- December 2, 2014
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Merrill Lynch Reaches Affluent Americans with Content Marketing
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Grey Poupon Dijon mustard swept American airwaves with its version of affluent marketing: hoity-toity passengers passing jars of the white wine mustard between finely appointed Rolls-Royce automobiles.
Today, that image is as bitter as the mustard seeds themselves.
Affluent Americans do not identify with stereotypical characterizations — and they rebel against brands that try to pigeonhole them into this archetype — which is why Merrill Lynch has mined gold with its content marketing campaign.
Visualize Your Brand’s Ideal Customer
You may know the size of your target market, but do you know the real identities of your customers? Brad Young, the global content strategy leader at Dun & Bradstreet, posed this question in the October 2014 issue of Chief Content Officer.
He writes: “Now think of how she interacts with your product. Where does it meet her in the real world? What needs does it answer? Does it make her smile or make her smarter? You want to know enough about the people in your target market to clearly answer these kinds of questions about your relationship with them, and for content marketers, to create successful content mapping.”
Bank of America Merrill Lynch has successfully embraced its target audiences as individuals, treating customer relationship as the fundamental core of its content marketing. According to Young, “The company’s key value proposition lies at that moment when a Merrill Lynch advisor sits across from an affluent investor who asks, ‘What should I do?’”
But what happens when an affluent investor asks that question of a search engine or a social media feed? Joe Corriero, head of digital marketing for Merrill Lynch, says his brand wants to be there with an answer, just the same. To achieve this, Corriero enlists his team partner, John von Brachel, who leads thought leadership and content integration for Bank of America’s wealth management businesses. They target a highly specialized demographic of affluent Americans with investable assets between $250,000 and $10 million. Here’s how they do it.
Make It Personal
The first step in Merrill Lynch’s content marketing strategy was to create hypertargets that hone more specific profiles within that larger investable-asset range. As writer Young explained, Merrill does a deep dive by analyzing combinations of age and income and, most importantly, discovers the questions that keep individuals up at night.
“There might be a segment of folks whose concerns for family are top of mind,” Corriero says. “Specifically, they might be thinking about caring for their aging parents. We dig deeper into the full set of needs where Merrill could add value and go find people online where they are researching or exploring those needs. Getting the right message to them, the right piece of content, at a time when it’s on their mind, is critical.”
Basics Of Search Still Apply
Search engine marketing is critical to Merrill’s integrated marketing strategy. “The easiest way to detect that signal is for them to tell us, and they do that with search,” Corriero says.
Young reveals three ways Merrill employs search in his article, “How Merrill Lynch Uses Content Mapping to Reach Affluent Americans.”
- Managing SEO and SEM as a publisher would, optimizing headlines and imagery in real time to pop effectively.
- Refining search terms beyond generic words, such as “retirement” and “investing,” to words describing a specific life-stage situation.
- Relying on recommendation engines, such as Taboola and Outbrain, to place Merrill content with links on other content sites. The posted Merrill content corresponds to the subject matter the viewer is reading on the non-Merrill site.
Seek Out The Influencers
Young points out that “Corriero and von Brachel use a mix of paid social campaigns and organic promotion to create a steady drumbeat – a strategy focused on targeting individuals rather than boosting certain pieces of content.”
In addition, the financial management and advisory company created The Merrill Lynch Clear™ platform and hub, which houses content created for retirement-minded investors and answers to retirement-related questions. Social media influencers can tap this content to spread to their followers.
“That’s a pool of people that have raised their hand and said, ‘This is of interest to me.’ We can go after them and target them with our message in those native spaces,” Corriero says.
Don’t Abandon Native Advertising
Young reports that rich content from haloed publishers such as The New York Times, Atlantic or FORTUNE offer near-guaranteed reach, relevancy and credibility — but it comes at a high premium.
Plus, Merrill’s Corriero says there is a shortage of quality inventory so Merrill still mixes display with native advertising to create awareness of the company’s content. The company’s native advertising tactic of choice is mobile, “where search is less reliable and other advertising mechanisms (read: banners) are an annoyance.”
But Does It Work?
“We’re hearing a lot of great things from our advisors,” von Brachel was quoted saying in Young’s article. Merrill advisors even use the online content to help their high-net-worth clients.
“We talked about the targeting that gets done technologically through the site, but think about the targeting that gets done through human interaction,” Corriero says. “It all comes back to the way Merrill Lynch and its advisors do business. It’s about understanding you, your personality, who you are, the things that matter to you in life and helping you get there. It’s the same approach whether it’s through the internet or through the advisors.”
How To Make It Work For You
Your company may not be targeting affluent Americans, but you most certainly have a niche market. This glimpse into Merrill Lynch’s content marketing strategy offers some tactics worth borrowing, rounded up by the Content Marketing Institute:
- Identify your buyer persona
- Determine what questions your personas have at each stage of the buying process
- Answer their questions
- Conduct a content audit
- Map the content
- Identify content gaps and create content
Plus, Marketing Tango has a library of content marketing resources on tap so you can become the Merrill Lynch of your industry:
- To help you determine how much content you’ll need to create, we published an easy-to-calculate formula.
- Want to write content ADD-riddled audiences will read? Learn how here.
- And get scrappy with ways to improve your content marketing strategy.
Finally, never engage in content marketing if you don’t have a way to measure it.
