Seven Years In: What a Long-Term Content Marketing Partnership Looks Like for a Financial Services Brand
Some client relationships are short sprints. Others become a running record of how a company grows. SBMA falls into the second category. Digital Storyteller has worked with the financial services firm since 2019, and the seven years in between tell a useful story about what sustained content marketing actually builds over time.
How a Financial Services Company Outgrew Its First Website
When SBMA came to Digital Storyteller, the company had already built something real. Their website, however, was still the one an employee had put together in the early days, back when the priority was simply getting something live. As SBMA grew, that site stayed frozen in place.
The introduction came through Prevailing Wage Partners, a firm Digital Storyteller had already worked with. That referral led to a brand storytelling session with SBMA’s leadership team in their old Mission Valley offices, sitting down with the people who understood the business best to map out where the company wanted to go.
<blockquote>”It really rooted us in where they wanted to go, not just where they were currently, but who they wanted to be and where they were headed.” — Amanda Rogers, Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Digital Storyteller</blockquote>
That early session became the anchor for everything that followed. The deliverables have grown considerably since then, but the direction set in that first meeting still shapes the work today.
Building the Content Engine: 2019 to Today
The early work was foundational: a full website rebuild, a content calendar, and social media channels built from scratch. SBMA’s CEO, Frank, was clear that he didn’t want to be the face of social media himself. His view was that the story belonged to what the company delivered, not to any one person. Digital Storyteller built a LinkedIn presence for him anyway, populated it, and managed it as an extension of the brand.
Search visibility took time to build. SEO in 2019 looked very different from SEO today, and the landscape has kept shifting since, especially with the rise of AI-driven search. Over the years, the work has expanded into weekly blog writing, consistent social posting, and occasional video projects.
<blockquote>”We’re sort of the engine in the bottom of the boat.” — Amanda Rogers</blockquote>
That phrase captures the nature of long-term content marketing well. The work that builds search rankings and brand authority over years rarely gets noticed in the moment. It shows up later, in the results.
Website Refresh Timing: Why Five Years Is a Meaningful Marker
Most web design professionals recommend revisiting a website every two to five years, depending on the industry and how much the business itself has changed. For SBMA, the five and a half year mark coincided with real change: an acquisition and a partnership with AcroShare, a large, likely private equity backed conglomerate.
That kind of shift is exactly what makes a website review necessary. A business can grow substantially without its digital presence reflecting any of it, and periodically asking whether the site still represents who the company has become is part of keeping a brand accurate.
A Parent Company, a Rebrand, and a Website Built for What’s Next
SBMA’s team and service offerings stayed the same through the AcroShare partnership, but the digital presence needed to align with the broader Inspired By ecosystem, AcroShare’s parent company. Digital Storyteller rebuilt the site with that alignment in mind, elevating SBMA’s brand voice and adjusting how the company talked about itself.
That rebuild, completed roughly a year and a half ago, also marked the start of a new layer of strategy: building the site with AI in mind from the ground up, rather than retrofitting it later.
Optimizing for the Way AI and Search Engines Read Trust Today
A year and a half is a long time in search right now. Much of the current work with SBMA involves refining what’s already on the site to strengthen E-E-A-T signals, the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness markers that both traditional search engines and large language models use to determine who deserves to be cited.
That shift reflects a broader industry pattern. In a 2026 survey of SEO and marketing professionals, every single respondent agreed that E-E-A-T will matter more this year, the only finding in the survey with unanimous agreement. Buyer behavior backs that up: recent research puts the share of B2B buyers using AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity during their research process at 73 percent. For a financial services company, showing up clearly and credibly in those AI-generated answers is quickly becoming as important as ranking on a traditional results page.
<blockquote>”We show up first for all the terms that we said we wanted to show up first for, and we do surface as one of the links that large language models are surfacing for people.” — Amanda Rogers</blockquote>
What Seven Years of Partnership Actually Produces
Beyond the blog posts, social calendars, and website rebuilds, the relationship has grown into something broader. Digital Storyteller handles interviews, internal video work, proposal design, PowerPoint builds, and the steady stream of design requests that come with running a growing business: business cards, pull-up banners, Zoom backgrounds, and vector files for milestones like SBMA’s 10 year anniversary.
That range is what a long-term marketing partnership tends to look like once the foundational work is in place. The strategic layer keeps evolving toward whatever search and AI visibility demand next, while the day-to-day production keeps the business running smoothly in the meantime.
Looking ahead, the SBMA partnership continues to track the same shifts every financial services brand will need to navigate: how AI reshapes discovery, how trust signals get evaluated, and how a company’s digital presence keeps pace with its actual growth. The tools will keep changing. The discipline of building a brand that shows up accurately, consistently, and credibly stays the same.
Frequently Asked Questions About Long-Term Financial Services Marketing Partnerships
How often should a financial services company redesign its website?
Most guidance points to a review every two to five years, with a full redesign warranted sooner if the business has gone through a major change like an acquisition, a rebrand, or a shift in target audience.
What does E-E-A-T mean for AI search visibility?
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Search engines and AI models use these signals to decide which sources are credible enough to cite, which makes them central to showing up in AI-generated answers rather than just traditional search results.
Why would a company build a LinkedIn presence for a CEO who doesn’t want to post personally?
A ghostwritten executive presence lets a company build credibility and visibility for its leadership without requiring that person to manage the channel themselves. The content still reflects the company’s expertise and voice, just under the executive’s name.
What kind of ongoing work does a long-term content marketing partnership typically include?
Beyond blog writing and social management, it often expands into video, design support for internal materials, proposal and presentation building, and periodic strategic reviews like website rebuilds or brand voice updates.
