Why Content Marketing is a Regtech's Best Acquisition Channel

Content marketing is the ideal marketing activity for the regulatory technology (regtech) industry.

A big reason is that a regtech company’s target audience is compliance professionals whose roles heavily rely on staying updated with news, the latest regulations and laws. This makes them avid consumers of content.

If you work for a regtech company and target compliance professionals, creating expert-based content that helps them do their job better and is easily discoverable during their research is an essential part of your marketing strategy.

As we’ll see, creating the right type of content is as important as making it easily discoverable. If your content is not easy to find, your potential customers won’t read it and many of your efforts will be wasted.

In this article, we’re going to break down why regtech companies should be investing in content marketing and SEO, and use ComplyAdvantage (with whom we did a case study on their content) and our client fscom as a great example of what this looks like in practice.

Note: join our newsletter to get updates every time we publish new content!

The three factors that make content marketing an ideal acquisition channel for regtech

1. Regtech is complex and constantly evolving, therefore requiring compliance professionals to consistently research and consume content

The fintech industry is complex, but we’d argue that regtech is even more so because the “rules of the game” are constantly changing. Governments and agencies are regularly issuing new laws with long and complex documentation on how to follow them. This makes it difficult for compliance professionals to stay on top of new regulations and ensure their company remains compliant.

As an example, in 2023, Congress passed 27 bills and federal agencies issued 3,018 rules – and that’s on the low side. That same year, the fines for non-compliance by a few fintech companies globally reached over $10 billion.

So yes, the stakes are high. And not only that, but new laws are being passed every year and the rules are not exactly easy to follow. Documentation is often thousands of pages. For example, the new Open Banking Rule in the US last year was 594 pages, 38 of those pages alone were regulatory text.

99% of a compliance lead's job is ensuring their company adheres to the rules, and much of this is spent on research. This means compliance leads will likely follow certain publications, be part of a strong network offering mutual guidance, and will know where to find the information needed on the latest compliance developments. This includes Google – and therein lies the opportunity for content marketing.

2. Compliance professionals are doing research on Google, providing a clear channel to reach them

As a customer acquisition channel, Google doesn’t work for every company. For example, we've found that fintech companies targeting certain enterprise companies, financial advisors, or banks, struggle to generate leads via this channel. This is because these personas often prefer to rely on their network rather than online research.

But this is clearly not the case for regtech. The heads of compliance you're targeting will still need to understand all the various laws and regulations, no matter the size of their company or the nature of their business. Whether it's the new EU AI Act, the Open Banking Rule or operational resilience, your target audience consults peers, attends conferences and does research online, especially on Google.

This is important to understand because Google is also the only channel where you can target people based on their intent – even if they’ve never heard of your company – making it ideal for capturing new business.

With Facebook and LinkedIn content, you’re targeting someone who is “scrolling” and therefore not actively looking for a solution. Instead, with Google, you can target someone right when they are looking for a solution and researching regtech keywords, like “best transaction monitoring software”. This makes Google one of the best growth and brand awareness channels for regtechs.

Since we’re sure the regtech industry's target customers are doing research on a channel which allows you to target based on intent – Google – there is a huge opportunity here, whether it’s through Google Ads, organic search or both.

3. There’s a clear way to stand out: precise, accurate, high-quality content

Finally, the third factor that makes content marketing an ideal channel for regtechs is that there is a clear way to stand out.

Many regtech companies opt for AI-generated or surface-level content because they don’t want to invest the resources into creating the right type of content (this happens across all industries, not just regtech). However, in an industry as high-stakes and complex as regtech, AI-generated content simply doesn’t meet the mark for compliance professionals conducting thorough research.

For instance, a compliance professional researching operational resilience isn’t looking for generic information—they need in-depth, expert insights tailored to their specific context, such as how resilience frameworks apply to the company they work for, complete with real-world examples and updated information about the regulation. They’re searching for content that genuinely helps them navigate their challenges.

Accuracy is another critical factor. Compliance professionals can’t afford to rely on information that might be incorrect or misleading, as the nature of their work demands precision. AI-generated content carries an inherent risk of inaccuracies, which can severely undermine trust.

Publishing inaccurate or poorly written content not only wastes effort but can also damage a regtech company’s reputation. If a compliance professional encounters content that feels hastily written by AI, is riddled with errors, or lacks depth, they’ll likely question the company’s expertise and, by extension, the reliability of its products.

In the world of regtech, an unreliable product isn’t just a gamble – it’s a liability that could result in millions of dollars in fines, a risk no professional is willing to take.

The downside here is: you cannot cut corners and mass create AI generated content to target your ICP on Google. Content marketing is not a quick and easy channel.

The upside here is: the opportunity to stand out. Most regtech companies won’t invest the necessary effort to create high-quality, accurate, and useful content – and this is where your company can gain a competitive edge.

For example, content that starts with generic statements won’t help your company stand out. Take the sample of text below. This is written by a regtech company that is targeting compliance professionals at financial institutions.

These are some of the most sophisticated compliance professionals, and yet the content reads like cotton candy at a carnival: it looks impressive at first glance, but the moment you bite into it, there’s nothing substantial to satisfy your hunger. It dissolves quickly, leaving you wishing for something real and filling.

The first sentence “marketing and selling financial products is a highly regulated activity” is such a banal statement that the compliance professional will move on, believing this is written for someone else.

It’s only the companies that truly invest in high-quality content, based on expert knowledge and that actually answers the compliance leaders’ questions that will build trust with their prospects and customers.

This demonstrates why regtech and content marketing are a match made in heaven:

A target audience that is hungry for content and does a lot of research online
A channel that perfectly allows you to target people when they are in need and ready to buy your solution
An industry where most of the content is subpar, allowing high quality content to stand out.

So, let’s say you work for a regtech company and want to get started. How do you get the best results with content marketing?

How to acquire customers with regtech content

If you’re new to Mint Studios, it’s important to first understand how we think about content. We’re a content marketing agency that specialises in the fintech and financial services industry with a focus on generating leads via content.

To get the best business results (leads, sales), we advocate for starting your content marketing with Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) content. This is content that targets people who are already aware they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution.

Why? Whereas most marketers will start with Top of the Funnel and focus on traffic as a success metric, we advocate for first targeting people who are soon going to convert, and then working your way up the funnel.

Our argument is that if you’re going to create blog content or content, why not get it to contribute to growth? Once you start getting results and have exhausted all the BOFU topics (the low hanging fruit, per se), then you can work your way up the funnel.

You can read more about this approach here: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?

We advocate doing the same for regtech content. Start your content programme by first targeting people who already know they have a problem and are actively looking for it. Here’s our four-step process:

1. Research the topics that indicate someone is close to converting

The first step is understanding which topics indicate a compliance officer would be searching for your product or service. As mentioned above, you want to start by creating content that targets prospects who are already close to converting, and then work your way up.

For example, you could begin by targeting someone researching “top transaction monitoring solutions”. Later on you can write articles like “The future of transaction monitoring” that are more “TOFU”.

Typically, there are 5 different types of BOFU content:

Pricing, costs and money
Problems and pain points
Comparisons
“Best in X” lists
Founding stories

Our favourite way to uncover BOFU topics is to interview the people on a company’s team who are talking to customers every day: the salespeople.

If you do this, you can ask them questions like:

Who are our best customers?
What are their pain points?
What are you usually compared to? What are the alternatives?
What are the most common use cases for using the product?
What was the last prospect/company that you had a really easy time closing? What type of prospects are the ones that are the easiest to close?

Based on those questions, you can come up with a list of ideas (and some keyword research) to see what to rank for. This is a good place to understand which content you should be prioritising. We go into more detail about how to do this type of research here: How to Do Research for Bottom of the Funnel Content Marketing.

As an example, we’re going to take the regtech ComplyAdvantage, an AI-driven fraud and AML risk detection software company. After attending a workshop hosted by Mint Studios, Director of Content and Communications, Will Thompson, started investing in BOFU content.

We don’t know the intricacies of how Will did his research, but it’s likely that Will either talked to some salespeople or already knew some topics that their target customer was researching when they were close to converting, such as:

AML transaction monitoring
AML software for banks
Payment screening
Sanctions screening software

2. Use Google Ads to test keywords and get results sooner

Google Ads, SEO and content are all targeting the same kind of person: someone doing research online.

The Google search results page is also changing, with more real estate given to Google Ads than ever before. That’s why we believe in both PPC and SEO teams working closely together to make the most of Google as a channel.

If you’re running Google Ad campaigns, you can bid on some of the keywords you’ve uncovered in the first step and test with some landing pages. If you’re getting more clicks, leads and deals from certain keywords, then this can help you prioritise which topics to start creating content from.

Early on, paid ads will contribute the most to the number of leads every month, but as you publish more content that’s targeting the right type of keywords, content marketing and SEO will become the dominant channel.

Learn more about how to do this here: Google Ads Framework

With fscom, a compliance consultancy that specialises in the financial services sector, we were running both Google Ads and creating content. We saw that specific regulations or types of audits seemed to bring in the highest quality leads, so we set out to create content targeting those keywords as well. To protect our client, we can’t share the actual keywords we targeted, but we’ll share examples of the content down below.

3. Create content based on interviews and written for the level of the reader

Once you’ve identified BOFU topics to target, it’s time to create the content. As mentioned earlier, compliance is an industry where making mistakes is costly, and you are targeting well-educated people who are highly skilled at their jobs. It’s also important to remember that you’re targeting someone who is close to converting, so it’s doubly important to ensure you are giving them the information they need by writing at their level of knowledge.

A mistake a lot of companies make is to outsource their content to a generalist freelance writer. Although the writer will do some research, it’s often not enough to create content at the level of depth that you need to. Ideally, you want an in-depth process that involves the writer having a deep understanding of the ideal customer, the product and wider industry.

We’ve found that the best way to do this is to involve the experts. There are two ways you can approach this:

Ask your experts to create the content
Ask writers to create content based on interviews with experts

The experts are likely to be very busy, and it can be very hard to get their time. It’s why we typically go for the second option, which is to base content on interviews with experts. This allows us to create content that is a lot more in-depth, go into detail about the product and build trust with the right type of prospects.

See how ComplyAdvantage wrote their articles, which are clearly written for an expert:

As you can see in these articles, they don’t start off the article with “What is sanctions screening software”. They know that someone comparing different types of software already knows what this software is and wants a comparison of all the different tools. This is what it means to write for the level of knowledge for your reader.

You can also see an article we wrote for fscom that goes into detail about operational resilience. No other article ranking for this keyword is as in-depth as this one, which is why it is currently ranking in the first position after the FCA website for “FCA operational resilience”. We were only able to go into so much depth because the article was based on a 1h interview with an internal expert:

FCA operational resilience: What you need to know and how to implement it

4. Track and report business results from content

All this effort of creating content to generate leads can be for nothing if you can’t track what type of content is performing best. Understanding which topics bring in the highest quality leads is key to creating a content strategy that helps with growth.

Whereas many content marketers use traffic and rankings as a way to measure results, we advocate for measuring business results: leads, lead quality, deals and deal value. This is because an increase in traffic does not always equal an increase in leads. The best way to understand the impact of your content programme is to track the numbers that matter: customers.

HubSpot is our favourite tool for this, and with the free version you can already do a lot. With HubSpot, you can track:

First click attribution: people who discovered your content by researching on Google, reading your blog and converting (the blog was the “first” touch).
Last click attribution: people entered your website through another page such as a product page, found your blog and then converted (the blog was the “last” touch).

You can see the whole journey a lead goes through on your website—which blog post they first landed on, and whether that contact became a deal or not (and how much the deal was worth).

*Example dashboard that allows us to report on deal value of leads that discovered our client via blog articles ranking on Google*

Unfortunately, HubSpot doesn’t make it easy to set up those reports, so we’ve created a guide on how to do that here: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 6 HubSpot Reports]

In our interview with ComplyAdvantage, Will shares how they track the results of their content and show the value content brings to the rest of the team:

“Tracking is mainly done via Dreamdata, an analytics tool that allows companies to aggregate information from Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and HubSpot.

Since sales cycles are very long, [ComplyAdvantage] mainly track influenced revenue from content, which is then broken down into two stages:

A business development meeting
A business opportunity

One of the biggest advantages of tracking results from content is that everyone immediately sees the value of content.

Whenever a new contact books a meeting, a company-wide Slack channel gets a notification which includes the lead details and lead source. The sales and leadership team are notified when new leads come in from content and organic, and it really helps improve visibility of the contribution of content to the company.

Via Dreamdata, the content team can also see how people bounce around the homepage, a product page, download a white paper, may disappear for a few months, and then book a demo. This is instrumental to getting a good understanding of how prospects interact with their content, and it’s also a great way to show leadership the role of content in a sales journey.

This visibility on the customer journey and leads from content has enabled a strong relationship between marketing and sales. Both teams understand that it’s more complex than simply “inbound and outbound”. Content sometimes influences outbound deals, and sales sometimes influences inbound deals. Both are essential to customer acquisition. This really goes to show how powerful visibility can be to keeping various teams on the same page.”

In regtech? Make sure you’re creating expert-based, accurate content that is discoverable via Google

Content is more than just random business musings on a blog.

When done well, content can be a key contributor to growth as well as to building trust with prospects and customers.

But to do that well, you need a strategy that ensures your content gets in front of the right people and actually answers their questions. We would argue that Google is the best distribution channel at the moment for regtech companies (although this could change in the future).

As the regtech industry grows in relevance and more AI content floods the internet, creating high-quality, trustworthy content that is relevant will be more important than ever. This is your opportunity to stand out and enable content marketing to be part of growth.

If you’re unsure whether content marketing and SEO is for you, book a 2 week Diagnostic where we dive into your HubSpot and SEO data to answer three key questions:

What is and is not working across your SEO, content and Google Ads?
What is the opportunity across SEO, content and Google Ads?
How can we execute on that opportunity?

Learn more about our diagnostics here: The Diagnostic: How This 2 Week Project Will Help You Get a Better Understanding of Your Digital Marketing

Learn more about what we do

Why Content Marketing and SEO is a Regtech's Best Acquisition Channel