Technology has made its way into our everyday lives in ways a lot of us don't even notice at first glance. Especially when it comes to the financial market, technology continues to play an important role, from helping provide services to making the lives of users a lot easier. The FinTech industry is at its peak, its very own golden age, where new developments and innovations are coming in every single day. But, if you want to start making your own name within this market, you need a way to make your business grow. The key to this lies in your content marketing strategy.
Nowadays, the internet is filled with all kinds of information regarding content marketing, which is not an ideal situation for beginners. While this information and data help people understand the idea behind this marketing strategy, it makes its usage a lot more difficult. With so many different ways to market your business online, figuring out the right marketing tactics and strategies is a complicated task. This challenge is made a lot harder with the never-ending competitiveness of this market. In such a dynamic industry, creating a unique and comprehensive marketing strategy is of utmost importance — but how do you make sure that your work stands out?
The simplest way to look at it is to make sure that you're ahead of the game. Content marketing plans need to be special, filled with all the latest trends and practices while ensuring that your brand is talked about. The goal is not just to capture the audience's attention; you also need to be able to establish a sense of safety, trust, and authority. This will help cement your standing within the industry. That being said, there's still a lot more that needs to be discussed before you can start creating content for your business online. In this article, we will be discussing the basics behind content marketing while delving into its intricacies and complex nature of it. So, continue reading, take inspiration from companies that are getting it right, and learn how to jump ahead of your competitors!
What is Content Marketing?
Simply put, content marketing is another way for businesses to reach out to potential customers and viewers. By creating and sharing articles and online content consistently, you can look forward to attracting the right people to your websites. Through this content, you should be looking to answer customer queries while discussing trends and key information about your company. With the help of your articles and online content, you can teach potential customers and engage them in activities that make you stand out from the rest of the companies around you.
The financial industry involves everyone. But over the years, this market has fallen in everybody's list of priorities. After all, if you are not into finance, we are sure that you have also had thoughts about this subject being boring and difficult to understand. However, if you have been around on the internet, you have probably also come across websites or Instagram accounts that make finance look interesting by presenting information efficiently. That should be your inspiration for content marketing in FinTech.
In an industry like FinTech, customers are always looking for answers, and they often have all kinds of questions. Before anyone makes investments, they want to be sure about everything, just to be safe. This helps them ensure that they are making safe and smart choices. So, when you look to take part in content marketing, you need to appeal to these customers. Providing useful information, like why your product is essential and helping potential users realize the value of what you're offering, is a great start in content marketing. Why your product? Why should people invest in you? Once your customers can answer these questions easily, you will know you are doing everything correctly.
There are several benefits to specializing in this kind of marketing, and we will talk about it again later, but by making use of this, you can essentially cut down on costs by a significant chunk. Depending on who you are, content marketing can be either the easiest or hardest task for you. However, one thing is for sure: it is worth it! This marketing strategy is not only sustainable, but it offers the opportunity for your business' fame to reach unimaginable heights.
Companies Making the Most of Content Marketing
Content marketing is a very important part of your marketing strategy, so it is no surprise that many companies use this method to spread news about their product. Let's look at some of the most famous companies that are using this method:
Varo is one of the most accessible online banking options available. Their end goal is to educate and help people take complete control of their money. This way, their consumers can make simple and informed decisions with their own online bank account. Varo focuses on using an online website with information that is focused on creating bank accounts, handling them, and making safe investments. They have focused on the educational prospect very well, as they make their content easy to understand.
Curve is a Belgium-based company investment application that focuses on using SEO to bring in and retain customers. On their pages, they started by publishing information that is easy to understand and accessible. They focused on keywords and are one of the top-ranking companies that have understood how to structure their articles perfectly.
Wise is perhaps the most famous company on this list, and they make use of content marketing in a very different way. The money transfer app focuses its articles on its competitors. This does not seem like the best option, but if you know anything about content marketing, you will see how smart this is. Some of the content on their website talks about how you can close your accounts with their competitors. So, while they are talking about their rivals, they are essentially guiding rival customers to their products.
What Should You Know Before You Start Content Marketing?
For any business strategy, brainstorming your ideas is the very first and most crucial step. Gather your team and gather all your ideas, then sit down and focus on how to appeal to your audience. Let's take a look at some of the key concepts that you must focus on before you start marketing your products:
Data is Your Best Friend
Research, research, and more research! You cannot start sharing your brand and its stories online without researching extensively about the strategies that you plan to use. This idea is better explained when you look at the word "traffic." When we talk about traffic in content marketing, we are referring to the number of users that visit your website and which pages they are focusing on. With the help of programs like Google Analytics, you can get a better idea of what your customers are looking for and how they are getting access to the things they are looking for. This will help you focus your resources on strategies that you know work. When you get an idea of what your customers are looking for and where they find it, you can infiltrate these places with your content.
Understand Your Audience
We know you already have an idea of what we are trying to say, but it is important to never lose sight of the basics. In this day and age, finding products that are personal to you is all that matters. This is why you need to get to know your audience before you can start building on how to reach them. There are a couple of simple questions that you can ask yourself to locate your customers:
What type of problems do your customers have?
Where are they looking to solve these problems?
What kind of solutions are customers looking for?
When you answer these questions, you can build a base for what your content is going to be focused on. Do not forget the most important rule: Your content should directly relate to the customer's wants and needs. The more focused you are on your audience, the more receptive they will be to your content. You can also experiment with different kinds of content pillars, which we will elaborate on later. By posting your articles and different content in multiple different forms, you can keep track of the data to see which forms of content are best appreciated by the audience.
Structure your Articles Properly
The way your articles are structured is very important. Oftentimes, customers do not want to spend too much time reading through everything you have written. On the other hand, you can not risk leaving your customer's questions unanswered by trying to supply information more efficiently. So, you need to make sure everything that you provide is nothing short of perfect. According to a study done by Marketing Inside Group, content that has less than 1,000 words risks being unranked. So, not only are you possibly not answering the questions your audience has, but your articles will not make it very far. They also reported that content that goes further than 2,000 words is much more likely to bore your customers. After all, efficiency is key in today's world.
And do not forget about Search Engine Optimizations (SEO). SEO is a key aspect to focus on when you are writing your articles. When you focus on keywords, your brand will start to make its way in front of more and more people. When people have questions, especially about FinTech, they are less likely to be very specific. So, when customers are looking for their answers, you will want to make sure that you are the first answer on Google. After all, people always end up choosing what page they see first.
Look into Thought Leadership
Becoming a thought leader is very important, and when you get that nickname from others, you are bound to attract more and more customers. Thought leadership is a branch of content marketing that focuses on making the most of ideas, talent, and passion that come from the community or your business. Using this, you can answer audience questions consistently and establish yourself as a trustworthy and safe resource. The only problem is you can not become a thought leader overnight. The term thought leader is one that you earn from the people around you. This requires a great amount of dedication and commitment. You need to focus on continuously providing the best answers to the questions that your audience has. Once you keep at it, you will be able to establish yourself within the industry, bringing in new customers with little to no effort.
Focus on Educating Your Audience
The finance industry is a vast field. It is a complex market with a lot of different sources, from transactions to investments and even banking. And when you stop to consider how quickly technology is advancing and changing, finance can get even more confusing. This is why people find finance to be boring or unrelatable. It can get really difficult to understand, and if you can solve that problem, content marketing should not be a problem for you. Remember, the best way you can retain customers is by ensuring that the information you provide is easy to understand and comprehend.
You should be looking to provide information for beginners as well as professionals and experts. This way, you are appealing to a larger crowd. After all, everyone wants to make good financial decisions. Being able to break down the complex nature of FinTech requires a lot of research and an in-depth understanding of the industry. Whether you do this yourself or spend a little money and pay content marketers to do it, the only thing you need to focus on is simplicity. When you do this, you have essentially understood the background behind content marketing, and you are well on your way to establishing an online presence.
Work with Everyone
Asking your marketing team to brainstorm ideas is the usual choice, but everyone does that. While this method does work, its progress is a lot slower, especially in content marketing. When you are looking to build credibility and customer loyalty, the first step is to fully understand the problems that customers can have. This helps fill in that gap between customers and the brand, where brands think they know everything about the consumer. Usually, they know half the story. This is why you need to ensure that your content is extremely personalized.
Brainstorming with just your marketing team will not cut it — You need to start involving your sales, customer service, and product teams. These departments know what problems people have and how to solve them. In turn, the marketing department can now think of ways to make this problem-solving process seem more interesting rather than them trying to understand the customers.
Benefits of Content Marketing
The FinTech industry is known for revolutionizing financial services. With new, complex innovations, FinTech has modernized finance as we know it. These services are built focusing on the consumers of this day and age. After all, you will be a lot more successful if you have them on your side. However, deciding on your audience is still easy, but being able to reach out to them is the difficult part. For this, you need to spend a lot of time and resources in developing a content marketing strategy. So, let's look at why companies are preferring this over traditional marketing strategies:
Reach Out to Larger Audiences Easily
The Internet gives all of us easy access to large amounts of information with the help of a single click. And we all know that sometimes, this info is not the most reliable. For most, this information can be a little difficult to handle, too. After all, there is no guide on how to get your hands on reliable and unbiased data. It is no surprise that influencers have some of the fastest-growing fanbases. These people have learned how to make use of the Internet, using the applications' algorithms to spread their content to as many people as possible. That is what makes them so famous so quickly.
By experimenting with different formats, you have the opportunity to reach out to people all around the world. Especially in an industry like FinTech, which involves everyone, when you are making the most of the different sources available to you, you can reach out to a much larger audience. Everyone wants to learn about making safe investments, and as long as you continue to provide useful and easily understandable information, people will want to come back to you. In this day and age, you can also consider partnering up with other famous companies like The New York Times. This way, you will have your brand name next to a famous and reliable source, which will only help establish your standing in the industry.
Helps You Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader
Creating brand awareness is important if you want to make yourself known within the FinTech industry. This market is extremely competitive, and you need to continue to produce content of the highest quality. Without this, you will struggle to establish a foundation for yourself in this industry. By producing useful and efficient information, you will eventually find yourself being called a thought leader. In a way, this just means that you have built a legacy for yourself, and you are now considered to be very trustworthy by consumers.
When people notice that your help is safe and trustworthy and that you know the finance industry like the back of your hand, they will want to keep coming back to you when they have problems. Posting content that educates your audience is not the only thing you are doing when you switch to content marketing. You are also adding value to your own brand in the eyes of your customers. When you start answering questions that customers have, without them even searching about it, the value of your services continues to go up. Hence, your brand gains importance that will benefit you in the long run.
Attract the Best of the Best
In the FinTech industry, you need to work with some of the smartest and best minds. If there is one thing that everyone knows is that coming across highly skilled data scientists or programmers is very difficult. Considering the pace at which technology and FinTech continue to develop, this is only going to get worse. So, we are sure that you realize that establishing yourself within the industry is really important. Your company needs to be able to appeal and attract the best tech professionals out there. Moreover, FinTech is still relatively new, so these professionals are always going to be critical of joining a new company. After all, job insecurity is always going to make hiring them difficult. So, when you establish an online presence, you automatically gain an advantage over other companies. Brand awareness and thought leadership will make your company look like the place to be. After that, attracting the best minds is going to be easy for you!
Types of Content by Funnel Stage
We all understand that the different kinds of content and information that companies post have one core purpose in mind: to get customers to spend their money. The objective is to guide potential consumers towards making purchases and investing in the brand. This plan is better known as a content marketing funnel.
What is a Content Marketing Funnel?
In the easiest words, a content marketing funnel is a different version of brainstorming how your consumers will react to the content you are putting out. With a marketing funnel, you are essentially trying to map out what your customer's route will look like when they see your content up until the time they purchase your product. Keep in mind there are a lot of assumptions that you will make while creating this journey. The funnel is divided into four separate smaller stages:
Awareness
Before a customer makes a purchase, they need to hear about your product. That is the first step of a content marketing funnel. When a customer walks into the hypothetical journey that you have laid out, the first assumption you will be making is that the consumer has no idea you and your brand exist. So, what do you do about that? You introduce potential customers to your brand; tell them all about what you do and how you do it. This is what we call the TOFU, Top-of-Funnel content. This content focuses on trying to gain the audience's attention. TOFU content can be shared in multiple ways:
Social Media Posts, e.g., Instagram Posts
Videos
Blogs
Pamphlets
Verbal Introductions
You do not have to start using every option available to you. That is a waste of resources and time. Instead, you can focus on using formats that go hand-in-hand with the products you have to offer. This way, you can look into enhancing the quality and quantity of content you put out. Do not forget about the key ideas that you had when you were first brainstorming about content marketing: they are equally as important in a marketing funnel, too. Use data to track which formats get the best reception and market your product to guide users to buy your services.
Evaluation
The second step of a content marketing funnel falls in the MOFU content section. Like TOFU, MOFU just refers to the Middle-Of-Funnel content, and here we are trying to imagine the consumers evaluating whether they should buy your product or not. In this stage, you are also trying to create a sense of trust between you and the customers. After all, if they trust you, they are more likely to buy from you. In this stage of the funnel, you need to provide more information about your product and why your customers need your product. Let's look at some of the ways you can continue to motivate your customers to make a purchase:
Case Studies
Webinars
Guides on how to use products
Live demonstrations
Conversion
Now, we are moving into the final stages of the funnel. In these stages, you need to finally convert your potential audience into actual customers. We call this the BOFU, Bottom-of-Funnel content. At this point, you are trying to influence your customers into making that purchase. The information that you end up sharing in this stage becomes very product-specific. You need to start answering questions like how your product should be used and what skillset is necessary to make the most of what you offer. To increase the chances of converting the potential audience into customers, you can use these services:
Product Overviews
Customer Interviews
Free Trials
Case Studies
Testimonials
Delight
Once the customers have made their purchases, you need to ensure that they come back to you if they need more help or services. This is where companies need to build customer loyalty. Even after the purchase, you need to be engaged with your customer. You can offer services like promotions and even discounts so that customers come back to you. When you do this, you make a good and long-lasting impression on the customers. Even if they do not come back to purchase things from you, they can guide other people. Word of mouth goes a really long way, especially in a developing industry like FinTech.
Start Creating Evergreen Content
The name is essentially self-explanatory. When we talk about evergreen content, we are referring to posts and information that continue to bring in new customers, even after a long time has passed. In today's time, content does not stick around for a long period of time. That is why you need to publish high-quality information consistently. Simply put, you are using SEO to publish information that is not related to current affairs. Instead, these topics are more focused on problems that continue to arise. Let's take a brief overview of the different types of evergreen content:
Q&As
Reviews
Guides
Interviews
Lists
Walkthroughs
Videos
Why is Evergreen Content Important?
Think of evergreen content as a gift that reaps fortune for a long time. The main benefits of evergreen content are very similar to the benefits of content marketing that we talked about before. However, there are more benefits to producing evergreen content than short-lived content. Let's look at some of these benefits:
Save Time
As we mentioned before, evergreen content continues to live on for a while after it is first published. When you focus on creating this content, you are essentially investing in the future. This information can be shared repeatedly while still attracting new customers. With this content available in the background, you do not have to spend more time publishing new articles. While that is ideal, it can be ignored since you have content that does the content marketing funnel work for you.
Better Investment
Spending resources on producing evergreen content is a much better investment than other marketing strategies. When you spend your time and effort creating this type of content, you are establishing a piece of work that will always get you more and more customers. Since these topics are always relatable, they are better shared amongst people, and a constant state of traffic is ensured.
Focus on the Content Distribution Pillars
The content pillar strategy is another subcategory in content marketing. If you read through the examples of companies that used content marketing, you would have noticed a pattern. When companies are publishing content, they are often focusing on a fixed number of topics. This is the content pillar strategy. Content pillars are the standout topics that you will have to select. Your website and TOFU implications will then revolve around the topics that you have selected. By focusing on a fixed number of subjects to talk about, you can spend more of your time researching and gathering information. There is no need for companies to stray away from a fixed number of topics because this leads to more time being spent on research and content production. With content pillars, you can focus more on your audience rather than just trying to throw information out.
What are the Types of Content Distribution Pillars?
The content distribution pillars are split into three parts: The "Inform" section, the "Explanation" section, and the "Solution" section. Each section, like the content marketing funnel, focuses on different information. The end goal is always the same: reaching out to a large audience and making sure they become customers.
The Inform Section
Much like awareness in TOFU content, the first subcategory of content distribution pillars focuses on informing your potential audience about your products. This information is primarily based on providing customers with all the information that they need to know. Most of the topics in this section tend to be part of evergreen content. However, you are not restricted to this and can continue to delve into the depths of a topic to better explain it to your audience. Examples of this section are hidden in plain sight. If you have ever visited an article that tells you how to do something, like Wise's article on how to close bank accounts, you have fallen victim to the first step of the content pillar strategy.
The Explanation Section
The explanation section is very similar to the evaluation segment in the content marketing funnel. In this step, you will be trying to explain all there is about your products, providing an in-depth analysis of what customers can expect. This section must be focused on if you are planning to make the most of SEO and try to rank high within multiple search engines like Google. Everyone has found themselves in the explanation pillar trap of multiple companies. Every time you visit Google and ask a question like 'What is FinTech?' you will be guided towards the companies' explanation pillar page. In these pages, you learn all about what FinTech is and why it is useful to you. This is an excellent depiction of how useful this section is in capturing the audience's interests.
The Solution Section
Now, we move on to the final step of the content pillar strategy. Here, we try to convert our potential audience members into actual customers. When people are visiting your website because of your content marketing strategy, they always have a problem that needs to be solved. In this section, you look to answer the problems that your customers are having. If you have ever seen those step-by-step guide articles, you must have noticed how they focus on different ways to solve a problem. That is the best representation of the solution selection. By focusing on providing all the right information needed to solve an issue, you start building a bond between the company and the customer. There is a sense of trust and loyalty that is established — As long as your solutions work!
Why are Content Distribution Pillars Important?
Focusing on content pillars is a different way of saying that your company should be focusing on SEO. By focusing on content pillars, companies can boost traffic and jump through rankings because they are the most knowledgeable people on a certain topic. When you select a specific topic to talk about, all the high-quality information and content that you publish consistently will focus on this one topic. Thereby, this will boost your reputation and speed up the process of being considered a thought leader. After all, if you spend most of your time researching one topic, you learn the most about it, which makes you the best and most credible source available.
Not only does it become easier to trust your company, but it also boosts the amount of time people spend on your website. In the MOFU section for content marketing, we talked about your customers evaluating products after being introduced to them. That section is relevant here again, as people will spend more time on your website because you have more types of information on the same topic. This, in turn, makes it easier for you to convert potential customers into loyal consumers.
Conclusion
Nowadays, technology plays an essential part in our everyday lives, so it is important for companies to start focusing on content marketing. Content marketing is a broad term with many subcategories like the content pillar strategy or the content marketing funnel. These marketing plans focus on increasing online traffic and guiding users toward company websites. This strategy focuses on explaining FinTech to the general public in ways that are easy to understand. As a result of this, companies benefit from an increase in the audience they are reaching out to and by establishing themselves within the FinTech industry. This is an important aspect of creating brand awareness, which not only benefits their customer audience but also helps attract some of the best tech professionals.
The FinTech world is continuing to make rapid developments, and it is revolutionizing the finance industry as we speak. It is an extremely competitive field that requires companies to be at the top of their game. Content marketing can be done in several ways, and it has its own list of benefits. From being the cheapest option available to provide the largest target reach, companies can focus their resources on providing specific or evergreen solutions to ensure that customers are left satisfied.
With this marketing plan, FinTech firms can take a firm hold on future trends to further improve their standing in the industry. So, now that you have learned all there is to content marketing, what are you waiting for? Gather your team, sit down to brainstorm, and start working on improving your company's status in the eyes of your audience!