In the wake of the global pandemic, many business owners and executives have grappled with how to keep up with continually changing markets and the global economy. Back in 2019, we showed how to strategically shift your financial brand to digital marketing through customer-centric marketing that focuses on content rather than channel and leverages automation tools (e.g., chatbots). The pandemic then threw a monkey wrench into everyone’s plans.
All these unexpected changes can be overwhelming for fintech and financial services companies, to say the least. However, by ensuring that you have an effective digital marketing strategy, you’ll be well on your way to generating leads and increasing conversions. While you may already have had a strategy in place, it’s likely that you have no clue whether it stacks up. To get you started, here’s a checklist you can use to assess the effectiveness of your fintech marketing strategy.
1. Strategy: Is your marketing strategy comprehensive?
As businesses struggle to navigate uncharted waters, Deloitte predicted that agility will be a top trend for marketers. In fact, companies reported that almost 80 percent of their marketing budgets were digital. We highlighted three marketing priorities for fintech and financial brands to focus on in 2021 driven by these findings. In addition to traditional strategies and tactics, you should implement artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, multi-touch campaigns, and diverse customer acquisition channels.
2. Brand: What direction is your brand positioning going?
Nowadays, business owners and leaders are forced to adapt and change as they grow and scale their brands. Your brand positioning strategy should be directly related to your company’s mission, vision, and long-term goals, but also tied to solving consumers’ problems and providing a positive customer experience. The most effective fintech brands are those that consumers perceive as credible, valuable, and favorable due to their unique selling proposition (USP).
3. Competition: Do you understand the competitive landscape?
Every day, consumers are bombarded with advertising, whether through social media, email, websites, direct mail, billboards, or other types of marketing. As the fintech sector continues to expand, it can be difficult for brands to stand out among all of the noise. The key to fully understanding the competitive landscape is to identify your competitors and their market position. That way, you can determine their strengths and weaknesses and enhance your brand strategy to appeal to target audiences.
4. Audience: Do you know your audience segments?
Although the saying “know your audience” is a cliché, it’s still an essential step in creating a fintech marketing strategy. When you understand your target audience’s needs, you can make authentic interactions with them that lead to more significant results. It helps to develop different customer personas to segment your audience according to their various needs, interests, demographics, etc. If you already have buyer personas mapped out, are you sure they’re accurate? The best consumer personas are based on data-driven insights you collect from your customers along with market research.
5. Content: Does your messaging build awareness and convert?
There’s no doubt that content is king. Yet, you can have all the content in the world or the most creative messaging ever seen without it actually doing what you want. Some of your web traffic may come from people who are early in their buyer’s journey, while others may be close to making their buying decision. Your site needs to have top of funnel (TOFU) and bottom of funnel (BOFU) content to capture buyer intent and maximize your inbound conversions.
There are many reasons why customers decide to support specific companies over their competitors. Most consumers (85%) say that authenticity is an important factor, which often ties back to consumer-created content that’s shared following a positive brand experience. In any case, effective content should build awareness, make sales, and convert leads to buyers.
6. SEO: Did you optimize your content for search engines?
In the brick-and-mortar world, it’s all about “location, location, location.” On the Internet, the same holds true, but you have to help consumers find you. The most promising way to do that is through search engine optimization (SEO). While you’ll want to tap into keywords that customers use to find products and services like yours, you must also ensure that your information meets Google’s high page quality standards. Remember, those Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) pages related to fintech and financial services can impact a person’s quality of life.
7. CRM: Is your CRM capturing user information?
In the fintech industry, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is revolutionizing how brands do business and should be a top priority. When done right, CRM collects and stores data about your customers and uses it to automatically engage with customers at certain times of the buyers’ life cycle. One of the questions you’ll want to find answers to is whether your CRM is capturing user information. When you track every step that customers take during their sales journey, you’ll be able to use that data to influence their purchasing decisions.
8. Return-on-Investment (ROI): Is your strategy even working?
Once you’ve developed and implemented a strategy, how do you know your strategy is effective? You should have key performance indicators (KPI) in place to gauge how well you’ve been achieving your goals. In addition, you’ll want to ensure that your reports are getting you the information you need. Measuring your marketing efforts to determine the ROI is crucial because it can help you identify what’s working or not working and make adjustments to get better results. This is especially important as the financial industry and technology evolve.
The Importance of an Efficient Marketing Strategy
Developing, implementing, and measuring your marketing strategy is essential regardless of the industry your business is positioned in. However, when it comes to fintech and financial services companies, the approaches may require some tweaking to attract and appeal to target audiences. This is especially the case regarding marketing on the Internet, providing positive experiences, and meeting guidelines specific to the finance industry.
It pays to get assistance from fintech marketing agency experts who understand the unique challenges of financial services marketing. At CSTMR, we work closely with fintech and financial services brand leaders to achieve business growth through effective digital marketing.
If you don’t feel confident that your fintech marketing strategy doesn’t stack up, schedule a free consultation and learn how to develop and implement one that does.