Learning Content Marketing in a Month? (here’s my attempt)

Documenting my journey from novice to slightly less novice.

I spent a month creating content for a financial services business. It was hard! I hit a few major creative blocks! But I did it. I have work to show for it. And today, I’m going to show you what I made, and how I’d implement it in the business.

The first week I spent reading up on all things content marketing; this was a fairly consumption-heavy week for me. Additionally, I was tasked with doing some market research on my focus business for the month, which is Chaney Financial Group– my dad’s business. I chose his business, not because I’m excited by finance, by any means, but because it’s my dad’s. Also, it’s far outside of my realm of experience, so I figured it would be a good challenge.

Week 1 in summary: I took a million notes, did some research, wrote a newsletter, and that was the end of week one. Here are some of my notes from this week:

The next week was focused on building a landing page! I started the week with notes on the definition and efficacy of landing pages, as well as visiting a few strong examples, because Picasso said “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Cheers to that.

Having gathered some inspiration, I began my own landing page creation. I did this on ConvertFlow. This was a huge learning curve for me. Here’s an excerpt from my newsletter that week:

As you can see, I struggled quite a bit with this. I felt like I couldn’t quite produce what I had in my head. And I accidentally deleted it the first time around, so that did not help my cause. In the end, here is what I created:

If you want to see more about my thought process from this week, here’s my newsletter following that week.

If you read that newsletter installment, you’ll know that I’m not obsessed with how this project turned out. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realize:

a) I was certainly limited by my lack of experience— I was just figuring things out!

b) Regardless of the level of accuracy with which I executed my vision, my creative style/preference is simply quite different than the voice and overall branding of this company. And that is okay! Just because it’s not my personal favorite piece of work doesn’t mean it’s unusable.

Some soft skills I utilized this week were adaptability, creativity, and problem solving.

A few hard skills include copywriting, digital design, and general computer skills. Also, I can generally navigate ConvertFlow now, which is useful!

Week 3 focused on creating a growth marketing strategy, which began with social media content, and concluded with an email campaign. This segment felt quite a bit more familiar to me, as I spent 6 months as a Social Media Manager for 2 companies (you can find some of my portfolio, here). My main tasks in that role were SM content creation, strategy, and implementation, as well as structuring and scheduling a weekly email campaign via Constant Contact.

So, week 3; I did some general research (like, what do financial advisors post on the internet?) and got to work creating 14 days’ worth of social media content. Chaney Financial’s predominant social platform is LinkedIn, which is typically a once-a-day posting media. The most beneficial time to post on LinkedIn is at 9am on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and for the sake of consistency and algorithm, I kept 9am as the upload time for every day of the week. Chaney Financial is not currently active on Facebook, but I did list it as a posting option, because I feel that Facebook presence creates an easy way for clients to share your service with their friends. I’ve seen great word-of-mouth exposure happen on Facebook, so I think it could be a beneficial media addition. The best posting time on Facebook is between 9am and 1pm, T/W/F, so I kept that 9am posting time as a universal standard.

Below are the posts I produced. Beyond those, I’ve also attached a detailed posting calendar I created to correspond with each post.

After the SM content, I drafted and structured a two-email welcome campaign in MailChimp. As I mentioned, I have a good amount of experience putting together campaigns in Constant Contact, so MailChimp felt pretty intuitive. I’d intend the first email to send immediately after a client enters their email to receive “The Playbook” (a financial resource my dad created). This is a true, short and sweet welcome email, delivering a concise message, as well as the asset that was promised.

The second email is quite a bit longer. I would schedule this one to send 3-5 days after the initial email. It dives more intricately into my dad’s growing up, his football career, as well as his mindset going into owning business. I transcribed a good amount of this info from a video, and ghost wrote any missing elements.

I don’t see my dad actually using these due to the nature of his business, but it was great practice, and could potentially be used as copy in an updated “about” page on his site.

Here’s my newsletter from this week.

The main CTA throughout the landing page, social media content, and the email campaign, is to call. Phone calls are huge for my dad’s line of work, so I wanted the client to always be encouraged to follow through with that action.

Soft skills: communication, creative thinking, resourcefulness

Hard skills: MailChimp, email marketing, social media strategy, digital design, (the tiniest bit of) ghostwriting

This was definitely a big month for me in terms of production and portfolio-building! Also a great reality check in terms of my humility and willingness to publish a creation that doesn’t quite meet my standards. Do I know all there is to know about content marketing? Obviously not. But I do feel like I covered a ton of ground in just 3 weeks, and that this baseline education is the perfect launchpad for further research and skill building in this industry. It’s interesting to recognize both

a) the elements I was already implementing somewhat intuitively, and

b) the principles I’d never considered before, and now get to utilize in a fresh way.

This post is getting long, so I’ll wrap it up, but all in all: I feel educated in what matters, and inspired to discover more. Learning is forever!