You have a great product or service that addresses a pressing need in the market. You might’ve even deployed a few marketing tactics to get your message out there. But without a thoughtful, well researched marketing strategy, even the best efforts can fall short of reaching and engaging your audience.
Forget everything you learned in business school (okay, not everything; that stuff about accounting is pretty important.). But all of the “best practices” in marketing? That’s just a starting point — and often code for being like everyone else.
And your business isn’t like any other. It’s yours, with a unique value proposition and solution. Built for your specific customer set. And your marketing and advertising should follow suit.
Here at CSTMR, we start every engagement with a bit of Discovery. Uncovering everything we can about your business, your customers, your competitors, and the market you serve. At the end of this Plan phase, we don’t just want to be familiar with your company, we want to know it inside-out. We refer to this as your Strategic Foundation – the basis from which all our work will flow. This includes defining the fundamentals of your business and marketing goals, as well as your value, audience, and more.
Once the foundation is defined, we can make well-informed marketing recommendations for your overall strategy. Depending on your needs, these might include strategic elements such as:
- Brand positioning
- Audience persona development
- Messaging
- Acquisition channels
- Website SEO
- Website UX and message
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Visual design style
…and much more.
Our experience working across early-stage, emerging, and established fintech and financial companies, community banks, credit unions, and other industry players means we know this territory, the customers, and what makes them click. We’ll spend our time focused on what makes you unique and why your customers should seek you out over the competition—not brushing up on industry jargon.
How Marketing Strategy Drives Business Growth
Without a powerful marketing strategy your fintech or financial services business will most likely struggle to achieve its commercial aims. There’s a chance you can wing it, limp towards your business’s end goal, and just about make it. But if you want to reach higher and smash target after target, you need that decisive, evidence-based, best practices driven marketing strategy.
The worlds of both finance and technology are developing with such speed that purposeful marketing is more important than ever. Commit to planning and developing the right strategy for your business, and you stand an excellent chance of success.
The Importance of Marketing Strategy
You’ve probably read about countless marketing tools and tactics, the “essential” this and the “top five” that. There certainly are a vast amount of ideas out there. But what works incredibly well for one finance business is likely to be a flop for another.
The secret is getting the right combination for your brand, and, specifically, your audience. And that, of course, is where marketing strategy comes in.
A marketing strategy is the complete plan for reaching a business’s audience, and turning prospects into customers. It means understanding your market, your audience, your brand’s unique value proposition…and marketing best practices.
It sounds like a lot, right?
That’s why it can be tricky to get marketing strategy right. Businesses can miss the mark by not going deep enough into their initial planning, or going the other way and getting lost in the weeds and bogged down in irrelevant execution or channel detail.
Some see marketing strategy as a paper exercise, something that has to be done but isn’t critical to the business. And then wonder why their marketing efforts aren’t quite hitting the spot. Instead, think of it as your foundation and map that you reference every day in decision making.
Creating Your Strategic Marketing Foundation
This is the first step in creating a marketing strategy. The initial building block of all of your brand’s marketing efforts. And, like any foundation, it needs to be strong enough for everything else to be built on top of it.
A strategic marketing foundation needs you to define the critical elements that are going to be involved in your strategy, including:
- Goals
- Audience
- Value proposition
- Differentiators
- Competition/market landscape
- KPIs
- Brand position
- Core message
Then once that’s developed, you can move on to your overall strategy – the map.
Developing a Marketing Plan and Strategy
Based on the foundation you’ve defined, you’re ready to take things a step further by combining different elements to construct a solid marketing strategy.
But what do you need to work on to make sure you attain your marketing goals? Here are some suggestions:
Brand Strategy
Your brand might not seem as easy to define as your products and services, but when you get your brand strategy right, it’s one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. In an industry where your customers’ hard-earned money is the main focus, making sure your audience understands who you are, how you are different and better, and what you can deliver is key. Then you will be ready to build your brand assets on top of that – logo, visual identity elements, voice and tone, etc. – in a purposeful, focused way.
Go-to-Market Strategy
From new startups to established businesses with new products or services to launch, a go-to-market strategy is the plan that defines how your business or product/service gets introduced to the market. Go-to-market strategies tend to look at the shorter term than most other strategies, but combining them with other marketing tactics can build sustained success over time.
Customer Acquisition Strategy
Today’s customers know more, think more, and want more. They have so many options at their fingertips that making sure they know about you in the first place is a mission in itself. In addition to paid media advertising, many acquisition channels and tactics should be considered and tested in your strategy to determine the most effective way to reach your prospects. And that’s customer acquisition, attracting the attention of new customers, in a sustainable and consistent way.
Content Marketing Strategy
An organic marketing tactic, using relevant, compelling, and well-written content can do so much for your brand. By demonstrating your knowledge of the core topics through informative and helpful articles, videos, graphics and more, you can also position your brand (and products or services) as THE solution to your audience’s problems – spurring greater loyalty, conversions, and growth. Blog posts, white papers, infographics, and more are all valuable content for fintech and financial services brands.
SEO Strategy
The land of SEO is vast, with rules and best practices continually evolving, so it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of more than just the basics. There’s much more to it than keyword stuffing, and experienced SEO strategists will be able to construct detailed holistic SEO strategies that play a significant role in your overall digital marketing strategy.
UX/Design Strategy
How do potential customers experience your website or app? No matter how streamlined and slick your marketing strategy is, poor UX design can unravel all that hard work in an instant. That’s why the user experience of your website and apps can have a profound impact on any successful marketing goals.
The CSTMR team is made up of specialists from many areas of fintech and financial services marketing. We’ll work tirelessly with you to create a bespoke marketing strategy that keeps your customers in mind at all times. Let’s position your brand exactly where it needs to be.
