Marketing on a Budget: 5 Tips for Fintech Startups
Financial technology, also known as fintech, covers everything from cryptocurrency to innovative payment solutions like PayPal. It uses technology to improve how financial services are used and delivered to consumers.
In recent years, more traditional companies have adopted financial technology in hopes of gaining a competitive edge. This shift in the industry has made marketing your fintech business all the more important, because standing out in an oversaturated market isn’t easy.
Fintech is also something that has been viewed as a boring but necessary industry by non-professionals, so making sure your marketing tactics help you stand out is essential.
You might think this is impossible without the luxurious budget of traditional companies, but that isn’t necessarily the case.
There are many marketing tactics you can deploy as a start-up company with a small budget that can still increase your chances of success.
These aren’t secrets, either, but they are important, so if you’re a fintech startup company, you’ll want to keep reading to hear our tips below.
1. Optimize your website for mobile
If you’re a financial technology company that hasn’t optimized your website for mobile devices, you’re missing out on lots of traffic.
A recent study showed that people are spending five hours a day on their mobile phones in the US alone.
That gives you a lot of time in people’s lives to market your products to them by making sure your content is mobile friendly.
One of the big ways of doing this is to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile.
To do this, you need to make sure that your website looks good on mobile devices, is easy to navigate, and every page loads in less than three seconds.
Not only will doing this help to increase your Google search ranking, but it will also increase your conversion rates. This is because over 50% of all online searching occurs through mobile devices.
2. Use social media marketing to your advantage
For many industries, creating a social media marketing plan is no longer optional.
In fact, in the fintech industry, having a social media presence and knowing how to market your start-up successfully is a requirement of success.
The truth is, a large proportion of the people you will be looking to target will be active members of popular social media websites. The most effective way of using social media is not to try and handle every website out there, but to instead focus on where your ideas customers are gathering.
Are they professionals that share ideas and information through LinkedIn, or are they younger audiences looking for an automated way to handle their finances that may be found more easily on social networks like Instagram and Snap?
As a start-up company you have a big advantage over traditional companies here, as it easier to define a target audience upfront than to decipher who they are from your pre-existing customers.
Best of all, if you can find someone to handle the social media marketing within your business, this aspect of your start-up company could happen without dipping into your marketing budget at all!
3. Create educational financial content
A recent study found that although 45% of millennials want financial products & services that help them handle their financial situation while 37% were unable to find resources online to educate them on vital financial topics.
This statistic is shocking, but good news for fintech startup companies looking for a way to carve their creative edge in a saturated industry.
It gives you the opportunity to target SEO with keywords relevant to your target audience, boosting your website’s ranking in Google and increasing your visibility in the eyes of your target audience.
Content isn’t only a way of increasing your success as a business by increasing visibility, however.
By creating content that has value and is relevant to your target audience, you are also creating a relationship based on trust.
Of course, trust is essential for any business, but when you are handling people’s finances like you do as a fintech business, it is an absolutely vital part of the selling process.
In fact, if we were to give just one piece of advice to fintech start-ups trying to market themselves on a budget, this would be it.
The truth is, content marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. You can do it yourself by using experts from within your own company, or outsource it by commissioning freelancers to create your website’s value on your behalf.
Either way, if you want a competitive edge over your customers, creating free value on your website is definitely the way to go about it.
4. Engage with your target audience
Engaging with your target audience is a longer term marketing strategy, and it will take time to notice an increase in business from this method, but that doesn’t make it any less important than the other things we’ve mentioned in this article.
The truth is, a lot of larger companies turn a blind eye to consumer engagement, and this can be seen as a major downfall for customers.
In fintech especially, customers want to know that they can trust you to help them when they experience problems with your service and/or products.
Even if you are receiving compliments from your customers, engaging with them can show that you genuinely care about their business, and their positive feelings towards your company may encourage them to make future purchases.
5. Use videos
Videos are one of the most successful marketing tactics you can think of, especially in the fintech marketing niche.
One of the main reasons for this is that it’s one of the only ways to completely captivate your audience online, as their attention will be directed on the media in front of them.
In the fintech industry, we recommend using videos to show how your products and/or services work.
These videos can be used on your social media platforms, your website, and turned into advertisements very easily.
Although the initial investment may be expensive, with needing to buy equipment and editing software, the conversion rates with video are better than any other form of advertising currently on the market. You don’t have the budget for this? Well, anyone with a smartphone is an amateur director (we only have to look at TikTok to realize how truthful that is!).
Not sure when video marketing is the right approach for your fintech startup? Consider learning more about our Fractional CMO for startups service.
Summary:
Moment of truth: marketing is super expensive. It truly is. And to really grow your fintech business, you have to dig deep into the coffers. That’s the bottomline. But that doesn’t have to be the case when you start your business.
If you’re at the beginning of your journey, with a new product that’s ready to be commercialized, market your product on the budget until you achieve market fit and enough recognition to get additional funding.
As we discussed, the best strategies for marketing a fintech product on a budget are as follows:
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. With Google deprioritizing sites in search results that aren’t mobile friendly, you cannot really succeed if your site isn’t mobile responsive.
- Spend 1 hour a day on social media. But don’t just post randomly. Find popular threads and engage with your target audience. Tag and comment on relevant stories. Be active. Be authentic. Be you.
- Create educational content. Millennials are starving for educational content in finance. They really are. Young consumers needs your help and guidance to learn how to manage their money effectively. So help them out through a robust content strategy today.
- Engage with your target audience. Simple strategy. Go to Google Alerts and add your company name on the list. Anytime, anyone mentions your company’s name - reply to them.
- Create short videos. Whether you do it on your phone or professionally, video is the future. Scratch that. It’s the present. You need to engage with your audience through video.
For a limited time, Digital Authority Partners is offering a FREE content & SEO audit to fintech companies interested in assessing their current brand in order to build a robust content marketing plan for 2023. Interested? Drop us a note at hello@digitalauthority.me or call us at 312-820-9893 for details.
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