Three Crowns Mixtape: March 11, 2022
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Important financial industry news + marketing insights + good music.
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Diving into the weekend is always fun – even when you know you’re going to lose an hour of sleep. Daylight saving time officially kicks off this Sunday, March 13, so don’t forget to turn forward your clocks!
And if you need a bit of the best industry news to get you through this especially sleepy weekend, we’ve got you covered 👇
Must-Read Financial Industry & Marketing Articles
Top Tier Tools in Texas Schools
A key part of any educational curriculum? Getting students familiar with the tools they’ll be using out in the real world. That’s why Holistiplan has teamed up with Texas Tech University’s School of Financial Planning: to bring top tier tools to students hungry to learn.
Students enrolled in the school’s program will now have complimentary access to Holisitplan’s tax planning software, allowing them to learn the ins and outs of the program at the very beginning of their careers. After becoming proficient in the software, students will even be able to list that they’re “Holistiplan Certified” on resumes. With so many potential benefits for Holistiplan and Texas Tech alike, will this mark the start of a new wave of educational and fintech partnerships? We hope so!
What’s in the Box? Money.
Wealthbox is one the most popular advisor-focused CRMs available, and private equity has taken notice. The firm announced this week it completed a Series B round of funding that resulted in a $31 million investment from Frontier Growth.
If this investment looks anything like the other times private equity has taken a stake in WealthTech firms, you can expect Wealthbox to aggressively grow its team and start launching new features at an even faster pace than the already innovative pace it’s been on since its launch in 2014.
This is the type of news to put market-share leader Redtail on notice. It’s not as if Redtail is content to rest on its back paws (it recently released Redtail Speak as a compliant-texting solution) but Wealthbox has been steadily gaining ground (they jumped from 7% to 13% market share between the 2020 and 2021 T3 Tech Surveys). There’s still a lot of room to grow and with this capital infusion, we expect that trend to keep going up.
Google is Serious About Internal Linking, Seriously
SEO has a lot of…squishiness to it, for lack of a better word. Sure, there are things you can do to improve your chances of ranking, but Google is notoriously vague about how they decide what’s important and what’s not.
That’s why it’s worth listening when John Mueller, Google’s SEO czar, says something like this:
“I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.”
He’s talking about a little SEO practice called “internal linking,”or adding links to your website that point to other pages/articles on your website.
The biggest takeaway from this article is not necessarily just that you should build internal links – it’s Mueller’s take on how you should do it. In short, he says don’t add internal links just to add internal links. Rather, decide what your most important pieces of content are, and then point your internal links to those.
Basically, every piece of content should include internal links that point users further down your funnel. If they’re currently reading a top-of-funnel awareness article about Social Security, point them to a lead magnet on the same subject.
tl;dr – Internal linking is critical for SEO, but make sure you’re doing it strategically.
What’s the Value of a Content Audit?
Now that more than half of all marketing budgets are allocated entirely to digital efforts, keeping track of everything you create can get kind of cumbersome. It’s not like you can pull out a drawer and find paper copies of every blog you’ve written. So if you want to be sure that you’re maximizing everything you create and building intentionally instead of haphazardly, you need to perform an annual content audit.
We’ve got you covered with 6 reasons it’s critical, and 6 steps to follow to complete it – check out the new blog to see how it’s done.
New Tool Alert: Autodraw
Google’s newest tool is a weird mashup of A.I. and graphic design basics, allowing you to turn any drawing into an icon. Really, it’s just a new way to search for icons (by drawing what you’re looking for), so maybe it’s not all that groundbreaking, but it’s a neat experiment in A.I. – and it’s a fun tool to mess around with on a Friday.
Our New Favorite Billboard
TFW you’re struggling to figure out how to make another generic piece of content “pop.”
Here’s what we’ve been listening to this week.
Zach McDonald, President & CMO
“My top focus album of all time.”
Johnny Sandquist, Founder & CEO
“This is not just the jam of the week. This is the jam of the century.”
Connor Brandt, Graphic Designer
“Noah opened at our show last week and is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Also he makes good music.”
Delaney R, Digital Marketing Specialist
“Recently discovered this song and love it!”
Justine Young, Content Writer
“I was hoping this band’s name was pronounced “ironing” but turns out it’s just “fine.” Still a good jam, though.”
Keep up with all of our picks of the week over time with the Three Crowns Mixtape on Spotify.
Click here to check it out and favorite it to add it to your collection.