Strategy, Production, Promotion: The 3 Pieces that Keep Your Content Marketing Machine Running
Getting your content marketing machine up and running can feel hard. How do you fire it up? How do you keep it going? How do you get people to pay attention to what you’re doing?
The core of content marketing comes down to three things:
Strategy
Production
Promotion
To use a cliche, think of your content marketing machine as a three-legged stool. Every leg of the stool is essential. Without strategy, your content will get you nowhere. Without production, your content won’t exist. Without promotion, no one will see it. All three are essential to successfully executing content marketing.
Let’s look at the steps and how you can optimize each:
Step 1: Strategy
A lot has been written about content strategy for financial advisors, and I’m about to write even more. But first, I’ll give it to you in six words so you can skip the rest if you want.
Here’s it is: Stuff your clients want to read.
The two core questions here are:
What kind of clients do you like working with?
What do those people care most about?
If you already have clients that you like working with, then you’ve got a head start. Send them a one-question survey that asks one simple question: What is your greatest financial concern right now?
However they answer, those are the topics you should write about.
Some people may disagree with the idea that your content strategy should be “Stuff your clients want to read.”
They would probably say it should be something like “Stuff that drives your business goals” or “Stuff that hits popular keywords” or “Stuff that demonstrates your expertise.”
But I would disagree right back at them.
Related: 9 Content Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors in 2025
Here’s why: All of those strategies are driven by what you want. You want your business to be successful, you want your site to rank well in search results, you want people to view you as an expert. Of course you do – that makes total sense! Those are all worthy things to strive for.
But when it comes to content, your strategy can’t be self-centered – it needs to be client-centered, with your own perspective laid on top of it.
When you’re writing something, ask yourself, “Will my clients want to read this?” If not, save it for your Christmas card.
This goes back to one of the primary reasons advisors create content in the first place: To give your clients another way to talk about you. When you send a newsletter or blog update that resonates with them, they are much more likely to send it along to friends and family—more people like them.
So write stuff your clients want to read. Everyone will be happier in the end.
When you sit down to create your content calendar, be sure that every piece of content—every email, blog post, video, podcast, Facebook post—is something your clients will want to read.
Need help getting a content calendar started? Click here to copy our simplified content calendar. It’s pretty bare bones so you can focus on the most important stuff, then you can create additional fields as you need them.
Step 2: Production
Once you have the strategy down, then it’s time to create the thing. Here, you have three options:
1. Create it yourself
If you can create it yourself, more power to you. Most advisors are too busy for this option, though.
If you want to try this route, I recommend either blocking off 20 minutes every morning to sit down and just write, or blocking off a couple hours one morning per week. At the end of the week, you should have enough content to send an email or publish a blog post.
2. Hire someone to do it for you
This is the opposite of the previous option. Many advisors go this route—have a person (or ChatGPT) create their content with little to no involvement from them.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to spot this approach.
Typically, the people they hire to write the content don’t understand the subject very well, so they speak in vague terms that don’t really help anyone.
Or, on the other hand, they use AI to create it, which results in pointless content that literally helps no one (and, honestly, is more than a little embarrassing for the people who use it).
3. Hire someone to help you
This is the hybrid approach where you hire someone who specializes in creating content to help you create a well-oiled production machine.
Think of it in terms of a podcast: When you listen to a podcast, you just hear the host, but really, the majority of the work in producing the podcast was done by a producer, editor, copywriter, etc.
(Side note: if you’re looking for a podcast company, I highly recommend my friends at PodPony.)
But it’s not just podcasts.
Partner up to create a client-centric content strategy
For each topic, create a list of questions we then send to the advisor
Advisor records a short (<5 min) voice memo/video talking through the key points they want to communicate on that topic
We write the article/email/social post
Advisor reviews/edits before it is published
We publish/send it
Ideally, the advisor’s involvement on each piece of content should come to less than 20 minutes, while my team spent hours getting it right.
One note:
Notice I didn’t include an option to use white-labeled content. That was on purpose. White-labeled content can have its place, but if you’re creating content catered to your clients, then you need to create content specifically for them—not something created for a mass audience.
Step 3: Promotion
Lastly, you have to promote your content so people know it exists.
You have several options here:
Email: Send it to your email list—clients and non-clients alike
Organic social: Publish to social channels
Paid social: Promote your social posts for your best pieces of content
Video: Publish a video on the topic on YouTube/LinkedIn/whatever you prefer to help get more eyeballs on it
Website: Add a link to your homepage pointing to your latest content
That last one is a simple addition that I see so many advisors missing. Even just a link to the blog index page is often missing. Sometimes I visit advisor websites and I can’t believe how hard it is to find their blog. It’s either hidden in a dropdown menu or the footer or halfway down the home page.
If you’re going to invest in content, then you should be doing everything in your power to promote it and figure out how you can promote it even better.
Want some help getting started?
At Clay Pigeon, we’ve been helping advisors plan, create, and promote their content for over a decade. Click here to schedule a consultation.
