Introducing a New Content Hub from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Financial Services
Editor's Note: This post was contributed by Rod Kurtz, a New York-based media strategist.
As the media landscape continues to evolve, marketers continually find themselves pondering one key question: What messages resonate most – and how do we convey them most effectively? While this quandary is relatively universal to anyone looking to connect with customers or clients, it is especially true for those in the financial-services industry, who must contend with rapidly changing products catered to rapidly changing consumer needs.
It is this challenge that served as the driving force for a new, robust content hub from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Financial Services – a one-stop destination for insights and analysis from a wide range of experts.
To help kick off the launch, we sat down with the project’s architect – Jennifer Grazel, Director of Vertical Marketing at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions – for a conversation about where marketing is headed, and how this new hub seeks to inspire and inform.
So what is this initiative all about?
Basically, we want to provide a destination within LinkedIn that offers both prospects and clients the ability to access thought leadership, best practices, case studies, and viewpoints around core topics that matter to them. Some of these topics include emerging trends, how technology is impacting their businesses, how to disrupt marketing from less of a push-and-pull experience and more toward a buyer’s journey, and how to create content that moves people through that journey.
This destination allows us to provide timely updates and thoughtful analysis. A formalized resource center for our clients. The need – the reason why – is that today, there’s really no one key area for this kind of information. If you look at Facebook or Google, they do have these financial-services pages. But they don’t really address these broader topics.
We want to be the go-to destination for topics that revolve around social, in terms of really understanding social, the buyer’s journey, a best-practices guide around content marketing and other marketing topics that relate to financial services.
And what makes LinkedIn a good home for this kind of resource?
As a platform, we’re really focused around knowledge. We’re focused around being a knowledge repository, creating conversations about topics that matter most. Given that the financial-services industry is facing quite a bit of change and disruption, you’re witnessing not only a disruption in traditional business models, but also other tech players creating new standards – and that’s also requiring financial services to rethink what the cross-channel experience is. There’s consumer behavior that’s changing, that’s causing them to up-level.
Marketing is also changing radically as well, moving away from traditional push-pull to multi-channel nurturing. With all of these changes in place, we felt it would be valuable to have a destination that really brings all of these key topics together, but in addition, through our showcase page and having our own destination and posting content and growing a follower base, it would create a conversation.
Where can people find all this new content?
By following our LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Financial Services Showcase Page, as well as subscribing to our blog series, along with the permanent destination.
How often will content be updated?
It’ll be a mixture of daily posts, along with deeper thought-leadership pieces on a weekly basis.
Who are some of these thought leaders that will be contributing?
It’s a chorus of voices. We’re bringing together industry opinion leaders, journalists, clients, and obviously insight and research teams within LinkedIn – to have a conversation around these topics.
Talk a little more about those topics.
From a consumer standpoint, these services are fundamental to our day-to-day lives – financial products and services. In the case of, say, a small-business owner, by subscribing to our destination, they’ll be able to find really interesting insights to disruption and key trends that impact them. From a business-leader perspective, this will help them understand an industry that’s going through major change and reinventing itself and look at how it’s aligning a buyer’s journey and not a product set. There are a lot of really interesting parallels that they can apply to their outside industries as marketers. I think these issues are at the forefront of what marketers grapple with, regardless of what vertical they’re in. In thinking about everything from your resource allocation to your operational structure to product and an ongoing insights loop, that’s what we offer finance business leaders.
You’ve been working hard on this initiative for a while now. What are you most excited about?
I think there’s a void right now – there’s no one place that brings all these topics together – and to be able to crowdsource knowledge and bring experts to participate in wider conversations about these key topics, it’s going to empower people within the financial-services industry and create further discussion and a groundswell. It excites me to be able to bring that to marketers and the wider financial-services community.
LinkedIn as a whole is obviously a chorus of voices and conversations. How can people participate in this new initiative?
We definitely encourage them to share and raise wider awareness, and to comment – there’s a great feedback loop. That’s really being in touch with our core constituents’ needs. It’ll be continual ideation. Our content will be based on what our key constituents are engaged with. So we encourage them to share and provide feedback.
Follow our LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Financial Services Showcase Page for fresh perspectives on how to leverage technology, data and social engagement to reach, nurture and deepen relationships.
