Table of Contents
More and more fintechs jump on the content marketing bandwagon as they realize the short- and long-term benefits of consistently publishing exceptional content. In the short term, content marketing can help brand new fintechs drive awareness and build trust with their core audience. In the long term, content marketing can add to a fintech brand’s credibility while also aiding in SEO, making a company more findable and appealing to its target audience.
The thing to remember about content marketing is that it’s a bit of an art and a science — with a heavy emphasis on the science part. It’s more than just hiring a few fintech copywriters to crank out blog posts. Several components are non-negotiable when implementing content marketing for your fintech organization. As with any recipe, if you leave out any of the ingredients, you’re likely to end up with ugly, tasteless results. Here are five major elements to ensure you’re creating a purposeful content marketing program aimed at achieving specific goals.
Strategy & Planning
Every marketing initiative needs a strategy or it will never be successful. Planning and strategy enable fintechs to create, document, and manage a cohesive strategy that is personalized for their audiences. This is arguably the most important phase because the other four components can’t even happen without it.
So what does planning include?
Audience personas: Personas are research-based representations of your ideal audience(s). This includes their needs, challenges, preferences, demographics, and maybe more.
Content audit: You should run regular content audits and build content inventories (that include checking for broken or expired links) to ensure you have content for every stage in the buyer’s journey and that all the content has been optimized.
Competitive content marketing analysis: Review and analyze your competitors’ content marketing efforts across search, social, and editorial.
Content marketing calendar: Build out and document each of the content assets you want to create, including where they will be published, when they will be published, and how they will be promoted. This should be a shareable document that can be accessed by marketing leads, external partners, fintech copywriters, and any other relevant parties.
Document KPIs: Decide how you will measure success, including key performance indicators that will help you evaluate the effectiveness of content marketing campaigns. These may include metrics like leads, traffic, and cost of acquisition.
Execution
Execution looks at how you’ll execute on the plan you created above. It includes how you’ll create content on an ongoing basis, who will participate in and own content marketing efforts, and which processes will be followed to create content. to how you’ll create content at scale, which includes the people and processes that make asset creation and publishing possible. Outlining these things should be part of the planning and strategy phase so everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities. This allows fintechs to have a playbook for success that they can reference, adapt, and iterate as circumstances warrant.
Execution will include:
Creative talent: The talent side of things should remain flexible and scalable as content needs may evolve. Determine how much content can be assigned to your in-house team and how much may need to be assigned to freelancers or marketing partners. This is a key consideration as fintech copywriters can be hard to come by. Do your homework and find fintech copywriters with ample experience writing in the space.
Brand guidelines: You should establish and document guidelines for content creation that include things like tone and voice, style preferences, design specs, and anything else that will help you maintain brand consistency across assets.
SEO: SEO is an important consideration within content marketing and it can be helpful to assign a single owner to this competency. This person will ensure that all content assets adhere to SEO best practices and can measure and track success.
Distribution
You can have a team of the most amazing fintech copywriters in the world, a stellar content calendar, the most amazing graphics the industry has ever seen — and it would all be useless if it’s not getting in front of the right eyes at the right time. The fact is that published content will go unviewed if an organization is not actively distributing content in the places where its target audience is most likely to see it. This means deploying assets across many different channels.
Distribution should focus on:
Fintech content hub: Create a fintech content hub (either on your website or on a microsite) that houses all of your content resources. The best content hubs make it super simple to find content, so consider how you will organize your hub (by content type, topics, or other means) so visitors can easily find information.
Promotion and amplification: Consider all the different channels and methods you’ll use to boost your content’s reach. This includes owned and earned channels like social media, your own site, guest posts, PR campaigns, and other efforts.
Lead generation and nurturing: Leverage your fintech copywriters’ expertise to create value-added content assets that tend to be long-form pieces filled with essential information. These assets can be gated and used to generate leads, which can then be nurtured through email campaigns and special promotions.
Email marketing: Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience. You can use newsletters, special campaigns, lead nurture drip sequences, and other types of email marketing to connect with your audience at key moments in the buyer’s journey.
Sales enablement: An often-overlooked component of content marketing is enabling the sales team. Arm your sales department with content that can help them do their jobs and build relationships with prospective customers. This is a great way to align marketing and sales efforts.
Results Measurement
Creating and distributing content should be followed by measuring results to see where you exceeded expectations and where things may need work. It’s important to track progress to ensure that content is achieving its intended goals.
Measure results by looking at:
Benchmarks: Once you have enough data around content marketing efforts, you can begin setting benchmarks and determining what the next set of goals should be. You can benchmark things like visitors, sessions, leads generated, or other meaningful metrics.
Analytics: Tap Google Analytics and any other analytics dashboards you may use to create personalized reports to help you visualize the success of your content marketing efforts.
Funnel attribution: The path to sales in B2B fintech can be winding and arduous, so you’ll want a documented way to tie leads back to content marketing efforts. This will help you make more data-driven decisions around content in the future.
ROI: Measuring ROI from content marketing is a great way to illustrate value to stakeholders and to grow a content marketing program. Look at ROI quarterly to see the value in your efforts.
Optimization
The only way to improve content marketing results over time is to focus on optimization. That means using data and insights to inform the choices you make in the future, including ways you can improve your content marketing efforts.
Optimization includes:
Performance analysis: Check-in on benchmarks regularly to assess areas ripe for optimization.
Audience analysis: Keep an eye on how your audience is reacting to, engaging with, and consuming your content. This helps you to identify any changes that need to be made to meet evolving audience preferences.
Insights on strategy: Use the analysis and insights garnered during results measurement to tap into new ideas for content creation and distribution. Identify new topics that your fintech copywriters can write about and discover new ways to promote content.
If you’re ready to boost awareness, generate new business, and delight your existing customers, you’re ready to embark on a content marketing journey. When done well, this is an endeavor with many different moving pieces. Remember, it’s about more than just bringing on fintech copywriters to whip up articles. You need to remain purposeful in your approach in order to realize ROI from your content marketing program. Following the guidelines above should ensure that your content marketing program is as effective as possible.
