InMarketing This Week: Editorial content is king

Innovate > Interact > Influence

Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it.

Read on to learn why:

① Editorial brands will dominate.

② Your customers need not only to be aware of you, but trust you, and aspire to you.

③ All brands need to become storytellers.

④ The question your marketing team should be asking most often is “so what?”

⑤ Fintechs top the returns leaderboard and are overtaking incumbents.

⑥ The wealth management industry finally has a global, front office wealthtech player.

⑦ Advertisers will soon rely on Google more than ever.

What’s new?

① This week I stumbled across a really slick digital publication, Business of Fashion, following the news that my friend Ben Clymer’s Hodinkee has achieved a $100m valuation. Their piece argued that editorial brands will dominate retail’s ‘long tail’.

In short:

• “Hodinkee and brands like it constitute an emerging class of new-era retail powerhouses comprising the long tale: retailers that create remarkable experiences through expertly researched, skillfully developed, and elegantly produced content. Content that informs, inspires and entertains. Content that ultimately shapes the consumer’s experience with a brand.”
• “When we visit a website, app or a physical store, everything we see, hear, feel, find and do there — all that content — coalesces to form an experience. Ultimately, content is the only means through which your brand story can be conveyed. If the content is valued by the community, product sales come along for the ride.”
• “With digital advertising costs likely to soar once again as we emerge from the pandemic, it’s a problem that won’t get any less expensive. Thus, for the majority of product brands to be sustainably successful, they have little alternative but to create their own deep and sticky ecosystems of content.”

Why does it matter?

② You might read BoF’s article and think it contains vital advice for luxury fashion brands. And you’d be right. Well, you’d be right as long as you removed the words “luxury” and “fashion” from that thought. Whether you run a fashion brand, a technology company or a financial services firm, some principles are universal. Your customers need to be aware of you, they need to trust you and they need to aspire to being part of your offering. 

Brands that want to get noticed need to become storytellers.

③ There was a time when advertising might be able to achieve that. That time has long gone. Today, people are naturally sceptical, they are increasingly immune to ‘broadcast’ communications. Instead they rely on their networks - whether in person or via online social channels - and their guts. They respond to content that resonates with them. Brands that want to get noticed need to appeal to that emotional trigger with content that “informs, inspires and entertains”. They need to become storytellers.

By fuelling their customer experiences with extraordinary content, both digital and physical, brands should, as the article suggests, be aiming “to reinvent their value both socially and commercially.”

What’s next?

Take action

How do you make this happen in your firm? The BoF article lays it out pretty clearly:

• “Content creation must become a specialised function within the business.”
• “Those with editorial and production skills must be hired, steeped in the brand’s culture and allowed to create without the expectation that every click or footfall leads to a transaction.”
• “Content is not a marketing campaign, or ad buy. It’s a daily creative process of authoring, animating and expanding the brand story and, in doing so, cultivating a community of loyal and engaged fans.”

④ So, your marketing team needs to be adept at storytelling. They need to understand that your clients don’t care about your product. That’s only the what. Your clients care about your purpose, the reason your product exists. They want to first understand the why; only then will they ever ask about the what, let alone the how.

The question then that your marketing team should be asking most often is “so what?”

By asking that question, they should uncover the why of sometimes sophisticated product offerings in order to tell your customers the simple story behind often complex solutions. 

Get help

I’m currently looking for a full-time, in-house role but in the post-Covid age of depleted marketing budgets and remote teams with skills gaps, many organisations need marketing and communications support that’s agile, flexible, and risk free. That’s why I founded WhatsNext Partners.

Whether it be as a permanent member of your team or with 'on demand' support, let me know if you need my help.

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What else?

Three other articles from the last seven days that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

Tracking returns of ready-made investment solutions

⑤ Away from the Robinhood headlines for a moment, less-sexy wealth management apps are quietly proving themselves with the only thing that really matters: investment performance. Fintechs like Nutmeg and MoneyFarm top the returns leaderboard and are overtaking incumbents.

• “Moneyfarm, Vanguard and Nutmeg were the top performing portfolios net of charges.”
• After fees, the average balance across all robo accounts in 2021 was ￡552 – an increase of 11% over a three-year period. For comparison, over the same period the FTSE 100 was down by 14%.”
• “If we consider medium risk portfolio returns over both a 12-month and 3-year period, Vanguard, Nutmeg and AJ Bell Youinvest have performed consistently well.”

TECHNOLOGY

Newly Minted Unicorn InvestCloud Plans Global Wealthtech Takeover

⑥ The wealth management industry suddenly has a truly global wealthtech player in the front office.

• “Private equity firms Clearlake Capital and Motive Partners are recapitalizing their investment in financial technology platform InvestCloud—and bringing two other fintech firms, Tegra118 and Finantix, under the InvestCloud umbrella.”
• “The latest funding round puts InvestCloud into unicorn territory, with a valuation at $1 billion, while simultaneously rewarding early investors and providing new capital, according to John Wise, co-founder of the company.”
• “The recapitalized business will be reorganized into four functionalities: a wealth advising platform, a private banking platform, a financial ‘supermarket’ and a modular, customizable financial platform for building ‘cloud solutions’.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Google’s next big Chrome update will rewrite the rules of the web 

⑦ Advertisers will soon rely on Google more than ever because what seems like a big win for privacy may, ultimately, only serve to tighten the firm’s grip on the advertising industry and web as a whole.

• “Google Chrome is ditching third-party cookies for good. The data gathered by third-party cookies is used to build user profiles, which can include your interests, the things you buy and behaviours online – this can be fed back to murky data brokers.”
• “Google is planning to put Chrome in control of some of the advertising process. To do this it plans to use browser-based machine learning to log your browsing history and lump people into groups alongside others with similar interests..”
• “Google’s plan is to target ads against people’s general interests using an AI system that takes your web history, among other things, and puts you into a certain group based on your interests. Advertisers will then be able to put ads in front of people based on the group they’re in. It all works in a similar way to how Netflix’s algorithm works out what you might like to watch.”

Quotable

Jeff Bezos, in a letter to staff this week announcing he’s stepping down as CEO of Amazon: 

“When you look at our financial results, what you’re actually seeing are the long-run cumulative results of invention.”

One more thing…

The Drum reported on a LinkedIn survey of 300 chief marketing officers. No surprise: they expect their role to change as a consequence of the global pandemic.

• “58% believe they will have to devote more time towards employer branding, internal communications and learning and development as priorities change.”
• “48% expect to wield greater influence in the boardroom as their roles evolve.”
• “87% point to the need for greater fleet-footedness to navigate the recession but 60% fret that agility is being favored at the expense of strategy.”

About

Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday evening to give you a head start on the week. Read it here, or have it delivered straight to your inbox at six, before it's available anywhere else.

InMarketing is a broader celebration of marketing that innovates, interacts and influences. It's available on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and as a Flipboard magazine.