Our team at CSTMR would like to wish you a very happy holiday and a prosperous new year!
In the spirit of the holiday season, we’d like to leave you with a holiday tale, written by our friend and colleague Josh Wendroff at Seedpay.
T’was the Night Before Fintech Christmas…
With the start of Q4, it’s time to start examining and planning your marketing strategies for 2019. With the ever-changing market landscape, it’s more important than ever to keep current on the emerging 2019 digital marketing trends. As I look ahead there is one main theme I see weaving through all the other trends that are popping up. Authenticity. To win customers hearts and share of wallet brands and marketers to commit themselves to transparency and authenticity in all that they do.
As consumers are becoming more and more distrusting of advertising and marketing honesty is becoming critical for brands. From staying true to your brand, remaining clear, direct and calm, embracing open two-way communication both positive and critical on public forums, to developing a more human voice—transparency and authenticity need to be part of your strategy.
The three emerging 2019 digital marketing trends are nothing new. However, it’s the way they’re emerging, build off each other, the market and growing technology that makes them especially salient this coming year. And authenticity weaves its way through each and every one.
At CSTMR this is nothing new. We put the customer at the heart of everything we do. You’re probably thinking this isn’t a new concept too. Personalization in marketing has been around for a while now. But now it is so much more than Hello, <<name>>. With all the new data there is much more targeting available to us.
Post a selfie or groupie on Twitter with hashtag #iamFintastic during the 2018 Fintech Luminaries VIP Reception to support Fintech innovation. The post with the most likes + shares will win a special Fintech VIP Prize Package.
• Post a selfie on Twitter, hashtag #iamFintastic
• The posts with the most likes + shares during the event wins
• 5 total winners selected
• $25 Starbucks gift card
• Free Digital Strategy Session with CSTMR ($500 value)
• Special edition #iamFintastic t-shirt
Ready to discuss digital marketing strategies to help your Fintech or financial company grow? If so, set up some time to talk!
#iamfintastic #fintech #fintechmarketing
Many fast growing fintech and financial services companies that we encounter lack the in-house marketing resources and time to drive growth and catapult their company to the next level. Despite the challenges, there are a few basic, strategic tactics that you start with to help drive growth, and it all begins with breaking down your target audience, customers and prospects, by segment and stage.
Market definition and segmentation can be difficult for many organizations because their products or services may cut across broad groups of individuals or companies. A key to useful audience segmentation is looking at how individual prospects make buying decisions, choose to purchase from you, and what similarities or differences exist in the buying process.
We leverage interviews with key members of the sales and product teams, sales data, web data, and secondary market research to understand the distinct buying processes that occur around our client’s products. Once we start to map the buying processes, we can see that the audience naturally starts to form into audience clusters based on similarities in how they buy. This forms the basis of your audience segments and allows you to develop very targeted messages that appeal to these distinct segments individually.
Market definition and segmentation sets the stage and is just one part of your fintech growth marketing foundation. The second piece is your marketing messaging.
You probably don’t give much thought to No. 2 pencils. After all, note-taking apps and screenshots have practically replaced their functionality. And even before there was a smartphone in every pocket, pencils were merely the thing you used to do math problems or jot down phone numbers. Not great fodder for contemplation.
But pencils are more instructive than you think. Not only do they serve a simple (albeit increasingly insignificant) function, pencils also symbolize the complex process that goes into any great product. For our purposes today, that product is a marketing optimization strategy.
When you look at a pencil, you see a ridged wooden tool, painted yellow and topped with a pink eraser. But you don’t see the tree from which the pencil was made being logged, that log cut into smaller slabs, the slabs being carved into pencils. Nor do you see the graphite holes being bored and filled, the rubber erasers being shaped and fitted, or that trademark No. 2 being etched onto the final product. As the end user, you shouldn’t witness that process. The mark of a truly great product is that users get to enjoy it without ever seeing what’s under the hood.
Marketing optimization strategies are like No. 2 pencils in that way. Customers are so blown away by the brilliance of the message that they never wonder how those words came to be in front of them. But behind the scenes, numerous people and processes come together to bring those campaigns to life.
In this post, we break down the multi-faceted marketing optimization process and why each component is necessary.
Each department in your company needs an organizational system. Everyone involved should understand their jobs,
Do you want to know the worst sales question you can ask a customer? Take note, and never use it again. The worst sales question is: “What keeps you up at night?”
On the surface, that seems a reasonable thing to ask. You want to help the customer focus on the most important issue she’s facing. But by asking what keeps her up at night, you’re focusing on a problem that she already knows she has. That means she is likely already aware of the options available to her to address the problem.
Your ability to influence that customer is already limited if you are addressing a problem that they know they already have. Sure, you might be able to solve the problem a little more cheaply or more quickly, but is that enough motivation to drive the customer to action? The way to drive actual purchasing activity is to get them thinking about their business or problem in a way they haven’t considered before. You need to teach them something new and change their perception on how they view an issue.
Steve Jobs once famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” If customers had their say, they would have asked for smaller CD players rather than the iPod.
By the time your customers reach out to you, they’ve probably racked their brains over obvious solutions. Your opportunity lies in the space they haven’t explored, the options that never occurred to them. Most people can only think within the context of what they’ve already seen. You need to get at the core of what your customer wants to achieve and fulfill that in an innovative fashion.
We’ve got zombies on the brain here at CSTMR, and not just because of the recent mid-season finale of The Walking Dead. As we brace for the hordes of virus-infected undead to storm our televisions again in a couple of months, we’ve been thinking about marketing zombies. You know, the campaigns you keep funding even though they’ve long ceased to have a pulse.
Companies that constantly monitor their campaigns don’t lose money. Instead, they identify their weaknesses and pivot to more profitable tactics, and do so quickly. But those that funnel money into strategies that have hit a plateau or have declining results? They’ve got problems, as they continue to pour money into campaigns that are already dead, they just don’t know it yet.
Build the following three components into your strategies and you’ll avoid marketing zombification:
Even the best articles and most brilliant ads can’t thrive in isolation. Media mentions are great for early-stage startups, but you can only milk those for so long. You can’t scale your PR efforts 100 times based on articles and interviews alone. Different channels should complement and support one another. If you have an avid Twitter following, use your influence to breathe life into some of your under-appreciated articles or videos.
The nice thing about digital marketing is that you have tight feedback loops, so you can see when SEO results decline or customer acquisition costs increase. When you have multiple channels in the mix, you amplify one while retooling another.
Think of each division as an oil well. Imagine that your PR department gets an article placed in The Wall Street Journal, and you gain exposure in front of more than 2.5 million people.
The Empire Startups Fintech Conference at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco launches next week, on Nov. 10. This is the inaugural west coast event, bringing together more than 180 fintech companies, investors and others in the fintech community.
For those attending, it will be an action packed day of blockchain and borrowers, payments and partnerships. With all of these great fintech minds under one roof, there are some panels and companies we definitely recommend checking out, and some in which we’re interested in finding out more. So without further ado, here’s our ‘Recommendations’ for the panels we’re looking forward to at the show and our ‘Question Marks’ for panels that could be interesting if they stay focused, but could also turn south if things get off track.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Cash is Dead
9:30am, featuring Marqeta, plastiq, Square, Core Innovation Capital, Mastercard
With a strong lineup of panelists, this session promises to kick the day off right. These leading companies are all dealing with the here and now of changes in the payments space, rather than a distant and uncertain future, so they should bring a uniquely qualified perspective on the state of payments.
The New UX of Fintech
3:00pm, featuring Yodlee, Bento for Business, LendUp, NerdWallet, Alchemy50
As fintech marketers and designers, UX for Fintech is a subject near and dear to our hearts. With companies like Bento, LendUp and NerdWallet that spend a lot of time considering the intersection of design, communication and effectiveness in customer interactions, they should have a lot of insight to offer.
The Growth of Lending
3:40pm, featuring Ldger, Sindeo, TrueAccord, Fundbox, SoFi
We had a chance to see Ldger at Finovate Fall and Fundbox at Money 20/20,
What happened the last time you told someone you work in financial services? Did their eyes glaze over, instant boredom setting in at the thought of crunching numbers and soulless database systems?
Start talking business loans or investment options, and you suck the life right out of a room.
People associate numbers with boring, calculated deal brokering. And who can blame them? Even for those of us who work in the industry, talking technology and money all day can make us forget that finance isn’t an emotionless trade.
Money is an integral part of people’s lives, the thing on which their mortgages, vacation plans, college funds, and annual Christmas parties rely. Put it in those terms, and you’ll see all kinds of emotions arise.
And therein lies the challenge for fintech marketers. Too often, they approach B2B clients in cold, hard terms, talking interest rates and banking security systems as if they’re divorced from customers’ everyday lives. In reality, if you’re in fintech, you’re in just as deep as your consumer-facing clients.
Both B2B and B2C clients want to know that fintech vendors get it. They need to be sure you can provide them with the right technical support and that you’re along for the journey. Finance may be a fact-driven industry, but buying decisions always come back to emotions.
If people based decisions on logic alone, there’d never be need for deliberation, and there wouldn’t be much room for marketing. The specs would speak for themselves, and the most efficient and cost-effective companies would have monopolies on their industries.
But we can’t all be Mr. Spock and operate on logic alone.
Most people are similar to the more emotional Captain Kirk,
