Today, the fintech market is valued at $312 billion. And by 2029, this valuation is projected to exceed $608 billion—nearly doubling in just five years.
Competition is fierce, innovation is hot, and fintech companies need to do more to stand out from the crowd.
The formula for winning today—and in the future—is no longer singularly focused on developing innovative products. It’s not enough for your products or services to exist—no matter how groundbreaking they are.
You need to market cleverly, compellingly, and consistently to enhance your presence and position yourself to grow amidst increasing competition.
To help you drive growth, we’ve compiled some of the most effective fintech marketing strategies below. Expect to learn how to craft a marketing approach that aligns with your business goals and build a robust digital footprint that works over time.
Let’s get started!
What Is Fintech Marketing?
Fintech marketing is a unique set of strategies and tactics designed to attract, nurture, and convert potential customers. No two fintech marketing strategies should be the same, as goals, audiences, and offers differ even among competitors.
Your marketing efforts should be tied to your business goals and should aim to:
- Boost brand visibility, awareness, and engagement.
- Drive increased website traffic.
- Generate and nurture leads.
- Acquire new customers.
- Educate prospects and customers.
- Foster customer loyalty and reduce churn.
- Improve the user experience.
No matter your business objectives, defining your goals is the first step toward crafting a custom marketing strategy.
While “fintech” is a broad term encompassing several industry verticals, such as banking, lending, payments, and insurtech, some fundamental components of a strong fintech marketing strategy apply to all growth-oriented companies.
Components of a Winning Fintech Marketing Strategy
Think of crafting your fintech marketing strategy like preparing a meal.
Your end outcome, the meal you are preparing, requires different tactics—or ingredients—for success. You wouldn’t pick up tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese if you wanted to make tacos, would you? Similarly, choose marketing tactics that will get you closer to your goals.
As a part of those tactics, you must consider what you want to achieve and who you want to reach.
A good starting point is the 95/5 rule: only 5% of your target market is actively looking for a product or service like yours. These are your immediate potential customers—or prospects. The other 95% are not actively looking, so how you try to reach them will be very different. In a nutshell, this is the difference between performance marketing and brand marketing.
The tactics in your marketing strategy will differ, but the components of a winning strategy stay the same.
Market Segmentation and Targeting
Market segmentation is the process of dividing a large consumer or business market into subgroups based on shared characteristics.
When segmenting your audience into precise groupings, marketing tactics will differ based on their specific needs—different strokes for different folks.
Start by identifying your most promising audience segment, which isn’t synonymous to largest—rather, find those that will bring the most lifetime value. Then, create marketing strategies that cater to them specifically. This precision allows you to communicate value more effectively, solve customer-specific problems, and enhance engagement, leading to higher conversion rates and customer retention.
Value Proposition Development
A value proposition statement summarizes why a consumer should choose your product or service over others, highlighting the unique value the product or service provides.
Clearly articulating your brand and business’s unique value proposition and communicating it in a way that resonates with your target audience helps to differentiate your offerings in a competitive market, ensuring that potential customers understand and are attracted to your unique benefits.
Customer Journey Mapping
The customer journey is the process your customers go through, from discovering your brand, to becoming prospects, and ultimately brand advocates.
Mapping your customer journey is a key step to understanding the different touchpoints prospects and customers have with your brand, and identifying opportunities to improve their experience and your communication with them at every stage.
Data-Informed Decisions
A wise marketer always uses data to inform their strategies. This involves collecting data about their customers, including customer behavior, preferences, and needs, and using it to make decisions about marketing tactics, messaging, and targeting.
This process helps marketers uncover hidden patterns and ensure strategies are informed by data—not hunches.
Once you have done the initial legwork to define your unique value proposition, analyze your audience segments, map their journey, and dig deeper into data, you’re ready to craft your custom fintech marketing strategy.
How To Build a Successful Fintech Marketing Strategy
What’s successful for you may not be successful for another fintech company. That’s why it’s important to create a custom strategy backed up by data-driven insights, and built around your goals, audience personas, and brand identity.
Here are the five steps to building a strategy that delivers impactful results.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
It’s not enough to target John Smith, age 56, CTO, in New York City.
You need to get more granular than that.
Understanding your target audiences’ demographics, psychographics, and behavioral patterns is crucial to knowing where they are, where they’re looking for advice, how they’re deciding, what factors are important to them, and so much more.
Defining buyer personas can help you create, execute, and refine a marketing strategy built with your audience in mind.
2. Establish a Strong Brand Identity
A strong brand identity goes beyond your colors, design, and logo. It should evoke trust, credibility, connection, and a belief that you will do what you promised.
It’s what your audience sees everywhere. It embodies perception, clout, influence, and the peace of mind you bring customers.
The best way to build a brand identity that resonates with your audience is by focusing on the narrative. As human beings, stories hit home differently. Brands that tell powerful stories are better positioned to establish “know, like, and trust” that attracts new customers and keeps established customers coming back for more.
Jason Henrichs from Alloy Labs takes it a step further: “Banks have customers that trust them. We focus a lot on how to leverage the trust of existing consumers and take it into other areas that can solve real problems.”
3. Leverage Digital Channels
More often than not, your promotion efforts should include a healthy mix of digital channels. After all, as a fintech product or service, your audience is likely online in some capacity.
At the very least, consider involving your website, content marketing, and digital advertising in a diverse marketing strategy:
- Website optimization: your website is the only salesperson working around the clock for your business. Optimize your website for search engines, mobile devices, and user experience.
- Content marketing: fintech content marketing is the process of creating and disseminating helpful content that gives prospects the information they need to make a confident buying decision. More often than not, it’s a top-of-funnel strategy used to attract and nurture leads through the customer journey.
- Digital advertising: display ads, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, and social media ads increase visibility and attract new customers. Done well, online advertising targets specific demographics with tailored messages and offers highlighting your brand’s unique advantages.
Ultimately, the channels you choose should be tailored to what you know about your audience through each persona. For example, if your audience doesn’t use Facebook or Instagram, advertising on those social platforms won’t make sense for your brand.
4. Implement Growth-Hacking Techniques
Growth hacking is a marketing technique for rapidly growing and scaling businesses through innovative and cost-effective strategies. It focuses on creative, low-cost methods to help companies acquire and retain customers quickly.
Common growth hacking tactics include referral programs to boost word-of-mouth and viral marketing efforts that capitalize on creating shareable, engaging content. Both of these tactics double down on humans’ tendency to engage with and share things that resonate with them.
Meanwhile, if you engage in growth hacking, consider A/B testing various marketing components. A/B testing compares different versions of the same marketing piece, testing one component at a time to give you a clear picture of “winning” elements—like copy or design.
A/B testing is one area where generative AI excels, making it easier to “fail forward” by simplifying tasks, streamlining workflows, and increasing efficiency. This makes the A/B testing process more scalable.
Regardless of how you implement A/B testing into your marketing strategy, paying attention to performance and outcomes will help you continually drive results.
5. Pay Attention to Performance
Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) at the beginning of your fintech marketing campaign is critical to measuring and tracking success.
Your KPIs will be different depending on your current strategy and needs. Brand marketing, for instance, focuses on impressions and views, while for performance marketing, it’s relevant to measure conversions.
Keep your eye on three key metrics to make sure your campaign is trending in the right direction:
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the money you spend to gain a new customer.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) measures the total revenue generated by a customer over time.
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is not specifically a metric, but rather a process that aims to increase the rate at which visitors or leads perform your desired actions. It’s most commonly used to measure website conversion rates.
Measuring performance is only possible with the right tools in your tool belt.
Google Analytics unlocks a deeper understanding of your website and content performance. With the right setup, it can also uncover insights on your audience behavior and acquisition trends.
Additionally, marketing automation platforms help fintech companies automate marketing efforts, streamline workflows, and improve efficiency.
Picking a marketing automation platform for your business means taking an honest look at the marketing channels you actively use and wish to operationalize. For instance, some platforms let you create targeted email campaigns and manage social media from within the tool.
In particular, CRM systems like HubSpot combine the power of marketing automation with a CRM. This unlocks powerful operational efficiencies and insights that can inform marketing and sales decisions and drive you closer to your goals.
Compliance and Regulatory Considerations in Fintech Marketing
Any company engaging in content marketing is subject to oversight.
Data privacy and security regulations like CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CCPA protect consumers across the world from unlawful use of their data.
Data privacy should be a high priority for fintech companies, as they work with sensitive financial information—because of that, they face unique regulatory and compliance requirements that other industries are not subject to.
All companies in the finance space should be aware of the FTC’s Truth-in-Advertising Law, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Investment Advisory Act, and the Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer (AML/KYC). These laws are designed to ensure truthful marketing, prevent discrimination, and prevent financial crime.
Compliance and regulation requirements go even deeper depending on the corner of the market you serve:
- Consumer banking: complying with regulations like the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws, and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements directly impacts marketing initiatives. These regulations dictate how companies can market services and how they manage and utilize customer data for personalized marketing—ensuring that all promotions are compliant with privacy standards.
- Small business lending: the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) affect how fintech companies can market their lending services. It ensures that marketing practices do not discriminate and that credit reporting is handled responsibly, influencing trust and credibility in their marketing campaigns.
- Investment management: the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Investment Company Act of 1940 enforce strict guidelines on advertising investments. This ensures that all promotional materials are transparent and not misleading and provides all necessary disclosures to investors, aligning marketing efforts with legal standards.
The best way to ensure your fintech company stays in regulatory bodies’ good graces is to enlist the help of your compliance department and legal team.
Scaling Your Marketing Efforts
It’s safe to say that all fintech companies wish to scale.
But that may mean something very different for each company: entering new markets, reaching new customer segments, adding new services or products…and the list goes on.
One thing scaling has in common for everyone? Your fintech marketing strategy must accompany that growth. And the most effective and impactful way to do it is by focusing on marketing channels that scale with your business.
These include channels like SEO, content marketing, and social media, where your investment will compound over time.
For instance, social media channels provide a fertile ground for content distribution. They allow fintech brands to reach a broad audience, interact with industry influencers, and repurpose existing content into “bite-sized” bits. Similarly, a well-crafted content marketing strategy uses existing content to repurpose across channels.
SEO, on the other hand, is not a quick marketing win, as it often takes months—or even years—to pay dividends. While you may not see the payoff immediately, SEO for fintechs is a scalable strategy, particularly for top-of-funnel marketing efforts.
Regardless, scaling means dedicating more resources to marketing. As you grow, you may need to expand your marketing team and acquire talent to keep up with demand.
Hiring experienced marketers who understand the fintech industry can help companies scale their marketing efforts more effectively.
Build Your Fintech Marketing Strategy With CSTMR
Growing in the fintech arena is tough business: there’s a lot to consider, and a massive amount of competition to stand out from. Fintech marketing is essential to make your brand stand out.
Building an effective fintech marketing strategy is not just about automation and analytics—it’s about creating a connection with your audience.
It requires humanizing your brand, ensuring your messaging resonates on a personal level, and maintaining a balance between innovative solutions and credible promises. This is a common theme that arises in our Mighty Finsights Podcast.
If you’re ready to transform your brand through fintech marketing, CSTMR is here to guide you. We embrace a fearless commitment to excellence, placing you and your goals at the center of everything we do. Get in touch to discuss your fintech marketing goals and how we can help you create a winning strategy today.
