This was originally published on Twenty Over Ten’s Market Assist Blog.
Are you in a content rut? Too often, I see financial planners and business owners get stuck when it comes to creating content for their practice. Usually, the content-creation wall happens unexpectedly. Advisors (and business owners in general!) start their content creation journey full of amazing ideas, and full of passion for the process.
You know what their audience wants to hear about, and you’re committed to putting exceptional content out into the world to help others and market your firm. Unfortunately, the fire for content creation can slowly burn out. Other parts of being a business owner take precedence, and pretty soon you may feel like you don’t have any fantastic new ideas for a blog, social media posts, or video – let alone the time in your calendar to make it happen.
One solution I often suggest is to find ways to make your content collaborative. This can help take some of the content creation pressure off of you as a business owner, and help you to tap into a new audience or strengthen a COI relationship. Sounds pretty great, right?
Let’s talk about what content collaboration is, how it can benefit you, and how to make it part of your marketing strategy.
What is Content Collaboration?
Content collaboration can happen in a few different ways, but the basic principle remains the same: you’re finding people either on your own team or from outside organizations, to help you create content for your business – or to help you promote your business’s content. This might mean having a team member tackle handling your social media posting, asking a trusted CPA to write a guest blog post for your business, or offering to “swap” content with a financial planner who serves another niche with their content marketing.
How Can It Benefit You?
Many financial planners shy away from content collaboration because they believe there’s an unspoken rule that they have to create all of the content for their firm 100% by themselves. The truth is, collaborating with your content has a number of benefits:
- You’re able to give a voice to other members of your team when you collaborate internally.
- By having someone else help with your content creation, you’re able to reduce the amount of work on your own plate – freeing you up to better serve clients or focus on business development.
- You can “borrow” another audience when you collaborate on content with a COI or other advisor.
- You start building strong, long-term COI relationships that could result in future referrals and business opportunities.
- Your content becomes more fun when there’s a change of pace. Whether you’re empowering a team member to write a blog post, or you’re having a CPA or estate planning attorney create a guest video for your YouTube channel, you’re offering your audience expert insights, and a different voice to learn from. It’s a win-win!
Internal Content Collaboration
One of the easiest ways to collaborate with your content is to look internally. Just because you’re the business owner or the lead advisor on your team doesn’t mean the entirety of content creation and marketing falls squarely on your shoulders. It can help to divide up the tasks among your team members. For example, you can have an associate advisor, paraplanner, or other team members take over:
- Blog writing
- Social media management
- Writing and scheduling your team’s monthly newsletter
This can help to expose your clients and prospects to another voice on your team, which helps to solidify your firm as a team that’s able to offer a variety of experiences and perspectives.
External Content Collaboration
Are you a solo advisor, or just have a team that’s less than interested in helping with content creation? Coordinating with external COIs, marketers, or even fellow advisors might be helpful. Here are a few different external sources you can reach out to for content collaboration:
COIs
Do you have a CPA, estate planning or divorce attorney, or even an elder care center who you love doing work with? Think about the organizations or individuals who you regularly send work to, and reach out to them directly about content collaboration. This might mean having them write a guest blog post (and sharing it on their social media, or in their newsletter), offering to interview them for a blog post you or a team member is writing, or even recording a webinar or podcast episode together.
You might also look at creating a content-swap arrangement. Maybe you guest-write a blog post for one another once a quarter, or you agree to have each other on your respective podcasts or webinars a few times a year.
This is helpful for both you and your COI because you’re borrowing one another’s audiences – and you already know that you each work with one another’s ideal clients.
Fellow Advisors
Stop thinking of your fellow advisors as your competition! Instead, start thinking of ways you can collaborate with the advisors in your network to provide top-quality content to your respective audiences. This might mean you team up on a comprehensive blog series on Social Security, you join forces to put together a downloadable list of local resources for young professionals in your area (including COIs you both refer business to, or other ways for them to get involved with the community), or you have each other on your respective podcasts to talk about your different specialties.
There are plenty of available clients for each of you – so why not partner together to encourage one another’s growth? This is especially true if you each work with separate target audiences, and refer prospects to one another regularly.
Marketers and Professional Writers
Sometimes all you need to shake up your content creation game is to partner with a marketer or professional writer who is familiar with the financial planning space. They’ll have worked with other advisors, and can offer insight about what’s working (and what’s not). They can also help to take some of the time-spend of creating, promoting, or publishing your content off your plate.
Determine Your “Why”, and Set Collaboration Goals From There
Before you start thinking about how to add collaboration into your content marketing strategy, think about what your goals are for each collaborative relationship you build. If your goal is just to alleviate some of the stress you’re feeling about content creation, reaching out to team members or COIs to cover a blog post each month for you, or to help with content creation in another way, is a good first step.
However, content collaboration can also be used to expand your reach, engage a new audience of warm prospects, and communicate your value. If your goal is to generate leads from content collaboration, think about who you can collaborate with to achieve that goal. A good rule of thumb to follow is to reach out to COIs who also work with your ideal prospects, and see if they’d be open to collaborating on content.
You know that, by borrowing their audience, you’re going to be in front of a new group of people who you want to work with. You might ask them to write for your blog and share it on their platforms or to “swap” content so that you can be visible in their content, as well.
Regardless of your goals, content collaboration can help you to check a number of different boxes in your business. If you haven’t thought about collaborating in the content creation process yet, now is the time! Trying this strategy can help you to grow your business, and to free up your time and energy to come back to creating content refreshed and restored.
