Whether you’re an experienced entrepreneur or a fledgling founder, you can always count on the constantly evolving fintech landscape to throw a few obstacles your way – especially when coming up with a successful marketing strategy. Avoid pitfalls and sidestep roadblocks with our solution-focused guide to some of the trickiest issues that fintechs face.
Obstacle: Building brand awareness and recognition
Traditional financial institutions have a huge head start when it comes to brand recognition, which might be why so many fintechs arrive on the scene with something big, bold and attention-grabbing. Like Monzo’s coral debit card and conversational way of conversing with customers. Brand awareness establishes you as a trusted brand in your space – the more you promote your brand, the more familiar people are with you, which increases the chance of them turning to you when they need the services you provide. Shine bright with our guide to establishing your brand awareness strategy.
Obstacle: Standing out from competition
There are plenty of opportunities for fintechs to differentiate themselves from traditional banks and legacy financial institutions, but what about demonstrating a point of difference to other challenger or disruptor companies? All the brand awareness in the world won’t help if you don’t know who your target audience is and how your products and services can help them – so spend time developing a clear understanding of your proposition, your target customer and their pain points, and your market positioning.
Obstacle: Accessing a ready-made audience
For all our talk about competition, sometimes the very companies we think we’re up against can provide a source of connection and collaboration – and have the capacity to put you in front of thousands of new customers. Legacy banks have the in-built brand authority, while fintechs have the digital know-how, and together they can build their capability and credibility. Like when American Express teamed up with Ripple to provide blockchain-enabled cross-border B2B payments. The good news is that there’s clearly demand, with PwC’s Global Fintech Report finding 47% of financial services companies worldwide were likely to collaborate with a fintech firm to achieve growth.
Obstacle: Demonstrating your financial expertise
Two words: educate and entertain. Yes, it sounds like a cliche, but content is still king when it comes to fintech marketing. By sharing useful, informative and relevant content you can convince your audience that you represent financial expertise and understand what makes them tick. Just look at resources like Mint’s personal finance blog – MintLife – which aims to engage and inform its target audience of young, digitally-savvy professionals and gently nudge them towards their app when they feel ready to take advantage of the fintech’s products and services.
Obstacle: Adding a personal touch to marketing messages
You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who your audience is, and once you start getting sign-ups you can begin to collect that all-important data in order to test those assumptions and create personal experiences. As your fintech grows, so will your need for a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy that allows you to strengthen communications, build customer relationships and improve operational inefficiencies. Without having this in place, you won't be able to activate, retain, reactivate and refer your users effectively. So where do you start? Thankfully, we’ve got a guide for that – download it here.
Obstacle: Creating an enjoyable online experience
Today, a mobile-first approach to UX is non-negotiable. Mobile accounts for more than half of all global web traffic and so there are no excuses when it comes to creating a responsive user interface – Google says that 61% of users are less likely to return to a website they had trouble accessing or navigating, and 40% turn to the competitor's site instead. With this in mind, you need to do everything you can to help users sign-up easily and perform tasks via your app or platform in a pain-free way. For example, the registration form on a fintech mobile site is often one of the final steps in the journey, so it’s really important that this works to improve conversion rates.
Obstacle: Knowing where to focus your social media efforts
Social media can showcase your fintech’s personality, give followers a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes and make them feel connected and part of a community. But instead of trying to establish a presence everywhere, it’s best to decide on a curated collection of channels. Do this by identifying your target audience, knowing what social media platforms they’re using the most and creating personalised content that’s tailored specifically to them and the platform they’re using. You don’t need us to tell you that the way you communicate on LinkedIn will be very different to the way you communicate on TikTok, but it is worth checking out our head of performance marketing Ross Smith’s tried-and-tested approach to allocating budgets.
Read his blog post to start researching and selecting channels and platforms based on your objectives, and you’ll soon start to see a return on investment.
Obstacle: Failing to look beyond social media
All that said – while your audience might be online, they do go to other places, too. So while it certainly makes sense for social media to be at the forefront of your fintech marketing strategy, you shouldn’t neglect the other channels that make it possible to get in front of your audience. Take for example Monzo’s recent multi-channel marketing strategy, which included it’s first major TV ad campaign that resulted in spikes in both brand awareness (increased 13 points from 35% to 48%) and app downloads. The takeaway? So-called ‘traditional’ advertising can pay off for the fintech challenger, so seek to diversify your customer acquisition channels. Look to employ email marketing, text message marketing, paid search, billboards and print ads in order to realise your growth ambitions.
Obstacle: Reaching potential new audiences on a limited budget
We spoke a little about budget allocation earlier, but there are some (almost) zero-cost marketing tactics that will create a buzz around your brand – which is great, as research shows that 88% of people are more likely to trust a company if a friend or family member has talked about it. Word-of-mouth marketing covers strategies such as: referral marketing, where you incentivise users with cash rewards, points or other perks if they refer your company to their network, and affiliate marketing, which involves working closely with influencers and industry bloggers in order to reach new, larger audiences. We’ve seen industry examples, such as crypto giant Coinbase giving referrers and referees $75 in their wallet upon successful onboarding and transaction. While mobile bank Varo invited users to enter a giveaway by sharing their money goals in a short social video, creating some great user-generated content in the process.
At Growth Gorilla, we can help you determine the right market positioning for your white-label solution, create a marketing strategy to promote your proposition and build the infrastructure you need to drive a successful partnership. In addition, we can help you take advantage of any number of marketing innovations, to ensure your fintech is always on-trend while supporting your growth ambitions.
Why not get in touch with us to find out more?
