How Hargreaves Lansdown Scaled Content Marketing With Chris Worle

Chris Worle is the Managing Director of Barclays Smart Investor, but he first made his mark at Hargreaves Lansdown, where he spent an impressive 19 years utilizing content marketing to take it from a direct mail business to the UK’s largest investment platform. 

As Chief Digital Officer, Chris helped Hargreaves Lansdown hit a staggering £735m in annual revenues and 1.8m customers. In an era defined by fintechs chasing profitability, he stands out as a true pioneer of profitable growth in direct consumer investing. 

And, as one of the few fintech marketers who could boast of mastering the art of acquiring affluent customers through digital channels, he was top of my list for The Generation, our new fintech podcast where I interview the world’s smartest minds on how they’re changing the finance industry. If Chris’s track record alone doesn’t force you to hit play, then here are five insights from our chat to pique your interest. 

Understand your customers’ dreams

Plenty of fintech businesses claim to be customer centric, but few really know what’s actually driving customer behavior. For Chris, the key to putting the customer first is scratching beyond the surface and never losing sight of what matters most to them.

“Really understanding this is important in financial services: what are people’s thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams for their investments, their ISAs, their pensions. It’s their life savings.”

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Build an engagement machine

Building a digital marketing campaign for investment products isn’t as simple as firing users through a traditional funnel. It has to be a slow burn process –often 18 months or more– of building a relationship via always-on engagement. 

“Investing is not a retail interaction. It’s not a decision that people make overnight or instantly when they hit a website. For most people, it’s a decision that takes place over weeks, months, sometimes years, from that initial Google search through to actually doing something… Building that engagement machine that builds a relationship with people along that journey is incredibly important.”

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Don’t overcomplicate the metrics

When it comes to measuring performance, keeping things simple can be powerful. At Hargreaves Lansdown, a wall-mounted counter of live site visitors provided a “heartbeat measure” for the business. Chris is taking the same clear-eyed approach at Barclays. 

“They don’t need to be complex metrics. One of the things that we’re focused on today is just the account conversion journey and ensuring that, actually, where people do decide to open up a smart investor account, how are we making that really easy for them? How are we removing all the barriers and issues that they currently might get along the way? None of these are groundbreaking metrics, and I think that’s the challenge - sometimes it’s easy to overcomplicate it, but sometimes it’s the simplest ones that are the best.”

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Education alone isn’t enough to drive investor engagement

A lot of investment businesses base their engagement strategies around big crusades to “educate the market”. But it’s more complex than that – and not how investors think about investment education. 

“People don’t want to be educated. People want answers to their questions. People want solutions to their problems.”

Having sunk time into building financial educational content hubs that haven’t delivered, he’s learnt that the focus has to be on solving today’s problem in an engaging way. Then rinse and repeat. 

“It’s how you use that initial spark of engagement and interest to then actually go, OK, you’ve done that now, think about doing this now… It’s about those tiny steps towards actually creating that good long-term investing.”

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Having sunk time into building financial educational content hubs that haven’t delivered, he’s learnt that the focus has to be on solving today’s problem in an engaging way. Then rinse and repeat. 

“It’s how you use that initial spark of engagement and interest to then actually go, OK, you’ve done that now, think about doing this now… It’s about those tiny steps towards actually creating that good long-term investing.”

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Personalize financial marketing based on behaviour

Traditionally, lumping people into categories and serving them with the product you think fits their ‘type’ has been the bedrock of fintech and financial marketing. Now, with the industry betting big on personalisation to fuel growth, it’s striking that so many still cling to yesterday’s data. It’s time to tap into richer resources. 

“If you’re trying to build that relationship digitally, it’s using the data and insight that you have… People obsess a lot about demographics, age and wealth, etc… What we spent a huge amount of time doing at Hargreaves Lansdown is focusing on the behaviors: what are people doing on the site? What are the sections they’re looking at? What’s the content they’re looking at? And that can tell you an awful lot more than where they live and what car they drive and how old they are…”

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Keeping the industry’s engine running

At a time when ‘customer centricity’ has become a bland corporate aspiration, it’s always good to be reminded of why people invest in the first place: to achieve a vision of their future. 

Engagement can never be a ‘one and done’ exercise. It has to be a machine that’s built, maintained and allows you to ride shotgun on your customers’ journeys, solving problems along the way.