Over the next five years, the financial technology industry is set to triple in value to $400 billion, a surge that is buoyed by emerging B2B fintech marketing tactics that are quickly becoming mainstays for growth – that is, proven strategies that generate not just good organic traffic, but also quality leads.
Yet, marketing to such a rapidly growing and diverse online sector also presents its own unique challenges.
The fintech industry is a broad church. Software-enabled financial services, platform providers, and blockchain and cryptocurrency start-ups, are the three disruptive industries that are taking the fight to traditional financial institutions, with many more related sectors ready to increase their digital market share.
To sum up the fresh-faced nature of fintech, half of Forbes’ top 50 Fintech startups in 2022 were new businesses.
Creating digital marketing for B2B fintech companies that speaks to desired target audiences, while staying within sales budgets and staving off new competition, is more important than ever, and fintech leaders are finding that they must increasingly work to overcome the following common marketing challenges:
- Producing high-quality content that builds authority while also staying inline with strict compliance rules
- Struggling to rank for traffic in an industry full of tech-smart competitors
- Difficulty converting the traffic they do get into meaningful leads.
But ‘challenging’ is not the same as ‘impossible’.
Many modern B2B companies have struck gold by combining key strategic elements within their marketing efforts.
Here’s how a well-crafted B2B fintech marketing strategy can help you whip your business into shape, and turn potential customers into red-hot conversions.
Ready to get smart with your fintech marketing tactics? Schedule a free consultation, and our content marketing experts will analyze your current website’s performance for free, as well as show you how we can help you increase visibility, engagement and conversions.
What makes a top B2B fintech marketing strategy?
If you’re a fintech CMO, you’ll know that when it comes to marketing, having a strategic vision of how you can outrank and outperform your rivals is fundamental.
Integral within this strategy is the objective to educate your audience about what will likely be a complex fintech product or service.
This vision to educate and inform your audience can be best brought to life with a content marketing strategy that sets out how to build authority and trust, outrank competitors online, and helps you track progress along the way.
SEO-focused content marketing is a preferable long-term strategy over paid online ads, such as Google Ads, simply because the CPA (cost per acquisition) in the fintech industry is unsustainably high with paid. Content marketing uses SEO in a way that reaps long-term dividends by keeping your brand above the competition on search, without having to pay for every click.
But how to come up with a plan that ticks these boxes?
The answer lies in analyzing existing high-performing content through key metrics that measure visibility, engagement and conversions.
As a B2B marketing agency for fintechs, Mint Position has seen the recurring features of great content marketing in the fintech industry that not only help companies build authority and generate traffic, but also draw in the target market most likely to convert.
To get to the crux of the matter, we can define three of these core features as follows:
1. Content marketing funnels
The most effective digital marketers know how to make potential clients get pulled down what some would call a buyer or sales funnel.
In the world of content marketing, we’ll call this a content funnel. This includes writing content around certain topics where you want to develop a niche expertise, then ensuring that the subject covers content for all stages of the funnel – unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware and most aware.
That funnel will look like this:
By writing each topic with this funnel in mind, you’ll create a Topic Authority that not only builds credibility with Google, but also a natural organization of a complete content library that anticipates all stages of awareness of your audience.
2. SEO writing
Effective SEO writing pushes the author to seamlessly include high-ranking keywords into copy while also examining why their target audience are searching for these terms in the first place.
In SEO speak, this is called search intent.
When we study and understand the search intent behind a keyword, we are then able to gauge how a piece of content should be structured for that topic, giving guidelines for everything from the headline copy to individual images.
These days, we also use AI-based SEO editing tools that give writers guidelines for how to craft articles that are mostly likely to meet search intent, and thus rank highly.
Understanding these elements is key to appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
3. Journalistic-quality research and interviews
B2B customers tend to be company C-suite executives who are well-educated professionals and have an in-depth knowledge of their field. As such, they’ll only give you their time (and respect) if they feel like they’re dealing with an authoritative source.
Authority and credibility is only gained from in-depth insights built upon excellent research and interviewing expert sources.
A good interview can produce a lot of specific information, while also adding unique insights that don’t exist for a certain topic on the internet yet. The opposite to this would be just a regurgitated report created from rewriting top Google articles – adding nothing unique.
Expert subject matter research is inherently what a good journalist does. The founder of Mint Position being a veteran journalist, he discovered that this is exactly what many current content marketing strategies de jour are missing.
Moreover, SEO and conversion performance goes hand-in-hand with unique ideas, as modern search engines are adept at picking out when a page is adding expert content for their users.
Marrying these three schools of thought together, then, hits the sweet spot for a content marketing strategy.
Indeed, combining these worlds together is what we call the Mint Position.
It’s a feat that eludes the vast majority of fintech businesses, but, then, that’s what makes it so special.
Coming up with this strategic masterplan is one thing, but a strategy is nothing without the tactics that make it happen.
As Sun Tzu once said, ‘strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory’.
Here’s how we do it.
The Top 5 B2B fintech marketing tactics
1. Generate leads via LinkedIn
With over 700 million members, LinkedIn is a social media phenomenon.
Yet while the likes of Facebook and Instagram are potent B2C tools, LinkedIn dominates the B2B industry.
LinkedIn’s professional audience isn’t there for cat videos, emojis and memes — although these can sometimes help: they’re only human, after all — they prefer to see high-value content specific to their industry, such as white papers, guidebooks or webinars.
Fintech brands can use this to their advantage. By providing expert material that demonstrates thought leadership via LinkedIn, in exchange for customer data, companies are able to open up a rich seam of new leads.
How a LinkedIn lead generation form looks within the app
Source: Selling Signals
At Mint Position, we helped mobile payment API provider Reloadly use this technique to stunning effect in a 2021 social media messaging campaign aimed at gathering more B2B leads from C-suite executives in the digital mobile payments industry.
Within one month of releasing a white paper on digital mobile payment platforms (a timely subject for their industry in 2021), they had collected almost 1,000 leads from executives around the world, leading to a string of new clients.
Reloadly benefitted from the exceptional potency of the white paper, which was written using academic footnotes and niche expertise and published on a dedicated landing page.
A snapshot of Reloadly’s lead-gen success on LinkedIn
A lead-gen success like this is well within the reach of fintech startups with valuable research to share with their audience.
Twinned with a LinkedIn content approach that includes consistent industry-curated posts with engaging hooks and regular interaction with fellow users, generating leads in this way could be one of the most powerful weapons in your marketing arsenal.
2. B2B email marketing
There’s a reason why eight out of 10 B2B content marketers use email campaigns for nurturing leads: they work.
B2B consumers are more likely to regularly consume email content, making it an effective channel for targeting them with quality content tailored to your product.
Email newsletters are an excellent way of packaging this content into a reader-friendly format delivered regularly into their inbox, but to work well B2B writers must follow certain guidelines for this, including:
- Only targeting consumers who have expressed an interest in the brand (such as requesting access to a white paper) to avoid that ‘cold-call’ feeling.
- Pick out and write emails on relevant topics about pain points, customer desires and product features.
- Make sure subject lines are short, snappy and inspire curiosity. Do A/B testing with emojis to see if they fit.
- Address the customer by name to make the message feel personal (and get past spam filters)
- Infuse the copy with multiple well-placed calls-to-action.
In the case of Reloadly, we used the leads generated from their LinkedIn campaign to influence the creation of an email newsletter directed toward their software developer community following the above tips.
A consistent influx of educational and relevant content helped build trust among the subscribers and led to a sustained boost in website traffic and leads.
3. Focus on pain-point SEO
We all know what a pain point refers to, but just sympathizing with your target customer’s problems isn’t enough to gain their trust and, ultimately, turn their interest into a conversion.
Pain-point SEO is a process that identifies the biggest difficulties affecting your target market, and builds optimized content that offers a specific solution to them.
Acting as a net to capture leads, your content funnel should be infused with ‘long-tail’ keywords of very specific queries aimed at specific buyer personas. This process is proven to lead to higher conversion rates as it offers a ready-made answer to what the ‘captured’ lead is looking for.
Here, it helps to think of Google as a ‘lean-in’ activity – people are using search engines when they have problems, and actively trying to resolve them. Provide specific answers to resolve them, and you’ll be rewarded.
In the B2B world, we can utilize this technique to win over important corporate decision-makers who might not even be fully aware of their pain point.
Using a well-defined sales funnel, as shown above, pain-point SEO has the power to turn a casual browser into an enthusiastic buyer with their card details in their hand.
With Reloadly, we knew how important it was to identify a chief pain point of their target market, specifically, how to easily install a gift card reseller API, and then to walk them through the solution to prove it.
In the API industry, this process is not always simple, and we knew that. Some competitors ask for contracts, and others are not so transparent when it comes to pricing. So, in this article we had to emphasize the ease of getting a gift card reselling business up and running fast — in fact, in just one day (or less) – as well as just how transparent and hassle-free the Reloadly API platform is.
This content strategy then combined certain aspects of product marketing (see below) to develop the article.
In particular, we provided a detailed tutorial with instructions and screenshots that took them through the process step-by-step, accompanied with the numerous benefits associated with the product.
It was something their target market was looking for.
Within a month, the article ranked number one in the USA for its keyword, and had landed Reloadly 25 new conversions that opened up a funded account. With the target audience being C-suite executives, this represented a much higher amount than normal.
In summary, it was a classic example of pain-point SEO at its most effective: reaching out to prospective customers at a time of need, and handing them a gift-wrapped solution based on the product you’re offering.
How we helped Reloadly load up on their B2B conversions
4. Push conversions with product-focused SEO
Potential B2B buyers can take longer to convince than B2C buyers.
While inside your ‘net’, they’ve learned about your product and how it can solve their pain point, but are still undecided. They want to see solid proof of how it works, how quickly they can use it and what kind of user experience they can expect before they make that purchase decision. Often, B2B buyers even want to know about why your company decided to create it in the first place.
This is where pain point SEO goes a step further, putting together a complete story of your brand’s purpose in the market and why your product/service exists.
We like to call it raison d’etre content.
Well-researched product-focused SEO content provides a full story, with the aim of being the tipping point that convinces potential buyers to hit that payment button.
It needs to clearly spell out why your product is the solution for them, backed up by several high-quality screenshots of its features.
It also needs to fit into a keyword strategy that draws in new organic customers that are at a similar buying stage to those in your funnel.
Mint Position got to use this tactic to great effect while working with Now Money, a B2B digital payroll provider in the UAE.
A main problem was that what little traffic they had was not coming from their target market.
We created a walk-through guide of how their smart payroll software would solve some key pain points for UAE-based business owners, including by cutting down on mountains of payroll paperwork, saving on fees for paying UAE salaries, remaining compliant with UAE salary laws, and giving managers more flexible salary payment options.
Laid out in short paragraphs and easy-to-digest bullet points, the article incorporated a keyword strategy that identified low-difficulty keywords with a strong search volume as we aimed to jumpstart organic traffic for a website that – while already in existence for several years – still registered less than 1,000 visits per month. This strategy was then applied to several other articles across the content funnel.
The proof was in the pudding. Within the first six months of engagement, we increased volume by 650% in a tough business vertical.
NOW Money’s jump in relevant organic traffic in just a few months
Our product-focused strategy proved it can work cross-industry, too.
Fan rewards platform Fanprime saw it first-hand when we targeted top sports brands with their white-label solution that allowed them to monetize fan interactions and collect valuable first-party data.
Our product-focused landing page focused on how quick and easy it is for customers to install the solution and open up new revenue streams. It caught the eye of several top brands, including Mercedes F1, which contacted Fanprime within weeks of the page going live.
Our Fanprime landing page that helped them win the race to Mercedes F1’s attention
5. Add credibility with expert interviews
As any fintech leader knows, B2B content marketing is about attracting the attention of fellow influential business figures within their target audience. The onus is on appealing to a few high-value leads, likely to be experts in their field, rather than writing for a mass audience.
To do this effectively, we need to make sure that we meet that crucial tenet of quality journalism that we mentioned earlier. Done correctly, this will build authority and credibility, and the end result will invariably need to include in-depth research that is linking to valuable online sources.
Expert interviews are the epitome of this.
Not only do they educate and resonate with the target audience, but they also improve SEO and conversion performance by meeting crucial Google algorithm factors.
This tactic works for both Top-of-the-Funnel (ToFu) and Bottom-of-the-Funnel (BoFu) content, only used in different ways.
ToFu articles are generalized content aimed at generating brand awareness traffic. To this end, interview sources can be industry figures talking about topics of interest to a wide audience.
In our recent piece for Reloadly, for example, we spoke about trends affecting the fintech industry at large, backed up by opinions from select fintech executives.
BoFu journalistic-quality research, on the other hand, lets us get down to specifics.
For this, we search for specialist insights usually within your company that justify why your product or service will solve a particular problem.
These internal expert interviews are geared toward soothing client concerns about the product, and convincing the reader to take action.
Placed alongside illustrative screenshots, incisive writing, and strategic calls-to-action, expert interviews speak to the rational, decision-making side of B2B clients, and are proven to help boost conversions.
Ready to launch your fintech content marketing plan or looking for more ideas to improve your content marketing ROI? Get in touch with us and we’ll show you how we use these unique marketing tactics to increase the kind of organic traffic that generates the conversions you’re looking for.
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