Research: How are the Top 50 Fintech Companies Creating Content?

It might seem that everyone in the fintech space is investing a lot into content.

But what kind of content is it? And is it actually good content? Content that brings in customers — rather than just traffic?

Just over a week ago we did a webinar where we presented some research on what fintech companies are currently doing with content. Specifically, we covered:

Why content marketing is so powerful in fintech
- What makes content work so well in the fintech space?
- What is “good content”?
Are the top 50 fintech companies investing in content and is it good quality?
What are the opportunities for fintech companies?

You can view the recordings here:

And here is the link to the slides: Webinar Slides

The research

The research we did was quite straightforward: we put together a spreadsheet, and then worked with a virtual assistant to fill in all the columns. Here’s a screenshot of the end research:

We looked at things like:

Whether they have a blog
Monthly traffic
Whether they’re doing ads
Whether they’re focusing on conversions
How easy it is to read their articles
What percentage of their traffic is organic.

But first, why content and fintech?

But before we get into the specifics about the research we did, let’s look at why content in the fintech space.

In the webinar, we focused on four main reasons content is especially important:

1. More than 50% of consumers run a search before becoming a financial services customers

If you’re like most people, you probably did not get taught about taxes, mortgages, investing in school. So when you realise it’s time to get your stuff together, where do you go? Google!

And that’s why, more than other industries, financial services customers like to do a search before converting.

According to Invoca, the numbers for each sub industry is the following:

Which means over 50% of potential customers like doing their research before becoming a customer.

2. Many financial topics are complicated or full of jargon. Customers want to be educated before considering a product

As many marketers in the financial services industry will probably know, it can sometimes be tricky explaining what your company does at a drinks party or networking event. And it can often be the same to customers and even clients.

With fintech, we often have that additional educational barrier before someone signs up to your product. In fact, in some fintech sectors you are obliged to educate your customers before they can even use your product (think options trading or crypto).

This is also true if customers are contributing a lot of money, or changing pensions — or if your sales cycle is 6 months and complex. When your target market is investing hundreds of thousands to use your product, you bet they’re going to do a ton of research.

3. Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) costs are incredibly high

We are fans of PPC and paid ads, and they are a great way of increasing your reach (especially when promoting your content). But in the long term, you get what you put in — there’s no long term investment. And even with paid ads, CAC is often above $1,000 to acquire a customer.

Not only that, but there are a lot of restrictions on financial services ads, with some getting stricter and stricter. This makes it increasingly hard to promote products, and you’re constantly relying on putting money in to get any customers out.

4. Fintech companies’ biggest challenge is gaining trust

In the Fintech Marketing Hub’s Top 30 Fintech Marketers report this year, a lot of fintech marketers mentioned that a fintech company’s biggest challenge is gaining trust.

Why? Well fintech companies are often startups competing against incumbents. Not only that, but it’s a lot different to ask someone to contribute their hard-earned savings, than just creating a social media account. Trust is the number one important thing with fintech companies.

Content addresses these four areas:

Here’s how:

1. Content gives the reader the information they want to do their research

Since over 50% of consumers do a search before picking a product, creating content that answers their questions offers a good opportunity for you to place your product whenever they’re searching.

2. Content can fill the financial education gap and explain complex topics

You’re going to have to educate your customers anyway — so why not do it via articles and written content?

3. Content and organic is cheaper than paid marketing in the long run

This does depend on how effective your content strategy is and if you’re producing the right kind of content. But in the long term, organic should be cheaper than paid marketing. It also brings other benefits such as brand building, partnerships and increasing chances of serendipity.

4. Content helps build trust

You are a lot more likely to trust a company that wants to educate you rather than one that doesn’t. Investing and taking the time to educate your customers helps you come across as more trustworthy.

What’s good content?

That’s all well and good, but if your content is terrible then content doesn’t really do a good job of addressing those issues. So what does “good content” mean and how do you make sure that’s what you’re creating?

Well let’s start with what good content is not.

Here are screenshots from various fintech blogs.

This is a B2B payment expense company targeting CFOs. Do you think a CFO would read “Vendor management 101”?

This is a payment processing company targeting CTOs, Head of Operations. Would they read the following?

This is a mortgage fintech targeting homeowners. B2C content sometimes can be more TOFU, but these blog articles take it a bit too far…

Based on our experience working with over 20 fintech companies, and growing customer acquisition and lead generation by over 700%, this is what we’ve found “good content” should be:

1. Written for the level of your reader

Are you embarrassed by the content you put out? If yes, then that means you aren’t writing for the level of your reader.

Make sure your content is written for the level of your reader. If you’re targeting beginners, then beginner content is fine. But if you’re targeting CTOs and Heads of Operations, don’t write “5 Business Expense tips” and other beginner style articles.

2. Based on expertise, not just Google research

You’ve probably seen your fair share of terrible SEO content. And that’s often because the content has been regurgitated and is based on what others have written.

If you want to be taken seriously and for people to pay attention, you’re actually better off creating content based on interviews with experts, rather than just general Google research.

3. Has a distribution strategy

What do you do once you’ve published your article? If you’ve gone through all the effort of producing a great piece of content, then why not go the next step and distribute it as well? Promote it?

There are a lot of things you can do with an article to promote it. My friend Dom has a spreadsheet with a list of 50 different ones. You can buy it for $35 here: Content Promotion Checklist 2022: 50 Places To Distribute Content

4. Includes Bottom of the Funnel content

Bottom of the Funnel content is content that targets your potential customers who are close to buying. These are people who know they have a problem, know what the solution is and are actively searching for one.

If your product or service doesn’t turn up when they’re searching, you are leaving customers on the table.

That’s why it’s important to include content that targets Bottom of the Funnel content. We actually argue that you should start with BOFU content, and only then work your way up the funnel.

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

5. Well formatted and optimised for conversions

Nowadays, people like to read articles on their phone — which is why it’s very important you make sure your articles are easy to read.

If someone in your target audience opens your blog article and is immediately hit with 3 pop-ups, a tiny font and paragraphs that require scrolling, they won’t even bother reading — and you’ve just missed out on a potential customer.

You want to make sure your articles are easy to read. We like to follow this criteria:

750 px paragraph width
18 px font size
Black or dark font colour
CTA after introduction and at the end of the page
Paragraph breaks every 3 - 4 lines
Descriptive images

To summarise, we deem good content as:

Written for the level of your reader
Based on expertise, not just Google research
Has a distribution strategy
Includes Bottom of the Funnel content
Well formatted and optimised for conversions

So, based on all that information — are fintech companies investing in content and are they doing “good content”? Let’s take a look. 👀

Are the top 50 fintech companies doing content correctly?

Amongst those 50 fintech companies we analysed, 70% were B2B and most of them were based in either Europe or the UK, although a few were based in Asia, Brazil and Mexico.

Here are the stats:

On content:

88% of the top fintech companies have a website blog
58% have more than 100 blog posts on their website
78% have organic traffic that exceeds 10,000 monthly pageviews
44% have a DA (Domain Authority) of higher than 50
38% have case studies
20% have more than ⅓ of their traffic coming from search

But are they creating good content? Content than brings in customers, not just traffic?

In order to answer this question, we focused on three criteria based on the 5 mentioned above. Meaning, we looked at:

Criteria 1: is the content written for the level of the reader?

Criteria 2: do they write Bottom of the Funnel content?

Criteria 3: is their content well formatted and optimised for conversions?

Let’s look at each individual criteria:

Is the content written for the level of the reader?

54% was written for the level of the reader
- For B2B fintech, 45% was for the level of the reader

To analyse this I went through each fintech company, read through their website and checked their blog articles. Sure, it’s kind of subjective but you can tell quite quickly if content is technical or not.

Takeaway: that’s not great. Based on those numbers, that means that just under half of companies are creating content that doesn’t hit the mark. It means they are most likely wasting the money they’re putting into content. And as you can see, it’s even worse for B2B where writing expert content is even more important.

Does their content include BOFU content?

We like to categorise BOFU content generally through:

Pain points
Use cases
Classic BOFU keywords (e.g. competitor A vs competitor B keywords)

Since we don’t know the pain points and use cases of each product and we weren’t going to go that in-depth, we just looked at the last point: are they targeting the classic BOFU keywords? The classic BOFU keywords are:

Alternatives to. (e.g. alternative to Paypal)
Comparison articles (e.g. Xero vs Freeagent)
Best of articles (e.g. best accounting software for freelancers)
Pricing pages (e.g. how many fees do [incumbent competitor] charge?)
Use case blogs (e.g. how do I open a bank account as a contractor?)

You can read more about our approach here: Mint Studios Framework

So we looked at the phrases they’re ranking for, and here are the numbers:

22% create content that targets “Competitor A vs Competitor B”
24% create content that ranks for “best [product types]”
10% create content that ranks for “alternative to [name of competitor]

Takeaway: that’s very low. As we said before, people searching these keyphrases are ready to buy and convert now. If you’re not ranking for them, you are leaving customers on the table.

Is their content optimised for conversions?

Based on our criteria of good content, here are the stats:

84% had narrow paragraph width
44% had font size larger than 18
60% had CTAs embedded within their paragraphs or after the end of the blog post
22% had descriptive images

Takeaway: In terms of paragraph width, not bad — but CTAs are a big miss. We usually aim for a CTA after the intro, and one at the bottom of the article. You don’t want to be overly salesy in your articles, but always make it as easy as possible for the reader to convert.

So to summarise, are the top 50 fintech companies creating “good content”?

Written for the level of the reader? Not really

Includes BOFU content? No

Well formatted and optimised for conversions? Not bad, but could be better.

The short answer is no.

The opportunity for fintech companies

1 - Create blog content

As we explained above, fintech and content go hand in hand. We’re not saying every single fintech company should create content, but there are significant advantages to creating content as a fintech company.

Based on our experience working with fintech companies, we’ve found that content works best for fintech companies where:

Your target market requires a lot of education
Your target market likes doing research online
You’ve already proven you are able to acquire customers cold
You have Subject Matter Experts on your team who are happy to do interviews and share their knowledge

2 - Create better content

Gone are the days where you can hire a generalist SEO agency to create subpar SEO articles with the hopes that it’ll get you ranking for the right keywords.

With more and more companies creating content, average content is mostly a waste of money. If you’re going to go full on with content, there is an opportunity to create “good content”, which:

Is written for the level of the reader
Is based on expert conversations
Has a distribution strategy
Includes Bottom of the Funnel content (very few are doing this, so there’s a big opportunity here!)
Well formatted and optimised for conversions

Thanks to everyone who attended live! If you’re interested in learning more about our approach of fintech and content, check out these articles:

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