How Fintech Companies Do Content: Using Content as a Compass for Pleo’s Marketing
Pleo is one of Europe’s cherished unicorn startups. Started in 2015, the company has raised $430 million to date, has over 900 employees and has a valuation of $4.7 billion valuation.
Pleo is a business spend management platform which allows companies to centralize their business spending for complete financial efficiency, helping them to balance their books effortlessly. Today, over 37,000 companies use Pleo across 16 European countries.
From a marketing perspective, what really stands out about Pleo is their unique branding and marketing. Every ad, video and piece content their team puts out follows a highly aesthetically pleasing and playful design element.
This is also consistent in their content. Not only is it well written and covers key topics (and includes beautiful designs), but if you search for any expense management related term on Google, you’ll see Pleo in the search results. As we’ll see, content plays a big role in leading and setting the direction for the rest of the marketing team and ensuring consistency across ads, long form content and video.
We wanted to learn more about Pleo’s approach to content, so we sat down with their Head of Brand and Content Marketing, Alejandro Salse Batán, to learn more about how Pleo thinks about content, what their operations look like and what kind of results they’re getting from their content.
You can listen / watch my interview with Alejandro here:
Note: Every couple of months throughout 2024 we’ll be releasing a new case study on how a financial services or fintech company does content. Join our newsletter to make sure you get each issue in your inbox!
A bit about Pleo’s backstory
Pleo was founded by Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra in Copenhagen in 2015. They were both employees at Silicon Valley start-up Tradeshift where they experienced first-hand the pains of expense management.
Even back when Jeppe was a boy, he remembers how painful and time-consuming it was to match old receipts with current transactions when he was earning pocket-money for his father’s accounting business.
Fast forward a few decades, and as the CFO of Tradeshift, Jeppe was again experiencing a situation where people were drowning in receipts and expense reports. At Tradeshift, Jeppe and Niccolo decided to hand out business debit cards to everyone to manage expenses. It worked: employees felt more empowered and independent. But on the back-end it was still very complex and time-consuming to set up and manage. The duo knew they had to reinvent the whole system and create software to solve that problem: and so Pleo was born.
The mission of Pleo is “To make spend management surprisingly effective and empowering”, and as Jeppe says in an interview with EU Startups, the Pleo team like to say that “Pleo turns CFOs into heroes”. Instead of chasing people for receipts, they can become the CFO that helps grow the company.
Today, people admire the Pleo product because of how simple it is to use compared to other expense solutions. You just need the Pleo card, a smartphone and the Pleo app to manage the expenses of a company. The simplicity of the product and the size of the problem it solves have been fundamental to Pleo’s success, which is used by 37,000 companies and includes Trade Republic, Too Good To Go, HelloFresh and Blinkist as customers.
Content plays a key role in helping potential users discover the product, while also educating and helping CFOs feel more in control of the company’s finances.
Why the content team is described as “the marketing team’s ‘compass’”
Pleo’s content team is just two years old, and is made up of one Content Lead and two copywriters, as well as a network of agencies and freelancers. Also, they have recently added two videographers. The main role of the content team, as how Alejandro describes it, is to:
Understand the main “narratives” of the company (we’ll get into what narratives are later)
Translate those narratives into different topics or themes
Oversee the development and execution of content assets
To do that well, the content team is the one often setting the key themes the company will focus on and building the “one source of truth” content marketing plan that everyone can refer to and rely on for direction – hence why they are described as the “compass”.
But to understand the role of the content team today, it’s important to get context on how the team was set up previously. A few years ago, the marketing team was very disjointed. There would often be situations where the blog, events and press releases all had different messaging and focused on different themes. The team was also more reactive than proactive.
So two years ago, the team went through a revamp. The goal of the revamp was for the content team to move away from being reactive to proactive, and to put together a content strategy that would help set the direction of the 50 person marketing team.
Two years later, and the content team puts together a content marketing strategy and plan in a way that can provide direction to anyone on the marketing team. For example, if a field marketer needs some ideas for a booth at a conference, they can go to the content plan and get inspiration from there. As Alejandro says:
“No matter what team you’re in, if you are looking for inspiration for the next marketing campaign that you are organizing at demand gen level or field marketing level, everything should be answered in the content strategy.”
The content strategy holds all the information: who to target, what to communicate, how to communicate, and when – it’s all included. Whether a team member needs content, an email nurture flow, slide deck, whatever it is, they can find more information in the content strategy.
So how does Pleo manage and set their content strategy?
What does putting together a Pleo content strategy look like?
At the beginning of every year, Pleo sets the main pillars for their content strategy. There’s the static and dynamic part. What remains static is:
The primary and secondary personas they want to target that year
The primary and secondary channels they’ll be using to target those personas
What’s more dynamic is:
Narratives and content topics
The process for determining all these is as follows: Every year, the team will start off by deciding on the 3 - 4 “Narratives” they want to focus on for the year. What they call a Narrative is a broad thematic area where they want to build a presence and be seen as an actor that is helping and educating. For example, these could be “AI and Finance” or “The role of the CFO”.
How do they decide on the Narratives? They first start off by identifying the particular pain points of the persona. For example, for a CFO, managing cash flow effectively is a key pain point. For someone on the leadership team, it may be understanding how to best use AI to improve operations in their company.
Once the Narratives have been decided, a quarterly calendar is put in place that will follow those 3 - 4 thematic areas. Based on those Narratives, it’s then a lot easier to decide on the channels they want to focus on. For example, for the topic of “Managing cash flow”, they may focus on long form blog articles. For the topic of “AI and Finance”, they may decide a report distributed via email is a better approach.
Although the static elements and the narratives are set at the beginning of the year, the calendar changes regularly and is set every quarter. During those quarterly sessions, the content team plans the main content pieces and anchor assets to distribute per channel. Those reviews also allow space for any last minute delays, or if something needs to be changed due to low performance.
How does the content team avoid becoming “order-takers”?
Anyone who’s worked in content or even marketing knows that it’s very easy for marketing teams to become purely executional and essentially order-takers. It’s great to have a grand content strategy you want to follow, but that all disappears if you spend your whole time handling tickets.
The Pleo team have been very conscious of this and have put guardrails in place to stop this from happening.
There are two main ways Pleo ensures the content team continues to be strategic:
1. Maintain strict control of the team’s capacity
Every week, the content team has an allocated time set aside to handle requests. They usually do it by tracking hours: if they know how long a particular project will take, they’ll translate it into hours and then assign how many hours a particular ticket should take.
And when that capacity is hit, no more requests can be sent till the next week. The content team says clearly to the request “that’s enough, we have no more capacity”. In certain cases, external agencies and freelancers will help with additional requests.
2. Create as much evergreen content as possible
Over the years, the content team has worked hard to create a bank of evergreen content that really understands what the company wants to communicate and touches on the key pain points of the audience.
By being proactive and preparing content pieces in advance, the team has managed to reduce by a high margin the number of requests. If, for example, Pleo launches a new set of features that solve a pain point for a specific persona, the content team will then craft the strategy to communicate this at the right stages of the funnel and create those assets.
When a demand gen or field marketer comes asking for content, the content team is usually already prepared, with a landing page, an infographic, or an eBook for customers.
This has been a big success, and Alejandro shared that more than 50% of the tickets they get already have a piece of content that covers what is requested.
However, he does say that this approach really only works if content marketers are already strongly aligned with what the organization is doing and what it needs. If the marketing and sales teams are siloed, then this is impossible. Which leads us onto our next topic…
How does the content team remain aligned with the rest of the company? With an “editorial council”
“Stories don’t come to you, you have to search for them”
Alejandro, who is a former journalist, says this is also true for content marketing: in order for the content team to add value and bring something to the table, they have to be proactive.
Previous to the revamp of the content team two years ago, the content team would usually play things by ear and their calendar was often based on guesses and inaccurate assumptions. This often led to the misalignment we mentioned earlier where the messaging would vary widely by communication channel.
To overcome this, the marketing team created an editorial council. The council is a committee composed of 8 to 10 people, who meet for 2 hours once per month. The team members include people from:
Product
Sales
User research
Product marketing
PR
External Subject Matter Experts (sometimes)
The content marketing team moderates the meeting where the agenda usually includes:
What content the content team is currently working on
Types of content they are currently missing
Ideas for future content pieces
Other ideas to implement
To mitigate any chaos during the meeting, the content team asks every attendee to do a bit of homework. Before the call, each member has to come with a 5 - 10 minute presentation which includes:
What is it you’re currently working on
What kind of content you’d like to see more of
Examples of content that you’ve seen that you thought was a great idea
For the first 30 to 45 minutes of the meeting, people present what’s on their mind. This then naturally triggers conversation, which often uncovers some interesting topics and ideas for the content teams.
The biggest benefit of this council is how much it helps with alignment. Alejandro says this recurring meeting has been key to ensuring messaging and content are consistent across channels, that the content topics they focus on are relevant to the audience and that they can create the right type of evergreen content.
It’s also one of the main inputs the content team uses to put together their content strategy and calendar, since they’re able to get frequent feedback from the sales team of what topics and issues prospects are thinking about.
Read about Adyen’s content: How Financial (Technology) Companies Do Content: Adyen’s Content that Sells to Enterprise
Measuring the performance of content: why moving to HubSpot has been pivotal to their content strategy
Pleo has a strong presence on Google via their SEO efforts. You can see from third party SEO tools that they’ve built an incredible bank of content that ranks for over 2,000 keywords and brings them over 16.4k pageviews every month (and the real numbers are likely far higher, since these tools typically underreport).
Alejandro explains that most people still find Pleo’s content via Google and is one of the biggest distribution channels. It’s also one of their highest lead generators, which is usually seen as content in the form of pillar pages, guides and downloadable content.
Their SEO strategy follows on nicely from their content strategy. At the beginning of the year, when they’ve set the Narratives, they’ll also put the key SEO clusters they want to focus on for that year.
However, this year things changed a little. Previously, the SEO team mainly focused on Top of the Funnel content, in other words, targeting people who are looking for particular areas in the finance discipline that are related to spend management but are not looking for a spend management solution. Examples of these types of content include:
But over the past year or so, the content team has been focused more on lead gen, which means investing more in Bottom of the Funnel content and getting better conversion tracking in place.
Over the past year, the team have been investing in content targeting people who are lower down in the funnel and ready to convert. Examples of those may be:
The issue is that over the past 9 years, Pleo has invested a lot in the blog and done a lot of work to build authority on Google. Some of their pieces were getting thousands of views per day – but it wasn’t certain how they were contributing to the business.
In order to fully understand the impact of their content, they knew they had to improve their tracking set-up.
So they fully transitioned their content from their old CMS to HubSpot to get a better understanding of how their content is performing. It’s only been a few weeks, but the insights they’ve been able to generate have already made it worth it.
With HubSpot, they’ve been able to uncover a complete new layer of insights on how people read their blog. For example, they were able to find out that:
After a certain number of pages, a reader is a lot more likely to convert and submit a lead form.
Deals where the point of contact has read more than 3 content pieces close a lot more quickly than those that don’t.
Alejandro admits himself: “We are very surprised with the amount of commercial insights that we can add to our content marketing reporting when it comes to the blog as a channel.”
The business performance of content has now become a part of their monthly reporting and helped close the loop to ensure their content strategy has all the inputs required. It’s also helped remove and abandon any beliefs around whether content brings the level of traction they thought they had.
Now, they measure the results of their content across two axes:
Content marketing performance: traffic, clicks, downloads
Business performance: pipeline, revenue
Doing Bottom of the Funnel content and focusing on lead gen did require a change of mindset. Content marketing is typically not seen as a lead generator and more of a brand building activity. But as Alejandro says, just because an article brings in a lot of traffic, doesn’t always mean it translates to business.
That doesn’t mean Top of the Funnel is not worth it. Alejandro explains that he tells his team that TOFU and BOFU bring value in a different way: one helps with awareness, and one helps with enabling action. It’s important to be aware of that when putting together a content strategy.
We promised that we would check back with them in a year to see what other insights they’ve uncovered!
You may like: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 6 HubSpot Reports]
How does the Pleo team manage to create content for 7 countries?
One other key topic we wanted to dive into with Alejandro was their localisation strategy. To fully sell to Europe, Pleo has to write content in multiple languages. Currently they create content in over 7 different languages for different European countries, which is an incredible feat. How do they do it?
Their approach has been to build a strong collaboration process with the internal localisation team that serves the whole organization.
The internal team has very strong SLAs towards the rest of the organization, with the content team being one of the main “customers”.
Once a piece is ready, it is submitted to the localisation team (usually in English), and in a matter of 2 - 3 days it’s usually ready in all 7 languages. The Pleo team also have local experts that have been with Pleo long term and understand the product, and they will do a quality review before publishing.
As Alejandro says “It’s a complex process that is very well executed.”
When it comes to SEO, the approach is a little different. Sometimes, a keyword that works well in English, may not work so well when it’s directly translated in Spanish or French. This is where having that cluster approach is helpful, because they can then set the direction in the language in advance. For example, the “invoice management” cluster will have its own version in the local language. To execute on the content that will be distributed via SEO in that language, the Pleo team works with a network of external agencies across Europe.
What pieces of content are Pleo proud of?
There are two pieces of content Alejandro is proudest of:
1. CFO Playbook
Every year, the Pleo team publishes a CFO Playbook which includes insights and helpful content for finance professionals. Alejandro says it’s already become a reference in the industry, with some customers even printing it and sharing photos of it in their offices.
The team is also able to leverage the playbook across PR, demand gen, website and other places. It’s a great original piece of content that can be repurposed in a lot of different types of content assets.
2. New way of finance
This is a video series that features Pleo’s customers and covers the challenges and pains companies feel with spend management on a daily basis, and how they overcome it.
The quality is high, and although Alejandro says a lot of work went into it, it’s also a great piece of original content that has led to the creation of an eBook, socials and more content still running today.
Pleo’s content: what if your content team acted as the compass of your marketing team?
Content marketers have the most important skill when it comes to communication: they know how to identify, build and tell stories, whether through written text, audio or video. If you want someone to write out a plan that can act as a source of direction, inspiration and alignment, you need someone who can write and think strategically. And that’s often the content team.
Pleo is a great example of a company that has reached unicorn status while still keeping a unique and distinctive brand. The quality of their content (written and visual) is also testament to the fact that leaning on your content team to help direct your marketing can work very well – however it requires processes in place to ensure alignment and a team that understands the role of content.
Thanks to Alejandro for sharing his experience and his insights on how Pleo does content, we hope it inspires more fintech companies to lean into their content teams and for content marketers to set up their own editorial councils to help solve misalignment issues!