Financial Services Marketing: How to Get Real Results with Content Marketing

Marketing in the financial services industry is unlike other industries. That’s because:

Your product and niche might be complex, which means education plays an important role.
You’ll have to adhere to regulations, limiting what you can do marketing-wise.
You need to be trusted and seen as an expert in order to acquire customers, which means trust is your ultimate priority.

Because of these three factors – education, compliance and trust – financial services marketing relies even more on marketing channels that help with these three.

One marketing channel that successfully meets these three is content marketing: using written, video or audio content to educate potential customers on your industry, and eventually, on your product.

Because of the huge impact content marketing can have on financial service marketing, we’ll be focusing only on content marketing in this article – specifically, written content marketing, as that is where our experience and expertise lies.

We’ll be covering:

The common mistakes marketers make with content marketing
How to get real results with financial services content marketing
Examples of financial services providers that have done great content

Let’s get started!

The common mistakes financial marketers make with content marketing

In other articles we’ve gone into a lot of detail about the common mistakes marketers make when it comes to content marketing. Briefly, those are:

Not investing enough time into understanding who your ideal customer is and therefore how to target them
Creating content for beginners, rather than for their ideal customer (especially important in B2B)
Creating content that is based on regurgitated Google content, and therefore doesn’t add any value.
Not tracking sales-related metrics.

To go in more detail, we recommend reading this article: The Content Tower of Pisa: Why Fintech Content Programmes Fail

How to get real results with financial services content marketing

One of the biggest issues we see with content marketing is that companies believe that content is a “nice-to-have” and something that helps with brand building.

But that’s not always the case. When done right, content marketing can directly lead to sales, an increase in the lead to close conversion rate and an increase in the quality of leads. That’s how we’ve helped B2B companies like Zai generate deals worth $200k+, and companies like Parpera make their blog the most cost-effective acquisition channel.

The strategy is straightforward, but not easy: take the time to understand who your best customers are and what their pain points are, and write advanced, expert-based content for them.

Here’s what we mean:

1. Invest time into understanding who your ideal customer is and what their pain points are

You won’t be able to generate good content ideas by getting a few colleagues together and brainstorming.

In fact, based on our experience very few marketers have a repeatable and reliable method to come up with content ideas that their target market will actually read and that will help meet KPIs.

It usually ends up being a guessing game. And that’s how you end up with content that falls flat, that no one reads and ends up being a waste of money. Usually something that looks like this:

To avoid creating content that you know no one will read, it’s super important to invest time into understanding who your best customer is.

Before publishing or executing any content, you want to take the time to understand who your best customers are. Those are the customers who:

Bring the most revenue
Stay with you the longest
Require the least amount of support

Then, you want to understand what their pain points are and challenges.

In order to uncover this, we spend time interviewing salespeople and customer facing employees. In these interviews, we dig deep into pain points, challenges. We ask questions like:

Who are your best customers?
What are their pain points and challenges?
What are the most common use cases for using your product?
What do prospects compare you to?

Learn more about our methodology here: How to Do Research for Bottom of the Funnel Content Marketing

When you invest the time into understanding who your best customers are and how they do research online, it’s a lot easier to create a content strategy and write for them.

However, ranking on Google or reaching them with your content is just half the battle. You also need content that keeps them wanting to learn more about you.

2. Write for their level of expertise

Another big mistakes we see companies make is creating content for the wrong audience. For example, a fintech company that targets financial advisors will start off their content with “What is financial advice?”. What happens here is that they’re writing content for beginners, when their best customers are experts in their field.

If you’ve done the first step of the process and spent time understanding who your best customer is, then it’s a lot easier to do the second step: write for them specifically.

When we start a content strategy, we like to start with those who are closest to buying first, and then work our way up the funnel. That way you get results earlier on and you’re able to test what topics your market enjoys reading and what converts them.

A lot of those prospects who are at the bottom of the funnel will be experts in their industry: think of the Head of Payments who already knows how payments works: they’re looking for a specific API.

If you know who your best customer is and are successfully targeting them, but then start your article with “What is a payment?”, you’ll immediately lose them.

That’s why it often makes more sense to start with the more technical and advanced content, and then do more top of the funnel content.

Learn more about BOFU content: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?

3. Base your content on interviews

In the financial services space, trust is even more important than in other industries. When you’re managing other people’s money, they need to trust you.

That’s why expertise is the holy grail, and why it should be central to your new marketing strategy.

And it’s also why you want to ideally aim to be a thought leader in the space and demonstrate expertise.

If you’re a marketer, in most cases you won’t be an expert on the topic your company specialises in. Even if you are, there are likely to be people on your team who know a lot more and could talk about the topic for hours.

That’s why we like to base 90% of our content on interviews with experts. When you’re targeting your best customers, they don’t want to read another regurgitated article on “what is the future of payments?”. They are interesting in hearing a unique point of view, something that adds genuinely to the conversation.

By basing your content on interviews with your internal experts:

You can go into a lot of detail about the financial product
You stand out as a subject matter expert
You can write more advanced content

Read more about our thoughts on this topic: Why You Should Create Content Based on Interviews With Experts

4. Track your results

Finally, all of this is for nothing if you cannot measure what does and does not work.

A lot of content marketers don’t track sales-related metrics for content, because they believe that content is for brand awareness and that the buyer’s journey cannot be tracked.

They’re right: however, that doesn’t mean you can’t track as much as you can. There are many tools, such as Hubspot and Google Analytics, that allow you to track conversions coming via the website with SEO.

It’s very important to track, because then you can prove the business value of your content marketing efforts to your higher ups. You can also see which topics your most valuable customers read.

By tracking who’s reading our content, we can see the size of the deals our content has helped bring in:

This type of information helps direct your marketing strategy, but also helps prove the business results of your marketing team efforts – and what manager doesn’t like that?

How to deal with compliance

As we mentioned in the introduction, dealing with compliance as a financial services marketer means you have to be careful with what you publish and write. It also means that you might not be able to engage in certain digital marketing channels; e.g. you might not be able to run Google Ads or PPC campaigns if you’re a crypto company in Singapore.

The great thing with content is that it’s a channel that you own. You can’t run ads for the keyphrase “how to buy Bitcoin”, but you can write a (compliant) article that ranks on the first page of Google for it.

Since it’s an owned channel, you have a lot more control over what happens to the content, how you distribute it and the results.

However, you still have to make sure your content is actually compliant. We’ve written some tips based on contributions of other fintech marketers on the best ways to deal with compliance when working for a financial institution or at a fintech startup:

How to Navigate Compliance and Content Creation as a Fintech Marketer

Examples of financial services doing great marketing

What are some examples of financial services companies doing great content marketing? Whenever we ask a room full of financial marketers, we don’t get many responses. That’s because it’s hard to find – and it’s why there is such a huge opportunity for content marketing in the payments industry.

Here are three examples of financial services sector companies we think are doing a good job with their content:

Argyle: technical and in-depth

Argyle is a B2B fintech company that provides a single global access point to employment data. They provide the worker with a single overview of all their employment history and therefore allow businesses to examine a worker based on multiple income sources.

Most payment companies will publish high level content that doesn’t dig deep, like “Top 10 ways to improve your payment processing”. However, Argyle is a company that does a great job with content. If you head to their blog and case studies, you’ll find advanced content for an advanced target audience.

Their financial services marketing strategy is based on the conversations they have with their customers. Every month, the team shares the topics they’ve had with prospects and customers, and pick the topics that are the most relevant. They then distribute their content via email marketing, social media marketing and SEO.

You can learn more about their approach in our podcast conversation with Eva Sasson, Head of Marketing at Argyle.

Tilled: LinkedIn content that is transparent and authoritative

Caleb, Tilled’s founder, started creating content and marketing Tilled a full 12 months before launching the product.

His strategy: a ghostwriter would interview him every week asking him what questions he was hearing from prospects and trends in the market. They would then publish content on their blog as well as Caleb’s personal LinkedIn and on social media.

Publishing educational, transparent content helped position Tilled as a leader in the payment facilitator market, and quickly helped bring them leads and customers. The results from their content efforts are pretty incredible:

Since founding Tilled, Caleb tells us their lead flow is over 54% inbound organic.
Their close rate is a mind boggling 59%.
To date, there are currently 63 people on the team, and they haven’t spent a single penny on recruiters. In fact, their average time to hire is 27 days.

Wise: B2C company fintech content that targets competitors

Wise is a great example of a B2C financial services company effectively using content marketing to target their best customers in places that no one else would think of.

Essentially, they’re targeting keywords where prospects are looking up how to open or close an account with their competitors. Here are title of the articles:

How to close your ING Australia Bank account
How to close your UBank account
How to open a bank account with Westpac
St. George Bank international transfer: Fees, rates and transfer time

A traditional marketer might first think this is crazy: they’re giving the spotlight to competitors! But a content marketer can see further.

Someone who is typing “how to close a UBank account” is likely to be someone who’s ready to start using Wise: they’re maybe changing bank accounts and are looking for other options. That’s someone who’s ready to convert and is at the Bottom of the Funnel.

Second of all, by writing an article that answers the readers intent, Wise is owning the narrative. Wise gets to include their own product in the article (without being overly salesy and spammy). When someone is searching for how to open an account with Westpac, they are reading on Wise’s website. That’s a lot better for Wise, isn’t it?

Targeting competitor keywords is a great strategy that will get you incredible results with content marketing.

You can read more about this tactic here: Why You Should Write About Your Competitors as a Fintech Compan

We hope these tips are useful. Essentially, when it comes to fintech marketing, content marketing should play a large role in your marketing campaigns. It’ll help educate your customers and prospects, it’s an owned channel that you can keep compliant and it’ll help build trust.

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