The Excellent Intro: Humanizing the Finserv Advisor using Content

Content and content marketing is the hot new idea to make brands seem more human, empathetic and alive.

But what happens occasionally when a human business-person (think advisor, consultant, professional services) uses content marketing to project an image? Yeah, they may end up sounding kinda robotic and corporate. That’s a bit of a strange irony, isn’t it?

Even if you’re using a great piece of content, it is often easier to Tweet out “must read” or something similar to your audience and hope people will take your word for it. Such intros rarely engage an audience, so the point you where trying to make with the content is then often lost.

Certainly, I’ll confess to being guilty of publishing out the automaton-sounding social message from time-to-time in a rush to say something, but for my more thoughtful moments here are best practices I’ve noticed:

1) Skip to the end: Jumping to the last chapter and summarizing it is a time honored way to finish that college paper, the same can be said for content marketing. If you have a great piece of content you want to send out but don’t know how to introduce it, skip to the end and summarize in one sentence the conclusion.

2) Things that make you go “hmmm…”: One way to engage an audience with content is find those few sentences that make the whole piece interesting, and then distill those sentences down to one and use that to intro the post.

3) Answer your own question:  Rather that saying “Interesting article about xyz…”, answer the question “This is an interesting article because….” and everything after the “because” falls into your intro. For example, if the article is interesting because it explains how to optimize returns bycutting fees with index funds, then title your post “Need to optimize retirement returns? Try index funds”, rather than the more automated “Interesting post on index funds.”

Finding great content can sometimes be easy. Finding a way to get your audience to engage can be harder. But looking to the content itself to find the one or two nuggets that really help the piece shine can also help your own posts sparkle.