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Your target fintech audience is a hungry beast for quality content. Insatiable for more, new, different types of content and innovative takes on the current fintech landscape, it’ll gnash its terrible teeth and roar its terrible roar until it can devour another blog post or white paper or social channel, never satisfied with yesterday’s material: always hungry for more. So how do you both keep up with the beast’s appetite and also distinguish your company’s content from all the other fintech content being consumed?
One vital ingredient in your pantry of fintech marketing materials is thought leadership. Fintech thought leadership pieces are crucial to earning your company a seat at the table with all the movers and shakers driving the conversation. You want your business to be considered a leader – not a follower, indistinguishable from the masses – so that potential customers see you as knowledgeable and trustworthy. So keep reading to learn how you can feed the beast from a seat at table 1 as we answer the question: what is fintech thought leadership?
Think Original Thinks
A primary distinction between generic fintech content and thought leadership is the novelty of the idea being expressed. To compare it with academia, it’s the difference between teaching a scholarly essay to your students versus being the author of it: regurgitating long-held beliefs versus challenging them or presenting them from a new angle.
Upon the ever-shifting sand of the still-youthful fintech landscape, productive content creators have quite a lot of fodder out of which to craft insightful thought leadership. So think those original thinks and you’ll start building your reputation as a trusted voice in the space.
SME? Yeah, You Know Me
In order to write compelling thought leadership pieces, you must establish yourself as an SME (subject matter expert). Authoritative writing convinces your audience that you know what the heck is up, which breeds trust. And trust is necessary to establish if you want to convert your merely curious audience into a potential customer.
Don’t use expressions like “I think” and certainly never “I feel” in your writing as those expressions are thought leadership kryptonite. No SME “feels” that a certain thing is true in the fintech world. No, no. They know it is so. So position yourself as a confident SME within every piece of content you create, but especially your thought leadership pieces, and you’ll be that much more likely to move your audience further down the funnel.
Don’t Be Afraid to Disagree
This is key. A true SME has no problem disagreeing with other SMEs out there, especially when their argument is backed by concrete expertise. Your fintech thought leadership should reflect your stance on a given issue without compromise or it should express how your product or service better delivers on a promise than the competition.
Write about a currently established norm that you have a slightly different take on or upend a norm altogether! That’s a great way to set yourself apart from the other veggies in the crisper. Just make sure you have the data and credentials to back up your statements when challenged – because if you’re disagreeing with established norms, you will most likely be challenged. Otherwise, the thought leadership piece will do the opposite of its intended purpose: create skepticism rather than trust.
Create Your Own Table
Having a seat at the table is great, but building your own table is better. With your own table, others can gather around you. Creating a table also enables you to build a gander of great content creators who can share and promote each other’s content.
The authority of fintech thought leadership is only as potent as the attention it gets. So a supremely important element of thought leadership is visibility, and often that can be bolstered by a strong network of fellow SMEs.
Speak Your Audience’s Language
As much as it can help you to cross-pollinate with other SMEs, you want to make sure the content you’re creating and promoting is relevant to your target audience. A compelling piece of fintech thought leadership should speak directly to the intended audience about a subject that matters to them.
Thought leadership builds trust with your audience, but only if you’re speaking to their needs, questions, concerns, and pain points. If you don’t know how to talk to your audience, why should they ever believe you have a solution that might solve their biggest problems? This underscores the idea that you need to know precisely who your target audience is, their pain points, and how your product or service solves for those pains. Relevant fintech thought leadership should inspire your audience to action.
Those are the primary elements of effective fintech thought leadership. You can feed the beast with many different types of content, but thought leadership plays a critical role in building trust and positioning you as someone who knows what they’re talking about. So think some thinks, put on your authority hat, and create some content that pushes the needle in an innovative direction. And whether you take a seat at the table or build your own, do it with some gusto.
