B2B fintech marketing: How to steal market share and grow in 2023
Fintechs have a pretty tough gig: They face a saturated and competitive market with new entrants coming in all the time – all providing some kind of AI or automation. This makes it hard to stand out.
Plus, when you target a highly technical audience, you have to know your stuff. Mediocre marketing – or no marketing – means you’ll get lost in a sea of competitors 🌊
Luckily, there’s a very specific recipe to marketing that fintechs can use to stand out, steal market share, and grow.
We recently shared this recipe with Market Recruitment’s Market Mentors Podcast – run specifically to help B2B fintechs to scale and grow in 2023 (and beyond). The focus was based on a new demand gen content framework that we built with Nottingham Business School (more on this here).
📽 You can watch a recording of this right here.
Prefer to read the content? Here’s a write-up of the highlights 👇
Demand generation for fintech companies: The secret sauce for growth
There’s one particular approach transforming B2B marketing. And that’s demand generation. But, more specifically, one approach: demand gen content marketing. It’s an approach we’ve used for decades to generate hundreds of thousands (even millions!) for fintechs... Yet, it's a strategy not many fintechs are using to its fullest.
Essentially, it's a way for the fintech industry to build trust, familiarity, and add value to potential customers by providing free advice to solve pain points… And then nurturing them toward a sale.
Psst. No hard selling! This just massively turns off this audience.
But how does content simplify and solve fintechs' growth challenges?
Let’s take a look.
What key challenges does content marketing solve for fintechs?
There’s lots of talk around demand generation at present – it’s fair to say it's a bit of a buzzword. But there’s been a lack of rigorous focus on content marketing… Despite the fact we know that content marketing generates revenue because it's been the base of our strategy before ‘fintech’ was even coined as a term.
So, what is content marketing? At its simplest, it’s about sharing expertise. This often comes in the form of thought leadership guides / white papers, blog articles, webinars, or any way of sharing free advice/tips to help solve a target audience’s problems.
Its importance has risen in the last few years due to changes in buyer behaviour.
In fact, we’ve entered the era of self-service sales. People want to educate themselves, they don’t want to fill in a form or speak to sales.
Think about it. If you just focus on product/service/sales messaging, you’re only appealing to those at the bottom of the funnel (the c.10% ready to buy).
Why is this a problem? Because those ready to buy are price sensitive. As a fintech, you don’t want to be competing on price – you want your unique offering to win the deal.
Plus, in the fintech industry, you’ve got large average order values, big buyer cycles, and you need to build trust. When businesses are outlying big sums, they need to feel 100% comfortable with who they are buying from.
The best bit? There’s a huge opportunity here because a lot of fintechs are still focusing purely on performance marketing (appealing to the c.10% of the market). This leaves a huge opportunity on the table to capture demand with the rest – 90% of the market.
But how does the right approach to content help?
Why is content marketing a must-have for fintechs right now?
As we’ve seen, the right approach to content marketing is essential for long-term growth, but how does this work in practice?
#1: Appeal to today’s buyers
Today’s B2B buyers want to self-educate… Which is why engaging and educational content is so important. Plus, the fintech audience is often very technical, so you can’t bluff it or use generic content – you need to truly offer helpful, advanced, and thought-leading advice.
#2: Stand out from the crowd
Because there are so many fintechs providing automation and AI, it’s hard to stand out. But each piece of high-quality content you create is like a salesperson working behind the scenes. It showcases your knowledge and expertise, but in a way that helps and adds value. So ultimately, when they are ready to buy, they’ll remember you and trust you.
#3: Generate and capture demand
Lastly, content helps build long-term sustainable sales pipelines by appealing to the masses in your target audience and consistently putting you front-of-mind. It also supports sales because your sales teams can use it to educate prospects – rather than going in with brochures and product collateral. It gives them a foot in the door.
And you can use the content in email marketing and social channels to gently nudge contacts through the sales cycle and towards that sales conversation.
Interesting side note: We’ve never run a lead nurturing campaign that hasn’t generated instant leads. 💸
In summary, with the right approach, you can expect long-term growth plus quick wins to meet today’s ROI and KPI needs.
💡 Top tip: Leverage your in-house experts to make content truly expert-led and super helpful, at the same time as optimising for SEO and embedding certain tricks to support sales conversion. And avoid relying on AI tools to write content for you (there’s a risk Google could penalise this content and it won’t provide your readers with a satisfying experience).
In light of all this, let’s look at how you can create good content…
How can fintechs create a successful content marketing strategy?
This is where our new framework comes in. In collaboration with Nottingham Trent University, we created a model to explain how you can appeal to those buyers wherever they are in the buyer journey.
Let’s talk through this a little more…
Capture demand
Approximately 10% of your audience are problem-aware, and either researching and seeking solutions (7%) or ready to buy now (3%).
This segment of your audience needs educating on the solution. Here you can answer common sales questions, establish trust, address any barriers, and essentially convince them about why your solution is best.
Create demand
Approximately 90% of your audience is not ready to buy at any given time. Of that, 90%, around 60% are not problem-aware or solution-aware, and around 30% are seeking change and becoming more aware of their problems.
To put it simply, this segment of your audience needs educational content. We’ve found great results using thought leadership content to educate them on the problem and why it needs addressing.
Sounds intriguing… But not sure where to go from here? Here are 3 simple steps:
3 key ingredients to content marketing to generate demand
Here are the practical steps you’d follow to make this happen:
Step 1: Create a demand generation strategy: Including ICPs/buyer personas, SEO keywords and content topic clusters, distribution planning, and demand gen strategies.
Step 2: Create demand gen content: Ensure this is written so it's optimised for SEO and the humans reading it. Think value-adding, helpful and subject matter expert-led content.
Step 3: Execute consistently: Share your content across multiple channels and repurpose it to maximise readership. For example, a blog works really well on your website for SEO and on guest blogging sites to direct traffic. While on social media and sales emails, flipbooks tend to get better engagement. This approach leverages the same content but gains greater reach and engagement.
💡 Top tip: Don't just limit the content to marketing channels. Because people don’t like feeling sold to, content massively helps sales to get a foot in the door and spark a conversation.
But how do you know if you’re doing this right? Read on 👇
How do fintechs measure the success of content marketing?
Before we talk about KPIs, the key thing with demand gen content marketing is a focus on building big and sustainable sales pipelines. It's not a sprint, but a marathon.
The good news: There are quick wins through strategies like lead nurturing and distribution – ideally, we recommend running these in tandem – so that you can create and capture demand.
Now, with KPIs, there’s one place fintechs can often fall down. And that’s with performance marketing. Most businesses just focus on performance marketing and capturing those that are ready to make a purchase decision. This is often because it's perceived as low-hanging fruit and every business wants quick wins.
… But then these businesses also wonder why they’re not getting the best qualified leads and they’re wasting budget 🤷♀️
Where to focus budget
Our advice? We’d flip this and put 75% of the budget in those not ready to buy (because it's the bigger and more lucrative audience). We cannot emphasise this more: Content is incredibly powerful because it allows you to support both goals!
KPIs to measure
So, what do KPIs look like?
KPIs should relate to the different stages of the sales funnel because it all adds together to create an impact on revenue.
Top of the funnel: e.g. website traffic.
Top to middle of the funnel: engagement rate (e.g. email click-through).
Bottom of the funnel: conversion rates / cost per lead / customer acquisition costs / revenue.
💡Top tip: You can’t track channels in silo. Every channel plays its part in the buyer process. For example, you can’t assume that blog articles alone are only driving website traffic because that’s all you can measure for it. When actually, those blogs encouraged someone to the website and nurtured them towards getting in touch.
Before we move on, let’s look at one case example.
Case study: Going from unknown to top of mind
PurplePatch offers a very unique service to fintech companies, banks, and financial services. Essentially, they help credit providers compare credit data suppliers to find the best price and quality data.
The challenge
Their data benchmarking services save hundreds of thousands to millions… But very few knew this service existed.
The results
Through demand gen content marketing, PurplePatch has gone from being unknown and working with smaller utility companies to being top of mind and now working with the top banks. When the audience has a need, they get in touch – which is exactly what you want content marketing to achieve.
How do they do this?
They regularly put out new blogs, guest blog on key publications (and get over 2,000-4,000 views), post regularly on social media from their company and personal accounts and they use LinkedIn newsletters and email newsletters to keep their audience engaged… and their business front-of-mind.
Plus, they’ve got sales collateral and sales email templates to support new business (and bottom-of-the-funnel conversations).
>> Read the full case study here.
Key content marketing takeaways for fintech companies
There are two major opportunities fintechs can take advantage of now to scale and grow revenue:
⬜ Content marketing generates long-term demand… And not many are using it!
There aren’t many fintechs using content marketing for demand gen. This means they’re missing out on attracting the c.90% of the market that needs nurturing towards a sale. If you go for the c.10% that are ready to buy, they are price sensitive and have no trust in you, so it's much harder to convince/nurture them to think differently.
From what we’ve seen, there’s a huge opportunity to stand out and create value-adding content that actually builds trust and converts sales pipelines.
⬜ Generate demand with content marketing quick wins
While a demand gen content marketing approach aims to create long-term and sustainable pipelines, the right distribution strategy can create quick wins. For example, we haven’t run one email lead nurturing campaign that hasn’t generated instant leads. You need a combo of a long-term approach (demand generation) and the right tactics to create quick wins (demand capture).
💡Top tip: This is another reason you want to use content marketing specialists and strategists.
Looking for your next step? Take a look at this blog: Fintech growth in 2023: The benefits of working with a fintech marketing agency.
Ready to get started but don’t have a marketing team? No problem! We’re a plug-in marketing team with over 25+ years specialising in fintech. Get in touch for a free consultation.