Why Fintech Needs Marketing

My mission at Mint Studios is the following:

“To help fintech companies grow and reach more customers with educational and empowering content, so they can fulfill their purpose of democratising finance.”

As we launch the second season of the Market Like a Fintech podcast, I’ve been on a journey to uncover how exactly we — Ani from the Fintech Marketing Hub and I — can support fintech marketers in helping fintech companies fulfil their mission. 

As the founder or marketer at a fintech company, you need marketing to help grow your company so you can reach and positively impact more people. You need marketing to stand out from incumbents. You need marketing so customers learn how to use their products. Most importantly, you need marketing so it reaches the right people and does what fintech companies intend to do: empower, educate, enable access.

The Market Like a Fintech podcast is a place where I explore how fintech marketers and founders around the world are using marketing to help fintech companies fulfill their mission of democratising finance.

I’m taking the listeners of this podcast with me as I explore how other fintech marketers are helping fintech companies fulfill their purpose. I don’t know all the answers and I don’t pretend to. Instead, I interview fintech marketers who are experimenting with new strategies, launching successful campaigns and building great marketing teams. Instead of hearing two marketing experts talk about what they know, you’ll be listening to someone who is trying to dig deeper behind the how and why of a fintech marketing expert.

So far, we’ve heard how Chip used crowdfunding to raise a funding round, but also turned those investors into brand evangelists. We’ve also heard from NMD+ and Whitesight on which fintech companies and banks are doing well with social media. We’ve heard how OakNorth gained traction by hosting entrepreneur dinners — rather than doing ads or social media. 

One of the key insights from these interviews is that acquiring customers is the hardest part of growing a company. Without customers there is no financial inclusion, accessibility or democratisation.

So let’s figure out how to do that together. Come join us on the podcast, and (soon to come) Slack group.

I wrote this “manifesto” for anyone who wants to improve the reach of their audience, and believes in the power of marketing to enable financial inclusion. Here are a few reasons why fintech companies need marketing. 

Why fintech needs marketing

1. Fintech companies are startups

This is the most obvious reason marketing is so essential for fintech companies: when you run or are in charge of growing a tech startup, marketing is essential to grow your company. 

In order to raise money, make a profit and grow at the right pace, you need marketing. When you’re competing against incumbents and tech companies, you also need to grow quickly. If you want your fintech company to have the impact you set out for it to have, it needs to reach and change the lives of enough people.

The strategy of targeting the tech-savvy millennial is no longer sufficient in the B2C fintech world. If you really want to make finance accessible and democratise it, then you need to target the average layperson, and that requires effective marketing.

2. Many founders are technical

Many fintech founders are technically-minded people, usually with a financial or engineering background — often both. They are usually builders and people who see a problem, want to fix it, and then build a great solution. Just look at some of the fintech companies around us: the Stripe co-founders are developers, the Plaid founders are engineers, the founder of Revolut has a background in banking — as do many other neobanks.  

And that’s necessary. But as we often say in the marketing world, you could have the best product in the world — but if you never tell anyone, no one will find out. 

When I talk to fintech companies, it is common to find only one person on the marketing team, if there is one at all. In some cases — like certain B2B companies that can rely on referrals — this might be enough. But more often than not, especially in a B2C setting, marketing is essential to accelerate the growth of the company and reach the right people.

Fintech companies need marketers because fintech companies are startups and need marketing to accelerate growth. Fintech founders need marketers, because they often lack the know-how or the capacity to manage marketing.

3. Marketing differentiates Fintechs from incumbents

A large part of marketing’s role is to communicate the soul of the company. That means explaining why your fintech is different and unique. If, for example, your fintech company stands for democratisation, transparency and accessibility, this must be present in the brand and communications. 

One of the key differentiators between incumbents and fintech companies are those three words I mentioned above (democratisation, transparency, accessibility). Just look at the bank ads when Covid broke out — everyone had the same “we’re here for you” ads. Now look at Unifimoney’s video:

If you want to disrupt an industry and do things differently, then you need to come across differently. Fintech companies need marketing to effectively communicate how they’re unique.

4. Fintech marketing itself democratises finance

In order for a consumer to use an investing app correctly, they need to learn how to invest. In order for a business to enable seamless online shopping, they need to learn about Open Banking.

When it comes to finance, there is usually an educational barrier to using a financial product correctly. It also doesn’t help that personal finance is not part of the high school curriculum, meaning that many of us grow up not knowing anything about taxes, payment processing or investing. 

Marketing, and more specifically, content marketing, involves educating your customers, building their trust and offering your product as a solution. For certain financial products, this is the only way to offer your product — by first educating them (think stock market investing). This is especially true in the financial sector, where learning how to manage your money effectively can be life-changing. It’s also a sector where regulations are stricter, and customers often are required to be educated on the risks that come with using a product (think peer-to-peer lending, stock market investing).

Marketing content is also inherently customer-centric: you are choosing to educate and empower your customers to make their own decisions, rather than blindly trust your product. Fintech needs marketing if it wants to be truly customer-centric. Fintech also needs marketing to help overcome the educational barrier, successfully build trust, and effectively sell a product.

5. Fintech is very fast paced

The startup world is incredibly fast paced. Combine that with the financial sector, where events like the rise and fall of Gamestop, and the fluctuation of assets like cryptocurrencies and stocks happen on a daily basis. Since fintech companies are also startups, they are continuously launching products at a faster pace than a bank would, and therefore growing in new markets and iterating based on feedback. 

Companies like Plaid, Truelayer and Alloy make it a lot easier to build financial products. That means that now, the hard part is building an audience. 

As Packy McCormick says in a recent Not Boring newsletter:

“When building a product is easier, the competition moves to customer acquisition. That was the core insight behind Unit: Fintech 1.0 was about products; Fintech 2.0 is about audiences.”

Fintech companies need marketing to remain in constant communication with customers and prospects, while also being in the know of current market trends. Fintechs also relies on marketing to help build an important USP. In other words, an audience.

6. Fintech has access to a lot of data

Good marketing happens when you understand your customer inside out. A good measure of this is when you’re able to predict their next move.

Fintech companies have access to a lot of data on their customers. Whether that’s spending patterns, habits or usability, marketers can use that data to gain a better understanding of their customer — all while remaining GDPR compliant, of course.

This helps marketers create more targeted campaigns, understand pain points and create content that is a lot more useful. Ultimately, it helps marketers be more customer centric.

This becomes a virtuous cycle: the more targeted and customer-centric your marketing is, the more you’ll reach the right people. Effectively, having marketers on your team that understand your customer inside out helps you grow your company. Another reason why fintech companies can benefit from marketing.

7. Marketing is taking up a larger part of the sales funnel

This is one of my favourite images from Andy Crestodina’s book Content Chemistry: 

Before the internet, we did not have many options when it came to buying. We would usually go for whatever was most accessible or what our friends recommended.

But with Google, we can now do our research. We check comparison posts, read reviews and post in forums. We like to do our research, find all the answers to our questions online and then reach out once we’ve made our decision.

Sales are still essential, but every year a larger part of sales is taken over by marketing. That’s because selling is ten times easier when your prospective audience or buyer has done their research and has already chosen you as their provider/product.

Note: I talk about this in more detail in my post on Where to Get Started with Fintech Content Marketing.

In a world where customers want to be able to do their own research, for all companies — not just fintech companies — marketing plays an essential role in providing information, answering frequent questions and educating prospects so they can make an informed decision. 

Fintech companies need marketing so they remain up to date with the modern day practices on customer acquisition. 

Join the fintech marketer’s journey 🥾

Would you agree with all those reasons for why fintech needs marketing? Are there any others you would add?

If you feel like I’m preaching to the choir and this is all self-evident, then I invite you to join me on my journey to uncover how other fintech marketers are successfully helping their companies fulfill their mission with marketing.

We’ve recently launched the second season of the Market Like a Fintech podcast, where we’ll uncover topics like how to hire a CMO, where to begin with community marketing and how to do immersive, real customer research. Soon, we’ll also have a Slack community, where you’ll be able to exchange ideas with fellow fintech markteres.

Join us by listening to our first episode: What's the Future for the Market Like a Fintech podcast? | Araminta and Ani

Let’s not forget that at the end of the day, we all want the same thing: to make finance more accessible.