Plan Financial Content Like a Publisher: The User Needs Model

By Yamm Labs · Updated October 2026 · 13 min read

The content calendar for a mid-size fund house has 22 rows for next month. Eighteen of them are market updates, mostly NAV notes and reels on the latest rate decision. Two are tax-season explainers and two are festive greetings. Each row will take a compliance review, and nobody in the planning meeting can say which reader each piece is for or what it should make that reader do. The calendar is full. It is also answering one question, over and over, for a reader who has already heard it.

What is the user needs model for a financial brand?

The user needs model is a way of planning content around why a reader opens it, instead of around what the brand wants to say. It came out of newsrooms. The BBC World Service published its first user needs research in 2017, and in 2023 the analytics firm smartocto and Dmitry Shishkin, who led that BBC work, published a revised version called User Needs 2.0 with eight needs built on four axes.

The eight needs are update me, keep me engaged, educate me, give me perspective, divert me, inspire me, help me and connect me. A useful way to read them is in four pairs. Two deal in facts, two in context, two in feeling and two in action. A healthy content plan uses all four pairs. A weak one leans hard on the first.

For a financial brand the model needs one translation. A newsroom publishes to win attention. A bank, an asset management company (AMC) or an insurer publishes under pre-approval, where every piece goes past a compliance reviewer and some pieces count as advertisements under a regulator’s code. So the BFSI version of the model asks two questions of every row in the calendar: which need does this meet, and which review route does that need trigger?

That second question is where the model earns its place in a regulated firm. It gives the content team and the compliance team a shared vocabulary. “This is a help me piece with an illustrative calculation” tells a reviewer far more than “this is a blog post”.

Why the user needs model matters for a regulated brand

The user needs model matters for a regulated brand because review time is the scarcest input in financial content, and the model shows you where you are spending it. A fund house that publishes eighteen market updates a month is buying eighteen review slots for one need. Six of those slots could buy tax explainers and goal planners instead.

Most BFSI calendars drift towards update me for a simple reason. Updates feel safe and they are easy to brief. A product launch or a new branch is news to the brand. To the reader it is often noise, and the reader most likely to care has already seen it on a business channel.

The model also exposes needs that a brand under-serves for good reasons. Give me perspective and connect me carry real regulatory weight in Indian finance. SEBI’s rules on association, explained in its circular of 22 October 2024, bar SEBI-regulated firms and their agents from working with unregistered people who give securities advice or make claims about returns. Investor education without advice or return claims is treated differently. A perspective series built with outside creators therefore needs a registration check before anyone writes a brief.

The same logic holds for insurers. The IRDAI (Protection of Policyholders’ Interests, Operations and Allied Matters of Insurers) Regulations, 2024 require every insurer’s advertisement to show its registered name with its trade name or logo prominently, and a distribution channel’s advertisement needs the insurer’s written approval before it goes out. If your broker partners publish educate me content about your term plan, the plan needs the approval step in its timeline from the first week. You can read the regulation on the IRDAI website.

Seen this way, the user needs model is a budgeting tool as much as an editorial one. It tells marketing what to make and tells compliance what is coming, and when.

SIGNALNewsletter by Yamm Labs

The next piece, straight to your inbox.

New writing on BFSI brands, B2B and influencer marketing, and AI search.

Email *

Subscribe

Subscription form is not available at the moment

One click to unsubscribe. Privacy policy

How the user needs model works in eight parts

The user needs model works as eight content types, each defined by what the reader wants, and each with its own format, review load and success measure in financial services. Read the table below as a planning sheet. The review load column is our working view of how much compliance attention each need tends to draw in Indian BFSI, not a regulatory classification. Your compliance team decides the route for each piece.

Three of these rows deserve a closer look, because each has a design decision that a regulator effectively makes for you.

Update me on video carries a timing rule. When an update about a mutual fund turns into an advertisement, SEBI’s standard warning applies. In audio-visual ads the warning must be shown on screen and spoken in a clear and understandable way. SEBI’s mutual fund rules give five seconds only as an example of what can meet that test, and you can read them on the SEBI website. In a 15-second reel that mentions a scheme, the warning takes a real share of the running time. Plan that in the script, before the edit.

Help me tools sit next to a loan document. An EMI calculator or eligibility checker is the clearest help me piece in lending. RBI requires a Key Facts Statement, including the annual percentage rate, to be given to the borrower before the loan contract is executed. These rules were first set out in an RBI circular of April 2024. For commercial banks they now sit in RBI’s November 2025 Responsible Business Conduct Directions, and other lenders should check the Directions that apply to them. The calculator should say its output is illustrative and point to the Key Facts Statement as the document that governs the actual offer. Our guide to KFS and consent screen design shows how that sequence looks on screen.

Inspire me needs consent before it needs a camera. A customer story uses personal data, and India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, notified in November 2025, expect a clear consent notice that names the specific purpose. Get that signed before the shoot. A story that cannot be published after filming is the most expensive piece on the calendar.

In the Gulf the model works the same way, with two extra planning costs. The Central Bank of the UAE’s consumer protection standards expect advertisements in Arabic and English with the institution’s name and readable disclaimers. SAMA’s advertising rules in Saudi Arabia require the institution’s compliance function to approve material in writing before publication. Each need that you plan for the Gulf is two language versions and a written sign-off, so expect a longer lead time for every row.

How to start using the user needs model

Start the user needs model with an audit of what you already publish, not a new calendar. Most teams find that the gap is not a lack of ideas. It is an imbalance they cannot see until each existing piece carries a label.

1. Pull the last 90 days of published content across the blog, social channels, email and app notifications into one sheet.
2. Tag each piece with one primary user need. If a piece seems to meet three needs, it probably meets none well; pick the one the headline promises.
3. Count the tags. Note which needs are missing and which take more than half the slots.
4. Sit with your compliance reviewer and agree a default review route for each need: fast track, standard or full review with legal.
5. Build one approved template per need, with the fixed blocks already placed: disclaimer position, logo lockup, consent line, standard warning timing.
6. Rebalance next month’s calendar so no single need takes more than about a third of the slots, and run it for six to eight weeks before changing the mix again.

Take a hypothetical AMC that publishes 20 pieces a month and finds, after tagging, that 14 are update me. Moving six of those slots to educate me and help me pieces does not raise the review load if those six use pre-approved templates. It changes what the reader gets for the same number of review hours.

Keep a claims register alongside the calendar. Every number, rate, date and regulatory statement in a piece goes into it with its source and the compliance reviewer who approved it. When a rate changes, the register tells you which pieces to pull or update. It is also the first thing an auditor or a regulator’s inspection team will ask to see.

A full calendar is not a plan. A plan knows which reader each piece is for and how long its review will take.

Our content marketing playbook for financial services covers the wider system the model plugs into: pillars, clusters, distribution and the approval workflow.

How to measure the user needs model

Measure the user needs model by need, because each need does a different job and a single traffic number hides that. A help me calculator with modest reach can move more loan applications than a viral divert me quiz, and both can be doing their jobs.

Use one primary metric per need and write it as a name, a formula and what it shows.

• Update me: reach share. Existing customers who saw the piece divided by total existing customers in the segment. It shows whether your own customers hear news from you first.
• Educate me: completion rate. Readers who reached the end, or viewers who watched past three quarters, divided by those who started. It shows whether the explanation held attention.
• Give me perspective: qualified engagement. Shares and comments from people who match your investor or buyer profile, per thousand views. It shows whether the view landed with the right people.
• Help me: task completion. Users who finished the calculator, checklist or form divided by those who opened it, followed by the share who clicked the next step. It shows whether the tool did its job and led somewhere.
• Inspire me and connect me: return visits. Readers or attendees who came back within 30 days. It shows whether the piece built a relationship.

Report the mix as well as the metrics. A monthly line that reads “update me 30 percent, educate me 20 percent, help me 20 percent” tells a CMO more about the plan’s health than total page views. Track review hours per need beside it. If give me perspective takes twice the review time of everything else and shows no lift in qualified engagement, you have a decision to make about that format.

Attribution is hard in financial content, and you should say so in the report. A reader may read three educate me articles over two months, then apply through a branch. Use proxies that you can defend, such as assisted conversions in your analytics and the share of new applicants who visited content in the previous 30 days. None of them is proof. Together they show direction.

What to tell your CFO: the user needs model does not add pieces; it moves existing review slots to needs closer to revenue, such as help me and educate me. Test it for eight weeks against last quarter’s mix. Watch task completion on help me pieces and the share of applicants who read content first. If neither moves, go back to the old mix.

What goes wrong with the user needs model, and the early signs

The user needs model goes wrong when teams treat the labels as decoration, tagging pieces after they are written. The table below lists the failures we see most, the signal that shows up first and the fix.

A quieter failure is translation. Content planned in English for an Indian audience often meets the educate me need for metro readers and misses everyone else. If your customers in smaller cities search in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi or Bengali, an educate me piece in English is a piece for someone else. The model does not solve that for you. It does make the gap visible once you tag pieces by need and by language.

Another failure is borrowing the newsroom’s balance. A newspaper can run many divert me pieces because diversion is part of its product. A bank cannot. Divert me content still carries the brand, and once a product appears in it, the piece is an advertisement under the relevant code. Keep divert me small and brand-safe.

Trust is the last thing to watch. Readers judge a financial brand on whether its content is consistent and plain, and a calendar that swings between hard selling and light entertainment reads as unsure of itself. Our piece on the psychology of trust in financial brand design explains why consistency reads as competence.

When the user needs model is the wrong choice

The user needs model is the wrong choice when your content volume is too low to balance, or when your content has one legal job to do. It is a planning tool for teams that publish regularly across channels. It adds little to a team that publishes four pieces a month.

Choose something else in these cases:

• You publish fewer than about eight pieces a month. Pick the two needs closest to revenue and agree their review route with compliance, usually educate me and help me, and do those well.
• Your content is mostly mandatory disclosure: scheme information documents, policy wordings, Key Facts Statements and statutory notices. These have one job, set by the regulator, and the model has nothing to add to them.
• Your problem is distribution, not mix. If good pieces reach nobody, fix the channels and the email list first.
• Your compliance function cannot yet keep up with your current volume. Adding new needs, especially perspective and connect me, will make the queue longer. Fix the approval workflow first.
• You sell to a small B2B buying committee. A fintech selling to a handful of banks may do better with account-based content planned around each buyer’s role than with a reader-need mix.

For most banks, insurers, fund houses and lenders that publish every week, the user needs model is worth a trial. Run it for one quarter, measure each need on its own terms and keep the review route agreed with compliance at the centre. If the mix moves and the review queue holds, keep it. If not, you have lost little, because the audit alone will have told you what your calendar was missing.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; your compliance team decides how each piece is reviewed and published.

People also ask

Who created the user needs model?

The BBC World Service published the first user needs research in 2017. In 2023 smartocto and Dmitry Shishkin, who led the BBC work, published User Needs 2.0, which sets out eight needs on four axes.

What are the eight user needs?

Update me, keep me engaged, educate me, give me perspective, divert me, inspire me, help me and connect me. A content plan that covers all eight serves readers who want facts, context, feeling and practical action.

Can a mutual fund house use the user needs model under SEBI rules?

Yes. The user needs model only decides what each piece is for. SEBI’s advertising rules still apply to any piece that is an advertisement, including the standard warning, which in audio-visual ads must be clear and understandable on screen and in the voice-over, so plan those pieces with their review route from the start.

How many user needs should one article meet?

In the user needs model, one primary need. A piece can touch a second need, but the brief, the headline and the success metric should follow the main one. Pieces that try to meet every need tend to meet none of them well.