The merger of technology and financial services has accelerated the growth of the Fintech industry. It is assumed that by the year 2022, the global financial sector will be worth USD 26.5 trillion. And even though we can see the industry booming, it is still the trickiest of all. Trying to reach the apex of excellent service, customer care, and building trust amongst all the noise takes a lot more today than just offering a quality product.
Businesses are moving out of their comfort zones and are building their businesses on the pillars of strong content. Gone are the days when Fintech was obscure and stuck to the realm of business magazines. These days, Fintech and Content Marketing are like Netflix and popcorn, a match made in heaven.
How so?
Fintech is about empowering customers by educating and guiding them on how to manage their finances. The content and communication used to create the backbone to build awareness among customers is what fintech content marketing is all about. Take a look at how Chime, and PensionBee have made content and building awareness by providing value to their end audience key to their business success.
Over my decade's worth of experience in marketing and with a background in finance, I have come to recognize and practice the four main pillars of building an effective content marketing strategy for my Fintech clients and Fintech brands in general.
Creating and understanding the buyer persona
As a Fintech organization, a big role of content marketing is to provide solutions to customers' problems.
Fintech brands help people manage their finances. It’s an area that demands trust. People are not confident about sharing their financial information over an app or software or with a person they just met. Building trust is crucial to the process. You can only build trust with a person when you know what they seek, what they need, what other assurances they are looking for and how you can win their trust.
This is a two-step process. One, you got to understand who the person is whose trust you want to win. To zero down on the person, aka your target audience, you need to create a fictitious profile of what your ideal client or customer is like. This profile will sum up the characteristics of your target audience. We call this profile a persona or a buyer persona.
A well-crafted buyer persona includes all details about your target audience, right from demographics to habits, fear, and hopes. This sums down an entire population that you might have marketed to, to a set of 1-3 profiles you can focus on. A persona helps you see the problem through the consumers' perspective and better understand the problems they are facing in real life. This will help you answer their questions using your expertise via content such as blog posts, templates, social media posts, webinars and LIVEs.
Would you like a buyer persona template to start off with? You can download it here. No worries! We won't ask you for your details. It is all yours.
This brings us to the next part. Building trust. We tend to trust people who help us out without any ulterior motives. Sounds imaginary but something very crucial to content marketing and something content marketers are super skilled at doing. You need to give your audience answers without even them asking. Make them feel like you can read their minds and their worries and you want to help them out by telling them how.
Telling people HOW is powerful. We might know a lot of things. But we might not know how and when to do it, how is it going to be useful for us. That is why we feel so elated and motivated when we have our calendars sorted, checklists made, meal planners ready. We need stability and organization as human beings. And finance is something that people find it hard to keep pace, stay steady on tracks and manage well. Help people do that with your expertise. Help them with valuable and relevant content. Empower them to make informed decisions and see them looking at you as a leader in your space to help them understand the nitty-gritties of pension management, handling their taxes, mortgage management or managing their daily finances.
Coming back to the talking about personas and identifying their problems, the framework that can come handy for you is the Jobs to Be Done framework derived from the book Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice.
This framework helps you define the problems you are solving for the customer and why should they pick you against your competitors.
Want to check out the book? You can find the free PDF copy here.
My own process entails creating the buyers’ persona, and penning down the primary points as to what JTBD my offering addresses.
For example,
Why should <persona> install your app?
- It helps to manage finances easily
- You can learn more about investment
- Inbuilt alert system that notifies unusual activities with the account
Monitor your competitors’ content and what your Target Audience is reading
Competitor analysis is great but to stay ahead in the race you need to pull some extra chords. This can be done by analyzing the competitors’ content.
Content audit helps you to widen your horizon and understand what topics your customers are interested in reading. Once you crack that, you can ask yourself a question like is there anything that you can do differently? For example, could a topic be better explained in the form of a video instead of a blog post?
Write content that sells
A good product sells, but a good product backed by valuable content makes sales skyrocket.
Writing about everything you know about the Fintech business won't make you an expert for your end consumers. If at all, they might end up feeling confused. When creating a content strategy, make sure you pick 3-5 topics, which are yet to be explored or are related to your offering and of value to your end audience.
This not only will help you stand out but will also help you rank high on Google (don’t forget to use relevant keywords) and turn your prospects into customers.
Let me share a mini hack to stock the right set of keywords:
Create a list of keywords by using tools like Ubersuggest
Analyze competitors’ content and focus on keywords that can be used for your offerings
Map those keywords based on the relevance to your product and how easily it ranks
Pick 3-5 general keywords and a few that are more specific (long-tail keywords) to build to integrate into your blog posts, social posts, and any content you share online.
Disseminate content across platforms
Currently, over 70 million blog posts are published monthly. Therefore, writing quality and relevant content is not enough. You need to make your content pop in front of your customers' eyes to make it relevant. Thus, it makes sense to ensure it’s present on all relevant channels where your customer currently is or might be in near future. Here are some ideas on how to achieve that:
Social Media Marketing
Build a community through different social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. Fintech companies like Paytm in India (with a current follower base of 4.1 million) are using Instagram to its full potential by sharing quirky content, creating trending hashtags, showing prospects how their apps can benefit them and encouraging them to install it.
Leveraging Influencers to Market
CRED, an Indian Fintech startup, took the internet by storm when they showed the cool as a cucumber, Rahul Dravid, screaming in a fit of rage on the streets of Bengaluru in their ad. The out-of-the-box thinking and using the most influential members of the Indian Cricket team, helped CRED create a permanent space in everybody’s mind.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is not about sending random emails to your customer, it is about personalizing the content and making an offer they can’t refuse or providing such value through your newsletters that they keep looking forward to your emails. Having a well-planned email marketing strategy, right with the correct copy, beautiful fonts, designs, and images, all matched up to make sure your emails don’t make their way into spam folders and are actually opened and cherished by your receivers is key to a good email campaign.
Content Marketing is a long term investment and also, an insurance. An investment that gives you incremental benefits in the form of boosted brand awareness and authority with every passing day, more people trusting your brand and product and willing to invest in it. And an insurance that promises you a chunky sum of goodwill on your balance sheet that you can definitely pitch to investors for initial or further funding. Because you know you are building trust with your audience in a space where it is difficult to do so and it’s only going to get better.
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