Research into the investing market shows how major financial institutions are creating direct relationships with website visitors
While compiling the Mequoda 500 study – a detailed look at the content models of the most trafficked US websites – we took a deeper look at the top investing websites. We set out to highlight and compare the content models being used by today’s top investing websites and analyzed their strategies for building direct relationships with their website visitors.
We supplied this information to The Motley Fool, a popular and successful investment website and one of our consulting clients.
Major banks, like many other large businesses, have always been avid traditional media sponsors. They advertise on all the major channels including TV, print and radio. What we discovered is that online, they are busy building direct relationships with their customers and website visitors through their own content marketing efforts.
They’re focused on creating customer databases and lists. They are harnessing the interactivity of social media and are getting links back to their content. External votes of confidence have come in the form of inbound links, followers and “likes”.
Major corporations are realizing that direct to consumer relationships are a core strategy in today’s digital world.
This should be a wake up call to all companies that expect to continue generating sufficient revenue only from traditional sponsorship deals. In every market we analyze, the big brands are busily aggregating their own audience and effectively disintermediating the media.
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All brands need a mission-based reason to exist
Brands are able to build audiences online because they base their communications on missions that resonate with consumers. For a brand like Pampers, it’s about caring for a baby. For Secret Deodorant, it’s about opposing teenage bullying while relating the message to their products like they did with this summer’s ‘Mean Stinks’ campaign.
By looking at the chart below, you can see how major companies in the financial market are building direct relationships with visitors as all 29 companies are subscriber-centric – meaning they ask visitors to interact through social media or email correspondence.
The lesson here is that building an audience online is possible for all markets and building a subscriber relationship – through email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or RSS – is job #1.
