Episode 13 – Is Financial Education Worth It

Rokture Ramblings – Episode 13 – Is Financial Education Worth It?

Hello everyone and welcome to Rokture Ramblings, where I discuss topics around digital 

marketing, marketing technology, and marketing operations for the financial services industry. 

My name is Fernando Pena and I’m the founder of Rokture, where I can help you master the digital 

channel. Today’s topic is around one trend that I see where a lot of financial institutions 

don’t really do a great job. I don’t think they put their best foot forward and so I wanted to go 

ahead and discuss this trend and see if there’s a way to sort of flip that around so that you are 

taking advantage of this. And that trend is financial education. And so the question that I 

hear is, is it worth it? Is this worth the sort of support, maintenance, et cetera, to embark 

upon a financial education journey? So the things we’ll cover today are what is financial education? 

What are the benefits? What are the pitfalls, the ideal implementation, and also the best approaches? 

So let’s go ahead and get started here. For  

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those that don’t know what financial education might be, it’s generally a dedicated section 

within a website where there’s content or tools about financial products and services and 

that knowledge base is then provided to your clients or your customers or even your prospects 

because it’s generally available in the public space. It’s offered as a value -added service 

without any promotions or call to actions. Sometimes maybe even there’s an educational partner 

that is sponsoring it. So it’s really meant to inform and create awareness and education around 

financial concepts for your customers. And that leads to the next point here, which is that 

it educates and it provides clarity around products and financial concepts, services, best 

practices really around how to manage finances or how to make use and take advantage of the products 

and services that a financial institution might offer. So it really does look like a great thing. 

And so with that, I wanted to go ahead and go over what the  

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benefits are for the financial institution. A lot of brands launch these initiatives because 

it does help to demonstrate that that brand is caring about their customers. So it’s showing 

that they’re more customer -focused, they’re not just focused on selling widgets of some sort 

and really are looking out for the well -being of their clients. From a technical perspective, 

SEO plays a big part in these sections. A lot of times the content is very keyword rich. And the 

fact is that within most banking sites or financial institutions, there’s not a lot of knowledge 

about the site itself. There’s not anything that’s conversational. It’s more so these are 

the features, these are the benefits, and that’s really hard to create rankings within SEO 

from a Google or other search engine perspective. So these sections do create a wealth of content. 

And with that, there’s the ability to be able to rank a little more highly for these prize terms. 

It does help to educate clients, and so they’re able to  

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make more informed choices. So the last thing that you want is for clients to feel that they have 

unfortunately maybe brought on a product that they’re not a good fit for. So at least with these 

financial education content repositories, you’re able to show that, okay, these are your 

options. This is where this product is best suited, in what scenario, situation, and really 

try to play upon the strengths of that product so that it’s a good fit for your customer. Then 

there’s also that soft selling approach. So instead of having calls to action that are very 

blatant and maybe off -putting, this here is a little bit more of a soft sell. You’re educating, 

you’re creating trust and awareness. And so there might be an opportunity there to sell maybe 

down the line, but you’re sort of sowing the seed and creating a reputation that you are looking 

out for the best interests of your customer. So now we flip, and what are the pitfalls with these 

sections? This is one of the main reasons I made this  

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video is because I look at these and oftentimes they’re very monotonous. They’re irrelevant. 

They’re just boring. The content really does not resonate with anyone. It just seems like it 

was put there to check a box, and unfortunately it really doesn’t reflect very well on your brand. 

It makes your brand seem out of touch. It makes it seem like you’re just sort of filling in the 

blanks and putting in what people expect you to put there, but nobody’s really utilizing. There’s 

no benefit. It’s just there. It just exists. The second part of it is that that information may 

become outdated or require continual upkeep. So that means that as a smaller institution, 

you’re going to have to maintain a copywriter or make use of the services of a copywriter to make 

sure that that information is well -maintained. If you don’t, then outdated content probably 

looks worse than no content just because it shows that you’re not really taking care of your 

own backyard, and that doesn’t reflect positively on  

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the brand. The third point here is that many times the intended audiences don’t even know that 

this content exists. So the fact is that this content isn’t necessarily creating any value 

for the organization from a monetary perspective. There’s other value, and we’ll get into 

where you can actually create additional value for these, but nobody’s putting these on their 

front page, front and center, because these don’t lead to immediate revenue returns. So oftentimes 

they’re sort of put off to the side in the resource or reference section of the site, and most 

people who actually could make use of these aren’t really aware of it. And so that’s another 

reason why there’s not a lot of value being added because it’s not being put in front of the right 

person. Then the last thing is that there’s little differentiation over competitors. So I 

go to different financial institution sites and they’re all saying the same thing. They’re 

all going over basic checking concepts, difference between different  

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types of savings accounts or other investments, and there’s really nothing that is specific 

to what I’m looking for or specific to a particular scenario. It’s just general information 

that you can find anywhere. So there’s nothing that differentiates your institution from 

your competitor because you’re all putting the same thing out there.  

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So what’s the ideal implementation? We’ve talked about where things went wrong, so now how 

can we improve it? What would a good content repository for financial education look like? 

And to me, that’s a mix of static content, rich media, tools, and apps that provide a relevant 

and engaging experience. So what that means is that you’ve got not just content that is being 

consumed in passing, but also you’ve got tools that create interactivity. You’ve got apps 

that they can reference on the go and things that are really relevant and very likely to be consumed 

by the clients that you serve. Strive for personalization on the presented topic. So this is 

an opportunity to really be very targeted in terms of what problem you’re trying to solve. The 

more targeted you are, the more relevant that content is going to be or those tools to those individuals 

in that particular point in time. Generate content around situational settings instead of 

broad topics. So instead of saying, this is what a savings  

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account can do for you, then talk about specific goals, talk about specific aspirations or 

financial aspirations that your clients might have and figure out exactly how can you write 

an article or create a tool that aligns with that so that they can come back to it and not just one 

and done, but instead they reference it on a continual basis because it does really add benefit 

to them. And then try to leverage interactive elements. So that’s what I was sort of leading 

to that allowed the visitor to participate instead of just observe. So tools are great for this, 

creating what -if scenarios or calculators or even creating like a budget for an individual 

that’s not really familiar with where to start on that concept. So these are all great ways of 

turning around what a financial education section is and making it into a go -to destination 

instead of just something that exists.  

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So how to best approach creating this new world? This is actually a really good use case for generative 

AI. So not to say that you take the output of AI at face value and put it out there because there 

is tremendous risk in that, but this is an opportunity to create a lot of variations related 

to specific scenarios or situations. And generative AI does a great job with that. So feed it 

the general concept and what you’re trying to get to, and then make use of your friendly robot 

companion here to help generate some of this. Again, as I mentioned in the previous slide, personalization 

is key here. So the more relevant it is to a specific scenario or situation, the more likely it 

is to be consumed. The next thing here is something that I didn’t bring up in the pitfalls, but 

something I see very often is just extremely verbose content. So I know that you want to try to 

get everything out there in terms of details and information, but what we’re finding, and this 

has been a trend for a while,  

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is that most visitors are looking for just short, concise topics that hit upon what they need 

to get back. And actually the search engines are encouraging this behavior and they’re starting 

to penalize those that have a little bit too much out there just for the purpose of keyword stuffing, 

for example. So this is an opportunity to get to the point and get that information to your visitors 

that they’re looking for and let them move on to their next task. The next thing too is call to 

actions. So instead of being blatant or very passe, look somewhere in the middle. So have calls 

to action that are embedded within the content, but not immediately obvious. So this can be 

something of the sort that, you know, let’s go back to savings accounts. So this is a savings 

account that works for this particular scenario. You’ve created a tool around it and now in 

this what if it says, oh, by the way, if you click right here, you can open up your account today 

so that you can start embarking upon this  

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savings journey. So that’s a way of not being very blatant, but showing that you’re helping 

and that it’s well aligned with the intentions of your customers. I also suggest rotation of 

elements and components to avoid staleness. So the last thing people want to see is the same 

thing every time they click on a section. There has to be updates. There have to be maybe reconfiguring 

the priority order of the content just so that they see something different each time they log 

in. After they log in a few times and see that it’s the exact same content, they’ll likely not 

even come back just because there’s nothing of interest that has changed there going forward. 

And then also make it easy to discover this information, not only within the website, but also 

offline materials. So as I mentioned early on, a lot of times these sections are sitting on the 

fringes of websites where there’s not a lot of traffic and there’s not a lot of use for people 

to go to. So make this a destination for them. Make  

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sure that they’re aware that this exists. Print out pamphlets or flyers and also have frontline 

individuals that are working in sales or customer service remind your clients that this is 

out there and it’s a resource for their disposal. So with that, just make sure that it is something 

that is publicized and that you aren’t quite hiding it behind the fringes and it can instead 

be consumed by everybody who’s interested. So that is all for today’s topic. But if you’d like 

to discuss this or anything else that really centers around digital, digital marketing technology, 

or even just marketing in general, or growth of your organization, please reach out to me. Here’s 

my contact information. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on my website or even pick 

up the phone. So I look forward to speaking with you and until the next video, have a great day. 

Thanks. Bye -bye.