Education-first marketing offers 25 business benefits – as listed below.
So, most financial service firms offer some educational content, but very few become trusted (go-to) places for answers to key money questions.
The leaders offer Accurate, Balanced, and Compelling (ABC) content; I help them with that, and I’m now offering my core content to you for about 90% less than it would cost you to create.
Yes, my first client told me that the program of educational Insights I created with them was the ‘clincher’ for landing TESCO and other FTSE Companies as clients for their services.
So, an estimated 5 million employees now have access to those lessons, through my clients’ platforms.
Two of my clients were finalists for the prestigious Workplace Savings and Benefits ‘Financial Education Provider’ award.
Two others tell me that the content I created for them is described as ‘superb’ by their chartered financial planner clients.
The simple truth is that great educational content boosts your reputation, attracts new clients, and retains those you have; the testimonials here, from consumers and business clients, prove it.
But these are only a few of the 25 benefits of an education-first approach to your marketing. Click on the tabs below to learn more.
We know sound financial planning is a high-value service — but most people know little or nothing about it.
As the blue line shows here — almost no one ever searches for it!
(The search numbers for financial ‘advice’ and ‘coaching’ are on the floor, too.)
So, there’s a massive ‘awareness’ gap here.
A great many people are also skeptical about the value of financial planning.
And it doesn’t help that we use so many different terms (financial advisers, planners, life planners, estate planners, wealth managers, financial coaches, Mortgage Advisers, Protection Advisers and more) to describe this work.
So, to help you address this, I offer a licensable consumer-facing insight called ‘Should you pay for advice?’ which shows where it makes complete sense to pay for advice.
Most financial service firms offer some educational content — but very few become the trusted, “go-to” place their clients and prospects turn to for answers.
The firms that get this right offer Accurate, Balanced and Compelling (ABC) content.
I help them do that — and, if you’re happy with licensed content I can now offer my core content to you for around 90% less than it would cost to create in-house.
Does it work?
Yes:
My first client told me the educational content we created together was the “clincher” for landing TESCO and other FTSE companies as clients for their services.
Two of my clients have been finalists for the Workplace Savings and Benefits “Financial Education Provider” award.
Two others tell me the content I’ve written for them is described as “superb” by their own chartered financial planner clients.
And Charles Green — co-author of The Trusted Advisor — has told me he likes the simplified trust equation I use to shape this content.
It’s vital to prove your warmth (helpfulness) and competence with content to encourage clients to reach out to you.
You cannot wait for the first meeting when other firms are building bonds of trust before that meeting with content.
Let’s talk, if you’d like to learn more.
To learn about education-first marketing, read this guide.
It covers all 25 benefits, so could help you make a business case for this form of marketing, if you need one.
For now just consider these two consumer benefits of educational content.
First it makes money (and advice) less scary.
Second it helps clients (and their adult children/inheritors) to become more capable and confident with their finances.
And, let’s face it, long-term saving, investing and personal insurance are monster topics for many people.
Most would rather not talk about this stuff – so you must offer consumer-friendly (and human) Insights – to get people to open up.
How do you choose a great content creator?
It’s vitally important when you build a new educational content program (or enhance the one you have) to choose the right people – both to help you PLAN and build out that content.
So, please check this table and ask yourself if you have (or plan to have) the right people in your project team – to ensure your new content passes all six of these tests.
If you’d like to dig deeper into these 6 tests, read my three-part guide on ‘How to rate a content creator?’ linked here.
I do, of course, answer all six questions as they relate to my services, along the way.
That guide may simply confirm you’re on the right track with your content marketing – and getting great value for money from your team or current suppliers.
For most firms, however, it provides NEW ideas for boosting your client engagement and saving tens of thousands of pounds on your marketing over time.
If you’d rather talk than read these long guides – let’s do that.
I’m keen to help you find a great content creator – regardless of who it turns out to be.
All of my consumer facing content (licensed or custom-made) aims to help non-experts make better money decisions.
So, I write in a way that talks directly (in a conversational style) to potential clients of financial advisers, planners or coaches.
Of course, the content is also aimed to help YOU, the adviser, planner, or coach – to attract, engage and retain more clients.
And my standard pricing on licensed content makes it easily affordable for smaller firms.
See next section.
This ‘Content-To-Go’ licensed content service is designed to save you 90% to 98% on the cost of creating content in-house.
Our ‘All Insights Pass’ gives you access to our entire current and future content library – for just £960 pa or £96 p.m.
If you choose to create your own content in-house, just be aware that it will take a considerable amount of time to:
* This, btw, is why you should never pay a writer for a wordcount. You want clarity, not padding!
If you follow a similarly robust content creation process (and allow for some internal reviews of the content across your business) and you properly cost your time to do this work, you’ll find that my prices for licensed educational content are 90% to 98% (depending on your fee rate) less than the cost of creating your own.
The NEW All Insights pass offers the best value for the first few years. So, I’d urge you to use that license while you explore what kind of content will work best with your clients.
So, if you’re building (or adding to) an educational library, you could save enormous sums of money.
Realistic savings?
Using our top-quality licensed content could save you around £100,000—and possibly much more—over a few years.
You can explore these costs in this other Insight and please ask me any further questions you have about value for money – and why YOUR costs could be ten or twenty times the cost of my licensed content.
Priced for smaller firms
The prices for each licensable Insight shown in the content shop apply to firms offering financial advice, planning, or coaching and employing less than eight client-facing staff.
If your firm is larger than this or you offer other financial services, please ask me to quote you a price for licensed content at hello@paulclaireaux.com
If you run a large advice firm (or other business in Fund Management, Employee Benefits, Education or Training services, etc.), you may prefer to have bespoke (tailor-made) content – including unique ‘derivative’ versions of the licensed works
We can discuss a contract for such work if you e-mail me in the first instance with the subject line ‘Custom-made Content Enquiry’.
Please be aware that you’re not permitted to create ‘derivative’ versions of my licensed content.
The reasons are explained below, but in short, this is about protecting both of our reputations.
Our licensed Insights:
That said, you must check that any content you license:
As I’ve shown above, an education-first approach to marketing offers up to twenty-five benefits to your business and clients.
And most of those benefits apply to both licensed and custom-made content.
My license agreement permits you to use the content:
You are free to:
You have considerable freedom to use this content – which should help you obtain many of those 25 benefits outlined above.
Just be aware that you are not permitted to:
* Note that my approach differs from that of some licensed content providers, who offer content only as ‘drafts’ for you to amend as you see fit.
I strive to offer extremely high-quality (accurate, balanced, and compelling) educational content to small business owners who lack the time, desire, skills, or budget to create their own.
So, it’s in your interests, and mine, to ensure that no one corrupts this content to make it:
Is that fair?
Great educational content will help you build trust in your business, but it can only do that if it tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Part of the reason we have a trust problem in our sector – see earlier tab – is that too much content is biased, misleading or ‘salesy’.
I’d hope you’d agree that there’s already enough misleading or low-quality nonsense content in the market.
We have no wish to add to that pile!
Of course, I’m not suggesting that you would corrupt our content, but sadly, we have experience of some people doing that.
So, I’ve applied this rule to the license to protect all of our customers.
To allow anything else undermines all our efforts.
Just remember:
You can brand this content to your business style – in your own colours with your own images – provided those new images don’t corrupt the messages.
And, you can add your own call to action and replace the term financial adviser with ‘planner’, ‘coach’, ‘wealth manager’ etc.
We must ensure, however, that these Insights retain their integrity – and pass the ABC (accurate, balanced and compelling) quality tests.
To be clear, I’m also not suggesting that any Insight I write is the final word on that topic.
I’ll aim to constantly improve these Insights – with any updated or improved versions placed directly into the content shop for existing license holders to download for FREE.
I may also create derivative versions of our content. And will be pleased to hear ideas for content improvements from our licensed content customers.
If you read an insight you’d like to use in your business, purchase a license to use it.
If you have ideas for improving our Insights, read tab 10 on how to advise us.
Our licensed content is primarily created for small firms (1 to 7 advisers/coaches) that lack the skills, desire, time, or funds to create their own content but value the Accurate, Balanced and Compelling style of what we produce.
So, I’d expect requests to change our content to be rare.
Indeed, I’d hope that our content gives you the opportunity to reach the finals for a prestigious award like Financial Educator of the Year – as it has done for two of my other clients.
So, subject to adding your own calls to action, etc, our content should be ready for you to use – which is why we’ve called it our ‘content-to-go’ service!
That said I welcome suggestions to improve the content in any of those ABC dimensions – and boost it’s value for educating and engaging more clients.
And if you have improvement ideas, please e-mail them to me at hello@paulclaireaux.com, and I will, as soon as time permits, take one of the following three actions:
Please be aware that I have a limited capacity for custom-made content creation contracts and I don’t undertake ‘one-off’ bespoke works.
As you’ll know from your financial planning work, ‘one-off’ tasks are seldom financially viable – and the same applies to content creation work. It takes a lot of time to get to know a business leader and agree on all elements of a content brief – to ensure the content is tailored to their particular audience and their style requirements.
So, I’ve designed this new licensed content to work for a wide range of advisers, planners and coaches.
I aim to help you engage your clients and prospects (and your introducers) in the fundamentals of personal finance – to help more people make better financial decisions.
Your ‘call to action’ words (which connect these core Insights to your service offerings) are entirely up to you.