How to win at fintech content marketing

 

Since the open banking reforms, creativity and innovation have brought real transformation to the fintech industry. But fintech content marketing teams are often stumped on how to promote their new technologies.

Let’s face it, you’re often introducing an entirely new category to the market without a blueprint or plan to follow. It can be hard to get the word out, when customers don’t even know your solution exists. 

That’s why we’ve put together this battle plan for fintech content marketers: 

0. Why you should be investing in fintech content marketing 

1. Best types of content marketing for fintechs

2. An example of success: Pleo

3. Five simple tips to follow 

 
 

Why you should be investing in fintech content marketing

You might already know why you should be investing in fintech content marketing– in which case, please move down to the next section.  

But for those who aren’t yet sold…the success of the fintech space means that competition is fierce.

Even during this weird recession time we’re in, the success of the fintech industry is bouncing back, fast. According to F Prime, the 2024 fintech index outperformed the S&P 500 by 540 percentage points. 

Image courtesy of F Prime

You need to work harder to become visible in front of your ideal audience, and even harder to retain their custom. Strong content marketing can help you keep costs down, since retention costs significantly less than acquiring new customers. 

Back in 2021, we argued that fintechs need content marketing thanks to the scandals of the past that still plague the public perception. At the time, less than half of the population reported trust in cryptocurrency, for example. Now, crypto ownership has increased to record levels.

Fintech content marketing is no longer about building credibility. The industry is maturing, and your content should mature with it. So our case for content marketing efforts are simple: you’re doing it to differentiate your brand and provide continued trust to retain good customers.

 
 
 
 

Best types of content marketing for fintechs

Your content should have one of three purposes: 

  1. Value-driven educational content

  2. Content to inspire connection

  3. Conversional content

 Pro tip: promotional content should only make up about 10% of all of your published materials!  

 

Intent match over all else

‘SEO-driven content’ fundamentally puts the algorithm before the human. And we think that’s a little backwards. So instead, our methodology in fintech content marketing is to consider search intent match above all else. 

By prioritising search intent, you can make sure you’re answering your reader’s queries. Placing the answers as soon as possible is the way forward, even if it damages your time-on-page score or bounce rate. Because by providing the right value to readers, you’re slowly building that trust over time.  

And they say it’s 7-times-a-charm for readers to turn into customers - so you better get publishing.

Nb. we still optimise our content for search, but only after writing the piece for search intent match. We know that many content leaders forget that SEO isn’t the only channel for your content!

Bottom-of-the-funnel content

One of our best performing case studies landed through bottom-of-the-funnel content types, like: 

  • Direct comparisons vs your competitors

  • ‘How I’ or ‘how we’ testimonials / use cases

  • Pricing pages (especially in industries that are not transparent)

We advise fintech content marketing teams to use these types of content because they’re highly effective in front of the right people. 

It’s like the age old analogy of being the big fish in the small pond. Only a small number of people will be looking for these topics, but those who do are much more likely to buy (it’s called the zero search traffic approach).

Here’s an example of a BOFU piece we wrote. This campaign generated approximately $160,000 in high-ticket sales across 5 months of BOFU publishing: 

Image courtesy of Core Integrator

Other content types 

If you take sales and revenue pressures out of content marketing, what would you be creating for your readers?  

This question should always underpin your strategy for any content that’s not conversion-focused.   

When we sit down with fintech brand managers, they often talk of the pressures of following set frameworks because these structures are easier to measure. They have to report back to the heads of marketing and C-suite with solid figures, and aren’t allowed much creative freedom. 

So we bring it back to the question: if revenue and sales didn’t matter, what would you create?

Answer: content that your audience genuinely enjoys (we hope). It means knowing your audience inside out and forgetting about what all the competitors are doing. 

And consistently, too. 96% of the largest fintech companies believe in consistently putting content into the world. Just make sure that yours is doing the heavy lifting for you. 

Here’s an example of successful fintech content marketing: Pleo

Pleo is a b2b spending solution; it gives businesses access to a centralised dashboard to easily balance the books. Based in Denmark, Pleo wanted to expand into the UK market in 2021. 

The problem was that their brand was pretty unheard of in the UK, plus all of their content was focused towards Danish consumers. 

We worked with Pleo’s content marketing team to create content specifically for UK-based small and medium sized businesses. The topics were niche, including uniform tax rebates in the UK, and how to calculate HMRC fuel rates, for example.  

In just six months, our articles for Pleo had generated over 900,000 impressions and 11,200 clicks through Google search (organic). 

 

So just what stands out about this fintech content marketing case study? 

Pleo’s tone of voice is unique - it’s friendly and even humorous, cutting through traditional b2b reads. We were able to play with the audience and attract them to something different. 

At the time, competitors were using super serious tones to describe their products, and this felt a bit boring. 

Pleo’s TOV enabled new readers to trust the brand quickly because they felt like they were just chatting to a friend. It’s always more welcome for friends to make recommendations, rather than for brands to be pushy, isn’t it?   

None of the Pleo content marketing examples we wrote were salesy. Instead, we focused on providing as much value as possible up front to match the search intent and answer the queries. 

Take a look at this screenshot to see exactly what we mean:  

Image courtesy of Pleo

Five simple tips to help you win the fintech content marketing game

Here are our top five tips for strong fintech content marketing: 

  1. Pain-point content wins

  2. Generate original insights

  3. Don’t wait for your audience to come to you

  4. Get comfortable talking about your brand (and your competitors)

  5. Partner with experts when you need strategic and scale-up support 

  1. Pain-point content wins

Pain-point content hones in on the problems that your customers face. Whether it’s a daily frustration, or just something making their processes less efficient, the customer knows that this problem is affecting them. 

When you create pain-point content, you’re digging into the problem and reminding the customer exactly how annoying it can be. And then providing a solution (the value add). 

The solution isn’t always your product or service. Sometimes, it’s about being honest with the customer and teaching them how to solve their problem for free, or comparing their solutions and outlining which is best for who. 

Pain point content is so effective because you’re able to show your customers that you truly know them, and their needs. It was actually one of the biggest factors of success for our recent fintech SEO content case study with Trustpair. 

But it requires a deep understanding by your writer. So, make sure you’re regularly interacting with customers, getting their feedback and leveraging those insights to build a valuable content library that addresses the pain points.  

 

2. Generate original insights

With several big Google updates happening in 2024, we’ve seen a significant shift in the effectiveness of ‘how to’ content. It’s not doing well, mainly because all the content competing for each term is too similar. 

But generating original insights enables you to differentiate. 

‘How I’ and ‘how we’ are two of the best examples. It’s an idea perpetuated by content thought leader John Bonini of Content Brands; 

“It’s the easiest and most effective way to stand out and be unique from the onslaught of SEO and AI content now and going forward is to create something no one else can.

 Your experiences. Your observations. Your perspectives. Your conversations. Your stories.

 Put this at the centre of all of your content.”  

Image courtesy of LinkedIn

For extra insight, we recommend sitting down with industry experts like your product manager or a member of your customer team. These individuals know your customer inside out, and can give you concrete original examples that will be valuable to your readers.  

 

3. Don’t wait for your audience to come to you

Distribution can make or break your entire content marketing strategy because if your work isn’t reaching the right people (or enough people), it won’t have much of an impact. Unfortunately, it’s why a large majority of fintech marketing teams have devalued content altogether: they just aren’t able to see the ROI.

That’s why it’s important not to simply ‘post and ghost’.  

Because let’s face it, it’s highly unlikely that your buyers are typing in your url and heading to the blog every week (let alone those who aren’t yet customers).  

When you know your audience, you should know exactly where they hang out online. Whether that’s in slack groups, on LinkedIn, or Youtube, for example. 

To give your content its greatest chance of success, don’t wait for your audience to come to you. Instead, you should go to them.  

Distribute your content where it’ll be seen to make your marketing efforts do the heavy lifting. Break down blogs into short and snappy LinkedIn posts. Repurpose reports into digestible short videos. Leverage your network and partner with third parties to expand your reach. 

Get comfortable talking about your brand (and your competitors)

In the age of social media, the public are getting a look in behind the scenes of many of their favourite brands. This newfound level of transparency is causing more loyal customer relationships, as it grows the level of trust between corporation and consumer. 

However, it’s not quite translated into the fintech industry as of 2024.  

Many companies are still anxious about: 

  • sharing too much

  • being too honest

  • And ultimately, making themselves vulnerable to the customer

To that we say: it’s time to change. 

 

We’ve had a lot of success in helping fintechs to get more comfortable talking about their brand, and comparing with competitors, in an honest and upfront fashion. It's a fintech content strategy for the brave.  

But just to prove how much we believe in this method, we’re also doing it ourselves.  

The Search Cure recently reached out to other marketing agencies and collated a list of the five best regtech marketing agencies. We used direct quotes from other founders, CEOs and marketing managers.

  

Why would we risk sending our prospective clients straight into the hands of competitors?

Simply because they might be a better fit for someone reading our blog.  

Even if we technically ‘lose out’ on an immediate client, we’ve built trust with the reader and know that when they do require content marketing support, they’re more likely to return (or refer their friends). That’s a big win in our book. 

 

Partner with fintech content marketing experts

Truth be told, we’re hoping we’ve given you all the tools in this article to go away and build a strong foundation for your fintech content marketing. We wish you the best, and would love to hear about any of the results you get from implementing each of the tips here. 

But in case you’re looking for that extra bit of support, The Search Cure is a dedicated fintech content marketing agency that's on hand to help. When working with a fintech company, we build a content strategy to fuel growth, and leverage unique insights from subject matter experts. 

We’re also perfect for fintech marketing departments that already know what they’re doing, and simply want to scale up their content writing output. 

To get in touch, simply fill out the form below or connect with founder Shan on LinkedIn. 

Happy fintech marketing 👋

 
 

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