How We Grew this Fintech’s Organic Blog Traffic by 1,619%
One of the main challenges when launching a new website for a new company is getting traction.
How do you get more people to visit your website? More people to learn about your product? More people to sign up to the waiting list? When the company, social media accounts and founders are new, it’s hard to get the word out there.
And that’s where content comes in. Getting your website ranking on Google is what puts your website on the map. It gets people’s attention, it gets people talking and it turns people into customers.
And that’s what we do at Mint Studios: we help Fintech companies turn their website into their section of the internet. Through a combination of Search Engine Optimisation, marketing, strategy and high quality content, we can get customers organically to your website. At Mint Studios, I am your outsourced content manager, writer and strategist all in one.
However, strategy can be an ambiguous word. What does the process look like? How do we do it? And what kind of results can you expect? I write a lot about how we do things at Mint Studios, and like to share how we work in public:
In this article, I break down how I created and produced a content strategy for a real client of mine as well as our results. I’ve worked with them for almost a year, and they have given me permission to turn the work we did together into a case study.
The Fintech Company: Minted
Minted is a B2C Fintech company based in London, UK. The concept behind their product is simple: buy your gold through an app. The concept is very much in line with the Fintech mentality: everyone should be able to have a bit of real gold in their portfolio, not just the wealthy. This is similar to what Robinhood did with the stock market, Monzo with current accounts and Transferwise with FX.
If you do a bit of research, you see that the gold dealer industry needs disrupting. Most gold dealers have hidden fees, require signed contracts, are incredibly expensive and ask for minimum commitments. Many don’t tell you this, but often when you buy gold with them, you don’t really own the gold. When you buy 10 grams, you’re just buying 1/100 of their 1kg gold block. So if you want that gold delivered, you’re going to have to pay “fabrication” fees to get it smelted down into a 10 gram bar of gold.
Minted is taking a completely different approach: fees are low, customers can start for as little as £30, no contract needs signing and most of all, they only buy bars of 10 grams. This means that once you own 10 grams worth of gold, you just need to pay for the shipping fee to get it delivered.
I started working with Minted in April of 2020 when they started looking for someone who could help them with content. The plan was: put Minted on Google and start getting organic customers on the waiting list.
Since then, we’ve grown their organic traffic by 1,619%, made Google their primary acquisition channel, doubled website conversions, and got the website ranking for 1,000+ global keywords in 6-8 months, all while competing with websites that have been on Google for more than 10 years.
Side note: it is important to note that we managed to get these high numbers in a short period of time because Minted was starting with a low amount of traffic and content. Websites with higher numbers will obviously take a lot longer.
Sadly, Minted is undergoing restructuring and has been bought by an investment company, so I will no longer be helping them with their content (although this does mean we are now accepting clients!).
The process of building a content strategy
This case study serves two purposes:
to explain to potential clients how I will create their content strategy,
to showcase how our strategy provides these results.
I am not able to share specific numbers, but I can share percentage increases and certain aspects of the strategy.
1. Questionnaire + marketing information
First of all, I send over a Mint Studios questionnaire asking for more information about your company’s goals, target audience, website competitors and details on your Tone of Voice (if you have one). I also ask for any marketing and branding material you might have that you can share with me. This allows me to understand the brand’s position even better, and ensure the content we produce is aligned with what has been planned beforehand.
2. Content competitive analysis and content audit
My next step is to analyse website competitors. It’s likely that you have already analysed product competitors, target audience, etc. But in this case, I’m talking about content competitors. This could be indirect competitors, bloggers, and anyone else who’s writing about similar topics as you.
Regarding Minted, the competitors are an interesting bunch. They’ve been in the industry for 10+ years, and act like incumbents. Their websites are overloaded with too much information (graphs, pop ups, you name it), their design looks like it’s from the 2005s and the user onboarding process is treacherous. Their content is mostly about current markets and news, which means they publish very often (almost once per day), but it’s not in-depth content and not very engaging.
Where am I even supposed to start?
Having said that, they are ranking for the best keywords such as “buy gold now” and “buy gold online” thanks to their huge domain authority. They get links from all the best online newspapers such as Moneyweek, The Guardian and the BBC. You’d think that competing against these websites would be very hard; but as you’ll see if you do a bit of searching, the quality of the content could be a lot higher (and they’re not working with Mint Studios 😉)
In this part of the content strategy, I do a lot of research. This is what sets Mint Studios apart from other writers or content agencies: we do thorough research. I sign up to the gold newsletters, watch the competitors videos, follow them on LinkedIn, read the reports, etc. This is how I am able to create content that you cannot find anywhere else (more on this below).
I also create an account with the competitors, check what’s working and what isn’t, read the reviews, etc. I then summarise my findings in some spreadsheets and finally in a plan. I also run their websites through a couple of SEO tools to see how they’re doing keyword-wise.
In terms of content audit, the Minted website at the time was very new and there was not much to audit. In general, I look at the strengths, the weaknesses, and what the opportunities are when it comes to the current state of the website.
3. Target market
Minted’s main USP is that the target market is different. The people we were targeting are consumers who want to manage their own money, keep a diversified portfolio, take better control of their finances. It’s a similar target market to Nutmeg, Moneyfarm, Monzo, etc: the generation of consumers who do not trust institutions, are sick of paying hidden fees and want apps that are user-friendly and intuitive to use.
We had a pretty good understanding of who the target market was, but I like to take this a step further and build an “ideal customer” framework. I go through an exercise for several “ideal customers”, which produces content ideas, a search framework and details on each one.
4. Content calendar and plan
This is the final part, where everything comes together: a calendar with title ideas and a plan.
Once I have the ideal customers, the audit, and an understanding of the competitors, it’s time to get a bit more technical and do some keyword research. I’ve detailed this process in the Fintech for SEO post, where I explain how I find keywords by using tools that analyse what competitors are ranking for, as well as researching topics on Quora, reddit and Googling as if I were the ideal customer.
I won’t go into the details, but this part of the process essentially entails a huge act of empathy: putting myself into customers’ shoes. That’s why I sign up to the newsletters, listen to the podcasts and follow the competitors on social media: what is the target market consuming? What problems do they need solving? What are the competitors missing out on? As you can imagine, this does take up a lot of work, which is why I do limit the number of clients we take on (for the time being).
I finally end up with a list of keywords that are worth targeting, and I then start creating content ideas following John Bonini’s search framework: Inspiration, Education, Execution. Inspiration is for ideas, Education is for help, Execution is to get something done. This helps create a ton of title ideas for keywords:
Once you have the ideas, all it takes is combining it with the ideal customers and creating ideas for every week.
Before you ask: no, not every single weekly post is targeting a keyword. There are many other types of posts we do too. Those include expert roundups (example: 7 Experts Tell Us Why Now is a Great Time to Buy Gold), resources post (example: 15 Resources to Learn More About Gold). Mint Studios is now officially expanding services and we’re including expert roundups, surveys and interviews within the content we produce - this allows us to increase the ROI of content even higher.
Once the calendar is done, all that needs to be done is to produce the content every week, track the metrics, and update and tweak the strategy as needed.
Updating and tweaking the content strategy
A content strategy is something that is ever evolving. As your product evolves, you learn more about your target market, what people want to read, and what is converting and what isn’t.
We track all the numbers using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and then once a month we look at the numbers, the content plan and the calendar, and see what’s working well and what isn’t. At Minted, our SEO strategy also evolved: we created pillar pages, we created a URL hierarchy, etc. We followed the copywriting tips I have covered on this blog before: interesting intros, engaging topics, CTAs, etc. Our highest performing articles were those that talked about gold being a safe haven, the tax implications of purchasing gold and details about how Minted worked.
Since Minted’s app wasn’t to be launched till early 2021, all we could do was post informational content, rather than product, team or transactional based content.
The results
Organic reach takes time; anyone who’s done SEO knows this. At the beginning, no one was visiting the Minted website. We had small reach, not much content on social media nor a newsletter. My advice usually is: when your website is small and no one is reading your content, focus on highly optimised, keyword targeted content - this means you’ll be publishing the SEO content first, which will give it a headstart on time to rank (time on Google is a big factor in search rankings). Once your customer base and following is higher, then it’s worth posting “advanced” content, such as expert interviews, original research, and parent pages.
As mentioned above, after 8 months of consistent posting, strategising and tweaking, Minted’s website had grown dramatically. Not only was traffic and conversions a lot higher, but the website was ranking for some invaluable keywords:
Why content for your Fintech?
Why content is such a good way to market a Fintech company? I’ve summarised three main reasons why content is such a good strategy for companies in today’s world, especially those working in Fintech.
1. Fintech is not corporate
One of the things that differentiates Fintech from institutions and incumbents is that we are disrupting an industry. As Katie, Curve’s creative director has mentioned before:
“Curve is here to disrupt the world of finance, so why wouldn't our tweets do the same?”
One of the main differentiators of Fintech is that it’s an industry that’s on the side of the small guy. The crowd. The retail investor. Instead of charging hidden fees and keeping users on hold for 30 minutes, we’re promoting financial education, using a tech-first mindset and putting the customer at the centre.
Publishing engaging content is at the heart of those three things I just listed. It can financially educate people, it can be distributed online, and by providing value we’re putting the customer at the centre. And that’s a huge differentiator from incumbents.
2. Content builds trust
Personally, I am more likely to trust a company that tries to educate and empower me, rather one that just “assumes” I know, or even worse, takes advantage of the fact that I don’t know. Publishing high quality content is an excellent way to communicate with customers and adds value. It’s one of the ways you build brand advocates: people who don’t just use your products, but also consume your content. Outside Fintech, a few examples of companies that do this well are:
Buffer
Beard Brand
Hubspot
Databox
3. Content grows organically
Finally, another big reason why it’s worth publishing content is that by ranking for certain keywords, you are effectively putting yourself in front of the largest acquisition channel in the world: Google.
Those who are searching online for solutions to their problems are more likely to convert into customers: they are actively searching and are often (although not always) ready to buy/download/sign up. This is different to TV ads or other non engaging marketing tactics, which are not hyper targeted and often are difficult to measure. With content, you can track practically everything on your website (while remaining GDPR compliant) which makes it a good way to gather instant feedback. Over time, your customer base grows organically as you rank for more keywords and publish more content.
Having said that, it does take time for results to come in, which is why many companies give up after a few months. Also, with SEO you can never guarantee anything: you don’t know when Google will launch a new update, when your competitor might butt in. That’s why content is a lot more than just ranking on Google: you want to be writing articles that are engaging and genuinely interesting to read. If we don’t get the article ranking on Google, then at least can use it for something else!
If you are a Fintech that is looking to get serious about content as a customer acquisition and retention channel, I can help you. My current services include one-off articles or a “self-service” comprehensive content strategy. Contact me or shoot me an email at araminta@mintcopywritingstudios.com to find out more. 😉