I'm David Hunstone. I am co-founder and CEO of Hub, a marketing agency based in Clerkenwell, London.

Content marketing is a marketing strategy aimed at increasing revenue to your business or organisation. So, it's got a very clear defined commercial outcome. The way that you do this is that you create content that is useful or informative to your ideal client, and that part is very important.

Content marketing would be useful to an owner of a financial advisory business because it helps them with two key things. One is attracting a steady stream of new clients coming through the door. The second key area that it can help you with is maintaining and keeping your existing customers happy. If you're feeding them regular, informative information which helps them make decisions about their financial future, they're going to be thinking of you favourably because you're delivering another sense of added value to them. And importantly, you're going to keep them from looking elsewhere and going to your competition.

In order for content marketing to be a success, you have to make sure that you're curating the right type of content for your ideal client. The most critical thing to do in this whole process is build a persona. A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal client. It uses information in order to build up a 360 degree picture of what your ideal client looks like. This will incorporate demographics, but importantly, it will also include behavioural traits. What makes them tick? What information that they seek? And what do they need?

You can collect that data from a number of sources. It could be surveys, it could be interviews that you do with your existing clients. It could also be things like Google Analytics, your search data, third party websites like AnswerThePublic. Another great area is looking at what your competitors are doing. When it comes down to the specific type of content that your audience is interested in, this is ultimately going to depend on what type of individual they are. It could be any number of things- from advice about tax planning, debt could be a critical factor. It could be about how to plan for retirement and then build your content and your content formats from those insights. When putting together a content marketing plan, there's quite a few moving parts, so it's good to have a strategy. The first thing to do is do a check of the content that you've already got within your business.

Often we find when we go in, there's  a ton of content that can maybe be tweaked or repurposed to give it that shift in focus to appeal to that target persona. The second thing is that you are going to have to start generating new content.In order to make sure that's easy to facilitate, you need to identify the right people in your organization that can help you do that. Once you've created the content, it doesn't stop there. You have to distribute it. So, getting out your content to the right type of audience to amplify the exposure - that can be done in couple of different ways.

The first place to do that -the easiest place, is by emailing your existing contacts. The second thing, which I find very useful to do, is to distribute it via LinkedIn. If you've got all of those pieces together, all those parts moving together, you have a content strategy. So, once you've got your strategy in place, you're going to start implementing it. The final piece of the jigsaw is measure- measure the effectiveness of your strategy. They don't need to cost the earth as well. It could be simply taking note of how many telephone inquiries you're getting. If you're focusing on improving your digital marketing, look at free tools like Google Analytics. How many monthly visitors are you getting? How much time are they spending on your site and what is the bounce rate? The bounce rate is when people land on your website, realise it's not for them and immediately leave. If all of those metrics are in place, all moving in the right direction, congratulations - you've got your content marketing strategy worked out correctly and it's going to help you grow your business.

So how do you make your content stand out? Make sure your content is good. Useful to your target audience. So again, that persona -I know I kept on banging on about it, but it's so important. Make sure that you're creating the content that your target client actually wants or needs. You can also curate, so you can use organisations. For example, Vanguard has fantastic resources of content, but again, select the right type of content for your audience. The other part is making sure that you distribute it, getting in front of them, get in front of the right eyeballs and do remember, it's a commercial endeavour. The important thing is driving increased revenue and creating that predictable pipeline of new business and traffic to your organisation. Get all of these things in place. You're going to be streets ahead of most of your competitors.