Growth Drivers for Fintech Startups

Many fast growing fintech and financial services companies that we encounter lack the in-house marketing resources and time to drive quick 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.

Segmentation

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 choose to purchase from you, and what similarities or differences exist in the buying process.

• How do they decide to make a purchase?
• What factors into their decision?
• Who are the individuals involved in the decision?
• Is it one person or multiple people, and to which resources do they turn to help them make a decision?

At CSTMR, 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.

Stages

Along with segments, it helps to place your customers into stages in the purchasing process as well, using a simple matrix with audience segment on one axis and their stage within the customer lifecycle on the other. At CSTMR, we generally define the stages as: Reach & Attract, Engage & Convert, Retain & Build, and Expand & Grow.

Reach & Attract

This stage involves defining which product sets appeal to each target audience, and then developing traffic growth and/or demand generation strategies for each. This includes selecting the right channels and developing positioning, messaging and killer strategies for each of those channels.

Engage & Convert

Once you attract the customers, you need to understand their impetus for purchasing your product. By understanding what ultimate issues each prospect is looking to address with your products, you can intelligently develop strategies for engaging and converting them by delivering the right messaging/positioning/calls-to-action for each audience segment at just the right time in the selling process. 

Retain & Build

Once the prospect becomes a customer, how do you keep them engaged? By having a handle on what your customer is trying to achieve by purchasing your product, you can develop useful engagement content to help the customer utilize your product, building that trust and relationship. If you are successful at your engagement process, you earn the permission to leverage that relationship into other sales opportunities.

Expand & Grow

As your company grows and your marketing strategies become more sophisticated, you’ll want to expand your reach to new customer groups and new markets. These strategies for growth may include:

• Channel or strategic partnerships
• Identifying adjacent or complementary categories and companies
• Defining new ways to integrate what you do with other products or services.

This expansion and growth usually requires a re-evaluation of your audience segments and the building of new market models to include not only prospects and customers, but partners, potential partners and even competitors.

Don’t Just Go To Market, Own It

You may have the world’s greatest product, but if the world doesn’t know about it or understand how it will improve their life, your work is for naught.