FinTech Marketing

Fintech marketing is a meticulously planned process of marketing techniques tailored for fintech firms. And it must be since customers appreciate it when fintech companies take that extra mile to convince their clientele that their money is safe with them and offer ways to manage it better. In recent years, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning have augmented the fintech industry by increasing the accuracy and personalization of payment, lending, simplifying the credit lending procedure, identifying new borrower pools, automating fraud detection, and more. Today, these technologies are poised to reshape the marketing aspect of fintech companies too.  

The market is always rapidly changing and getting highly competitive. Fintech firms are generally not equipped to anticipate trends, nor do they act quickly on real-time market indicators and data. Further, they don’t have any name or brand recognition. So, leveraging marketing tactics can help them understand their brand identity, target markets and personas, and ways to interpret customer expectations and reach out to people. Artificial intelligence can prove resourceful for the aforementioned activities while improving customer experiences and reducing risk.  

Apart from AI, RPA (robot process automation) can help with email marketing too. Even business analytics, machine learning can help Fintech firms’ CXOs make more informed decisions around what the company does, whom it targets, and how it will compete in the market. These technologies will also help extract more value from an existing customer base by improving quality, pricing, customer support, and delivery speed. Besides, insights from data-based analytics will facilitate lifecycle marketing by predicting the profile of the proposed product’s cycle and take advantage of projected opportunities from development, maturity, growth, and decline.  

Also, unlike traditional financial institutions, fintech marketing also focuses on maximizing the use of social media channels for lead generation and retention by creating personalized content for each audience. According to a poll by the Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group, 87% of consumers think banks are “annoying, boring, or unhelpful” on social media. A 2016 Facebook study shows that only 8% of millennials trust their banks. Fintech marketing aims to strategically deploy well-researched and crafted educational content that seeks to spread awareness about financial terms, approaches, and company activities, thereby establishing trust in the target audience via social media. People ignore or skip ads. By creating such inbound marketing materials, fintech can explain simply yet convincingly that their product is beneficial, smart, secure, and robust. 

One will find many success stories in the galore of fintech marketing initiatives that showcase how small brands can put themselves on pedestal with simple yet creative planning. For instance, when PayPal was caught up in a scandal over freezing its customers’ accounts in 2010, WePay pulled a clever stunt by dropping a 600-pound ice block, stuffed with hundreds of dollars, outside PayPal’s developer conference in San Francisco. The ice block also featured a URL leading to a unique landing page with more information. This epic stunt went viral on both tech magazines and online and directed consumers towards the then WePay landing page UnfreezeYourMoney.com. 

Another popular fintech marketing campaign that became a huge sensation was during London Fashion Week S/S’16. Visa Europe collab had teamed up with The 10 Group to create a campaign called, Cashless on the Catwalk, to exhibit the future of payment technology. During the event, celebrity guests like Daisy Lowe and Alexa Chung were given NFC-enabled rings, which allowed them to purchase items directly from the catwalk. This campaign was a huge hit and was bestowed with the FinTech Marketing Campaign of the Year at the 2016 FinTech Innovation Awards. 

Today the fintech industry is abuzz with new business opportunities arising on a daily basis. However, with the COVID pandemic in play, the industry is alerted about the onslaught of possible threats that may disrupt businesses forever. As the world is becoming increasingly digitized, more and more firms are flocking online to stay connected with their customers. And with more customers operating in the digital space, fintech firms need to amplify their marketing attempts to stay relevant in the game.  

Apart from content marketing, email marketing, and inbound marketing, marketers may need to explore relationship marketing too. While pandemic has restricted the spending, customers are still open to pay for services from companies that focus on building stronger loyalty and long-term customer engagement rather than on quick, short-term customer acquisition and individual sales. Though celebrity endorsement or the latest fad of influencer marketing can help in tapping the emotional connectivity and loyal fanbase, in the times of cancel culture, firms have to be careful about their approaches and policies. Any displeased service can cost more loss via word-of-mouth and social media calling out trends than others. So fintech marketing strategies must revolve around engaging and delivering a meaningful, personalized experience that can turn customers in favor of the brand or company. 

Next, amid the calls for data privacy, fintech companies must experiment with alternate sources of data collection other than cookies of websites and tracking activity on social networking sites. Instead, connecting via conversational AI tools like chatbox can help amass data required to develop demographics and mine insights to study customer behavior and anticipations. This also implies that soon fintech firms will turn towards other channels of communications to attract customers while also respecting their privacy. 

FinTech startups are starting to yield the benefits of disrupting an age-old industry to become one of the fastest evolving industry, itself. With the right marketing strategy in place, its growth can be multiplied tremendously in the coming years. Meanwhile, aspiring entrepreneurs are blessed with the perfect time to try their expertise in this sector.