to collect contact information. If you prefer to leave your content ungated, there are ways to identify your warmest opportunities.

Turtl can integrate with your CRM to recognize readers already in your database. A custom analytics setup provides a Known Reader dashboard where you can track interactions with your content to score and nurture effectively.

When you know who your ideal customer is and which type of content attracts, engages and converts them, you can plan better lead gen content in the first place.

Our webinar How to generate more leads from your digital content shows you how to:

Plan successful lead-generation content
Measure and iterate on content performance
Use content insight to judge intent
Act upon engagement signals and follow-up
Prove marketing ROI using long-form content

Using intent data to attract quality leads

Marketing intent data reveals the online behavior of potential buyers and their intentions to buy via engagement with your content. It offers a glimpse into what prospects are actively researching, their pain points, and their readiness to engage with your brand. By combining intent data with verified contact data, you’ll know when to reach out to leads, how to reach out to them, and what you should reach out to them with. With intent data, lead generation for financial services (and every industry honestly) becomes infinitely easier.

Turtl and first-party intent data

Turtl Analytics offers a view of your user’s data at a granular individual reader level. Gathering first-party data is important because you’re accumulating information directly from people who willingly interact with your content.

As third-party cookies are phased out for latently tracking people’s online behavior across sites and channels, marketers have often questioned the integrity of this data in the first place.

Collecting first-party data gives you a full steer: You’re building an understanding from people choosing to read your content – not from following behavior across channels and sites without a direct relationship. To put it another way – you’re dealing with warmer readers in the first place.

Turtl shows where readers are in the sales funnel, meaning you can manage your leads easily. You know exactly which leads to prioritize, who needs more content, and even what individual interests are. Take it up a step and nudge readers for feedback or insights with polls and surveys for zero-party insights.

I would advocate being wary of intent data providers. Instead focus on creating relevant, niche content for your ICPs, and then distribute this across core channels to build your own first-party data set, from which you can infer buying intent, rather than pay someone to do that (usually not very effectively) for you.

We've been using Turtl to do exactly this over the past three months, integrated into our own Workbooks CRM platform, and it's been a game changer in terms of lead flow and pipeline creation.