Content Marketing is not as stiff and menial as it used to be. Marketers are pulling all possible strings to transform their content from a rigid monologue to a conversational dialogue. Even if you’re offering the best financial products among your rivals, given the magnitude of content marketing, your product is not enough on its own, if you don’t employ content that strikes your users’ chords.

60 percent of today’s marketers reported that their content marketing strategies are more effective than the year before, compared to a 34 percent in 2016. In 2018, organizations of all shapes and sizes will multiply their efforts in generating quality content and setting up their development strategies; much more time will be spent on content marketing and on enhancing its targeting.

Making the effort

As a broker, you’ll have to make an effort as well, if you want to generate conversions. Content marketing will continue to play a significant role in driving customers and sales to your business. Your consumers are expecting valuable, unique, and original content that highlights how your product solves their problem.

Carefully, your content will be the foundation your users will base themselves on to choose you as their trusted partner. Amplifying your content marketing with the latest trends is a must to attract and engage customers effectively. The good news is you can start implementing these best practices today to Leverage optimal results from your content marketing.

With consistency, you'll create a credible digital brand, experience greater online visibility, achieve better social engagement, increase website visitors, and improve lead conversions. So, without further ado, here are four strong tactics for better content marketing in 2018.

Interactive Content Is the Future

Consumers are engaging differently with content, compared to five years ago. With so much text-based content on the web, people are looking for experiences that ease their understanding of your message. Thus, enters interactive content!

As we previously mentioned, your users favor dialogue marketing; they want you to listen to them. Interactive content such as quizzes, assessments, surveys, and polls, allows you to kill two birds with one stone – generate dialogue-driven content and learn about your users. They enhance user-experience and encourage readers to be more involved, all the while increasing average time spent on your website.

Interactive content allows you to identify your user’s unique problems and generate targeted content accordingly. How does this reflect on your business? It’ll strengthen your lead generation strategy and help you convert your Leads into true customers.

Let’s give you a simple example - as a broker, you can create an online quiz to test the “Trading Personality” of your users and aggregate insightful data about them. Your users will henceforth benefit from content that caters to their proper needs, challenges, or problems – this is called personalized marketing.

Video is a Must

If you're not using video in your content marketing strategy, you're missing out on a huge opportunity. Taking the US as an example, a whopping 85 percent of internet users watch videos online.

In 2017, videos have proven to be an indispensable tool to our content marketing strategy at Amana Capital; they enabled us to drive traffic, leads, and sales, and helped us build trust and humanize our brand.

On another note, here are a few video ideas you can use in your brokerage business:

• Share your story – speak about the mission of your company, why it was brought to life, what makes you different than competitors, and what makes your team feel great about work each morning.
• Highlight the top mistakes to avoid - what are the common blunders that traders can avoid, for instance? Share them in video and offer ways to help them avoid making these errors.
• Show your process – well-executed, how-to videos that position you as an expert in your field. Keep these videos shorter than two minutes for maximum effect.

Original, Consistent Content is King

Our experience with content marketing at Amana has confirmed to us that consistent and original content is the most addictive. In fact, brands like Google, Apple, and Facebook are planning to invest big in original content in 2018, and it's important that you follow suit. Content is the fuel of your entire inbound marketing strategy.

It attracts new visitors to your social media channels and website, it converts followers into email subscribers, and it moves prospects into becoming buying customers. Developing and documenting your content marketing plan is crucial to remaining competitive and staying current in today's ever-evolving digital era.

So, make sure that you have content that appeals to each stage of the buyer's journey (i.e., the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stage). Keep your eyes peeled and continually generate content that resonates with your user's interests.

Craft Unique Headlines & Call-to-Actions

70% of Facebook users read the headline before commenting on the story, and 59 percent of links shared on social media have never been clicked, according to the Washington Post. These alarming numbers reveal the importance of headlines in capturing attention, building awareness, and getting people to act.

However, if your headline gives the first impression about your content and determines whether the viewer will click to read, a proper Call-to-Action (CTA) tells your user what to do next. Your CTA can make the difference between someone simply liking your post, or clicking and sharing your content for greater engagement.

Some Final Notes to Remember

The tactics above are not sufficient on their own to achieve a fresh, intentional, and engaging content marketing strategy in 2018.

Based on our experience at Amana, content should cater to its audience’s culture. This helped us succeed in penetrating different markets around the world. Furthermore, content should be properly distributed across all channels. We know for a fact that traction cannot be realized within a fortnight, it requires a great deal of patience and time; so, you need to be consistent and perseverant about sharing it.

The bottom line is unless you provide your audience with relevant content and you distribute that content intensively on your platforms; your content marketing strategy won’t attain the impact you were aiming for.