Last Updated on November 9, 2021 by admin
Digital marketing is critical for financial technology companies, especially to raise awareness, generate new leads, and convert customers. The next step is to optimize fintech marketing to generate more leads. In a digital-first world, inbound marketing can be a highly effective strategy for engaging prospective customers.
Inbound marketing is especially important for fintechs to build trust. While outbound campaigns can be great for direct lead generation, inbound campaigns foster relationships that strengthen over time until a prospect is ready to become a customer. We’ll explore some of the ways you can optimize fintech marketing to generate leads.
Create 3E Content
You read that right: create 3E content. Your content should educate, engage, and entertain your audience. This may include many different varieties of content, including blog posts, white papers, reports, ebooks, social posts, infographics, and more.
Fintech is a complex, data-driven space. Achieving the 3 Es can be a challenge, but it’s not impossible. Creating amazing content starts with understanding your audience. If you don’t already have one, start by developing a solid audience persona to help inform your content creation process. After all, what good is content if it’s not interesting or relevant for the people you’re trying to sell to?
Many miss the mark by putting the industry and the product at the center of content. Your audience should be at the center and industry trends and data along with product information should support your audience’s needs and wants. Remember: WIIFM – what’s in it for me? Answer this for your audience — and do it in an informative and fun way — and you’ll be able to optimize fintech marketing while finding a loyal following.
Build a Lead Generation Flow
Once you have great content, the next step to optimize fintech marketing is to figure out the most effective way to leverage that content to get contact information. With B2B sales where the sales cycle is longer and people are doing their own research before even checking in with specific solutions, this takes careful consideration and planning.
Your audience could be coming to your site at any stage in the buyer’s journey. Some may simply be researching industry trends and are not even aware of the problems that your solution solves. Others may be researching solutions around challenges they know they face. Others are looking for a specific solution that is going to meet their needs. This is why having content to meet your audience at every stage is important.
Once you have content, you need to understand the visitor journey and how your content overlays it. High-value content — things like white papers, reports, ebooks, or anything that is in the thought leadership or proprietary research realm — can be used as a bargaining tool. By offering essential information, you can ask for a person’s contact information in exchange. More often than not, these content types are sought after by highly engaged prospects who are serious about making a purchase.
But offering a high-value piece of content behind a gate is an oversimplification. You need to consider each and every user flow and ensure that you have the content and the optimized user experience to support it. For example, David Digiwall may visit your site after seeing one of your blog posts on Twitter. It was interesting enough to catch his eye, but he’s nowhere near the consideration stage. He just clicked because the headline teased some interesting tidbits about the industry.
But now you’ve piqued David’s interest. If you have related articles listed at the bottom of the page David clicked on, he may explore further. If not, he may bounce from the page. If your content is relevant and engaging, David might bookmark your site to return to later. He now sees you as a trustworthy and credible source of information that he will tap into whenever he has a question about what is happening in the market.
At some point, he may develop a need for the type of solution you deliver, and guess where he is going to go for information about solving his problem? Yep, you guessed it. If you have gated content on your site that caters to his need for information at this stage, he is likely to trade his contact information to get it. Now you have a way of engaging in a one-to-one conversation with David, whether through your sales team, a lead nurture email sequence, or both.
Automate, Automate, Automate
Speaking of lead nurture, the user journey for prospects and leads at different stages in their process can get quite complex. Catering content and outreach to every prospect can be daunting, but it gets a lot easier when you add marketing automation to the mix.
Once you have a healthy amount of gated content, you will be able to start segmenting leads into different lists and categories based on their expressed interests. This can help inform the next marketing and/or sales step. Some may be ready for sales right away, while others will need to be nurtured with more content specific to their needs.
Marketing automation is a helpful way to organize and execute all of this. You can create customized flows for each lead depending on where they are at in their journey. Personalized emails with tailored content are highly effective at moving people further down the funnel. Doing it manually is nearly impossible, so utilizing marketing automation must be a part of optimizing inbound fintech marketing to generate leads.
To optimize fintech marketing is a bit of an art and a science. Your own workflows and content needs will vary depending on your business model and your audience persona(s). Taking the considerations above into account can help streamline your lead generation efforts and help you convert leads to customers on a shorter timeline.
Looking for more details to optimize fintech marketing to generate leads? Download our Fintech Customer Acquisition Playbook.
