Ever since the pandemic started, a lot of our work tasks have been shifted online. The world has become more and more accustomed to online life, and nowadays, a good chunk of our work can be done online. In today’s day and age, technology is the most important aspect of many industries, and it has also started revolutionizing the financial market. Many of the tasks that required customers to visit banks in person have been shifted online, and customer satisfaction has skyrocketed over the past couple of years. However, when we start talking about FinTech startups, a lot more effort has to be made in order to make sure that they stand on the same footing as famous banks.
The Internet is a difficult place to explore. With millions of websites and sources available, information on FinTech can overwhelm customers. However, customers are not the only ones who suffer from this. There is an abundance of different techniques available on the Internet, most of which are not backed by any statistics, and this can end up sending startup companies on the wrong path. Navigating your way through this maze of unlimited information is difficult, and it is even harder when you take the industry’s competitiveness into consideration. In this competitive market, it is essential for startups to come up with a unique and special approach to attract customers — But the question is, how do these companies ensure that they are doing the right things? After all, there is immense pressure on these companies; one mistake and they might lose everything.
Even though FinTech is a fast-growing industry, it still lacks the unconditional trust and sense of safety that is present between consumers and traditional banks. Overcoming this problem is where the FinTech industry has to put in quite a bit of effort, especially startups that are looking to establish themselves within the market. When we talk about the process, it seems quite simple: create an exciting and comprehensive marketing strategy that will attract new customers. However, this is not as easy as it looks. In this article, we will be talking about the fundamentals of content marketing while focusing on customer acquisition techniques that companies can use. So, continue on and learn more about the different techniques that you can use and how successful companies built themselves from the ground up!
What Do We Mean by Customer Acquisition Techniques?
The name is pretty much self-explanatory. When we talk about customer acquisition techniques, we are referring to the process by which companies reach out to potential customers and the journey this audience has until they become new consumers. Now, there are several ways to go about this journey, but it all starts with sitting down with your team and brainstorming a plan or, rather, a digital marketing strategy.
What is Digital Marketing?
The way you share information is essential to how well your company will grow. Customers essentially live on the Internet. That is the assumption your company should be working by. So, if your potential consumer is going to learn more about your company online, you need to focus on what that customer is going to see. When you are marketing on the Internet, this is referred to as digital marketing, and it is one of the best ways to market your brand. All the famous companies you come across nowadays have a brilliant digital marketing layout set up, which ensures that customers are learning more and more about their products, even if it is the same information. The more information available to your customers, the more interested they will be in supporting your cause.
Factors to Keep in Mind When Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy
Now, hold on. Creating a marketing strategy is not as easy as it sounds. There are quite a few things you need to consider and keep in mind before you can get out there on the market. This is an integral step, and there is no room for cutting corners here — your company depends on a marketing strategy. So, let’s look at some of the things that startup companies must keep in mind while they are brainstorming a marketing plan to bring in new customers:
Figure Out What Topics You Will be Addressing
The very first step of brainstorming a brilliant marketing strategy is to figure out what topics your company will be focusing on. The main aim of your discussion should be to solve customer problems while focusing on innovations within the industry as well as providing essential insights into your company. Through the content that you post online, you have the ability to educate a larger potential audience and engage them in discussions that will distinguish you from the rivals around you.
When we come to the topic of FinTech, the number of questions consumers have is endless. A lot of customers do not understand how FinTech really works, and that is why they are often hesitant to get involved in this market. When customers are trusting other people with their money, they want to be sure of everything. Is the company safe? Are they making the right decision? Will something go wrong? These are all questions that your company should be looking to answer. After all, the easiest way to establish a relationship with your customer base is by satisfying them with all the things they want to hear. Customers want to know if they are making the right decision, and it is your job to explain why they are making the right decision by trusting you. Once you can get the hang of that, you have mastered the first step of your brilliant marketing plan. With this, your potential consumers will know of your brand, and the next step would be to turn them into actual customers.
Learning More About Your Potential Audience
This is perhaps the easiest aspect of brainstorming for a digital marketing plan. When you start up a business, you already have an idea of who you will be promoting your products to. However, because of how easy this task seems, it is very easy to forget about or skip over some of the key things that you need to be focused on. When we talk about learning more about your potential audience, the idea is pretty simple. Answering the following questions is a great way to get started on learning about the people you are trying to attract:
What kind of problems is your company looking to solve?
Where is your company going to be solving these questions, and how?
What type of solutions will your company be able to provide, and will the customers like them?
When you answer these questions in an attempt to understand your audience better, you are laying out a plan for attracting the customers. These questions also follow the marketing strategy that is provided by a content marketing funnel, and we will elaborate on the steps that make up the funnel later on in this article.
Learn to Stand Out from the Rest
The financial market is a difficult market to compete in, and that is mainly because it is something that involves almost every person in today’s world. Keep in mind there are already well-established companies that may be ruling the industry, and let’s not forget about the up-and-coming startups that may be taking the market by surprise. Your job is substantially more difficult because of the presence of these companies in the market. According to the O8 Agency, there are more than 25,000 companies present in the FinTech Agency as of 2022, and all of these companies are essentially sharing the same products that you will be looking to offer your new customers.
By stating this, we are not trying to scare you away from the competition, nor are we telling you to market products that the industry and potential audience have never seen before. While innovation is ideal for startups, the best way to go about things is to follow other companies. It is often more difficult to bring in new customers if a new company happens to be completely different from the rest of the competitors. So, when you are looking to promote your goods on the Internet, you need to start off with the basics and then move on to introducing new and improved products.
Personalize the Way You Reach Out to Customers
The best way to attract new customers is by aligning your content with their specific desires and requirements. Essentially, the marketing plan you are creating should be focused on how to deal with specific customer needs and wants. This way, you increase the chances of satisfying the customer when they have questions and problems. When you create content that directly talks about the problems, concerns, and questions that the audience may have, you are more likely to capture their attention and keep them engaged. By doing this, your customers will understand that you are more committed to providing value to them, thereby making them more likely to want to buy your products.
When you are highly focused on your audience and their needs, you are focusing on their preferences and motivations. By doing so, you can produce content that relates to your audience on a deeper level, making them more likely to act. This action does not necessarily have to be purchasing your products, but it can still be beneficial to your brand. They can simply sign up for a service or even share posts about your brand, all of which increase your target audience. To get a better idea of how to know more about the customer, you can use data to learn.
Research and Use of Data Can Go a Very Long Way
As a startup company, especially in the FinTech industry, you cannot begin your digital marketing journey without doing your fair share of research. Research is the foundation of effective online marketing, and it ensures that you are making informed decisions about the approach you are taking to bring in new customers. If you have ever been a part of an online marketing team, you must have heard the word traffic. The word traffic is of great importance, and it helps understand potential audiences better than anything else. When we mention the word traffic, we are talking about the users that head over to your website and the time they spend on different pages of your website.
If you notice that your audience is spending a greater amount of time on videos rather than other informative pages like articles, then you can assume that customers prefer watching someone solve their problems, possibly because it is easier to follow. By determining this, you can then focus on producing more videos, which will then attract more customers, hence increasing brand and customer loyalty. As a result of this, you can allocate your resources to strategies that have proven to be successful. Apart from data, there are more ways of figuring out how customers tend to think and work in certain scenarios. When you can determine this, you will be able to personalize your products further.
Everyone in A Team is Equally Important
Trust us when we say this: relying solely on your marketing team will not help you make a comprehensive marketing strategy. It is a common approach, and many companies rely on this method, but as a startup looking to attract new customers, you will eventually hit a brick wall using this method. As we talked about earlier, knowing your audience is crucial. As a company, your focus should be to try and understand the challenges and issues that your customers may encounter. This is where the marketing department may fail to provide the right kind of information about the consumer. To better your digital marketing efforts, you need to involve every department on your team, especially the sales, customer service, and product teams.
These teams are some of the most well-versed in dealing with the problems that your customers face, and they are often the best at finding solutions, too. With the help of their insights, your team can build on several ideas that will increase the quality of your marketing strategy. Once you have the wealth of information that these teams bring, your marketing team can then take the lead on the matter. With all the information in front of them, they will be able to create brilliantly unique and intriguing content for your potential audience. By doing this, you are not only accelerating the content creation process, but you are also ensuring that your market strategies are highly relevant. As a result, you are more likely to foster stronger and more customer-centric connections with your audience.
The Customer Acquisition Funnel
Before we move into the different stages of digital marketing, we want to talk a little about the customer acquisition funnel because it ties in very closely with brainstorming a plan. This can also be called the content marketing funnel because the foundation behind both funnels is essentially the same. This funnel is a strategic approach that helps startups anticipate and understand how customers will respond to the content that is created and distributed. It is better understood if you think of it as a mind map. In this mind map, you are pretending to be a customer and trying to work your way from first hearing about a company until the point you become an actual consumer. In this funnel, you are breaking down the route that your customers take into stages or steps, after which you evaluate how the customers are reacting at each step. Let’s look at the stages that make up the customer acquisition funnel:
Brand Awareness
The very first step that a potential customer should take in that mind map of yours is being introduced to your brand. In this stage, you are looking into the ways that your potential customer hears about your product. Obviously, before this stage, you are assuming that the customer has never thought of your brand; they have never seen it. So, at this stage, you should be looking to talk about your brand and the products you offer; tell customers everything about your brand and the processes you have going on. Brand awareness starts off with customers learning about the existence your brand through these modes:
Articles
Physical Introductions
Social Media Marketing
Advertisements
Partnerships
These are just a few ways customers can learn that your brand exists. As a startup company, the more platforms you use to spread your content on, the better the reception you will get, but that is not possible. Not only is using almost every platform a waste of time and resources but startups also often lack the funding required to even use them in the first place. So, instead of using every platform available, you can simply connect the platforms available to you with the products that you have to offer. If you are offering customers a personalized service, then using social media to market your brand is a good choice. Similarly, partnerships would also be a great place to start marketing.
Customer Interest
The second stage of a customer acquisition funnel focuses deeply on capturing the customer’s interest with more specific and informative content. In this stage of the funnel, your company should be looking toward providing comprehensive and detailed information about the products and services that you have to offer. In the brand awareness stage, we talked about briefly introducing potential customers to the fact that your brand and its services exist. Now, we are focusing on telling these potential customers more about how your services work, how you are different from competitors, and how your products will benefit customers. Essentially, at this stage, you are trying to educate potential consumers and use that to your advantage. Here are some of the ways you can capture the customer’s interest:
“How-To” articles
Demonstrations
Videos
Case Studies
Consideration
At this stage of the funnel, your content should be transitioning towards answering customer questions and motivating your potential customers toward buying your products. Now, you want to start talking about the unique selling points of your product, using that to try and get your customers to make a purchase. This stage of the funnel focuses on persuading customers and getting them to consider your product. Here, your customers should be wondering about why your product is going to solve all their problems. To persuade your customers, you can use the following channels:
Comparisons with other products
Buyer Guides
Demonstrations
User Reviews
Interactive Content
Customer Conversion
Now, let’s move on to the final stage of the funnel, the end goal, conversion. At this stage, you should be trying to encourage the audience to finally take that action that will benefit your company and make them actual consumers. The end goal has always been to ensure that the customers who have visited your product or website are going to finally interact with it. This can be in the form of buying a product, purchasing a service, or even contacting your company. Here is a list of things you can put right at the end to encourage customers to take that leap of faith:
A Smooth Checkout Process
Forms (If your end goal is to get responses to something)
Streamlined Landing Pages
Payment Options
Confirmation Pages
Retaining the Customers
At this point, the conversion process is over. The customer has made their choice and interacted with your brand in a positive way, but is that all there is? No! While you have achieved the end goal of converting your target audience into customers, you cannot forget about them once the process is complete! Customer retention plays an equally important role for startups, as does the customer acquisition strategy. There is no benefit of having a brilliant customer acquisition strategy in place if you cannot ensure that the customers continue to revisit your page. Getting a hold of new customers is difficult, but getting old customers to come back? That is much easier. Let’s look at some of the ways you can promote customer retention and satisfaction:
Provide Limited-Time Offers
Ensure Follow-up Communication
Encourage Regular Check-Ins
Provide Information Regarding New Launches or Sales
What Are the Different Stages of Digital Marketing?
We have already talked about what digital marketing is, so let’s get started on the different kinds of ways that you can create a marketing strategy. Here is an overview of the stages that are included in digital marketing:
Look to educate and entertain.
Creating an engaging and attractive website.
Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Moving into Social Media Marketing (SMM).
Getting the help of influencers and partnerships
Providing Incentives
Look to Educate and Entertain
When you stop to look at the FinTech industry, it is undeniably one of the largest and most complex fields in the world. From payment transactions to different account types and even stocks or bonds, there is so much to learn about. When you factor in the rate at which the industry continues to develop, the market gets even more confusing. Now, if your customers are not one of the finance experts who are already thriving within this market, there is a lot of work that you need to do as a startup looking to attract these people. Finance can get really boring if there is very little understanding of the whole subject, and for an industry like FinTech, spending your time and resources bridging this gap is really important.
If we are being honest, a lot of the newer potential audiences nowadays struggle to understand the concepts behind finance. As a result, they are less likely to switch over from traditional banking to an industry like FinTech. If you struggle to understand a topic, you would not want to move into something that is even more difficult to understand. Hence, as a startup looking to attract new customers, it is your job to solve this problem. By ensuring that the information you share is easily accessible and understandable, you increase the chances of engaging your readers and boosting customer retention. Customers will want to come back to your company because you can break finances down for them. The easier it is to understand how financial decisions work, the happier the customer will be.
However, that does not mean that your only target audience is people who struggle to understand the financial sector. People with different experiences are always seeking for new information and guidance on their financial journey. That is where your expertise must shine through. Beginners are often looking for fundamental explanations, while experts tend to look for in-depth analysis and insights. By addressing the needs of both beginners and experts, your target audience grows, thereby increasing the number of potential customers. Dopay, the payroll service, does this best. By using their website to cater to the needs of business owners, Dopay gives off the idea that they are the people that customers should go to whenever they have similar problems. The better you are at explaining things, the better customers will feel about their problems being solved by you.
Creating an Engaging and Attractive Website
Now that we have learned about how our information should be shared and the things to consider, we need a place to upload it. After the pandemic, the importance of efficiency grew to be unmatched. When people started spending more time at home, they wanted to be able to navigate through the Internet with ease. That is why your website needs to be easily accessible and easy on the eyes. A user-friendly interface plays a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers. When people are able to navigate through your website easily, they are more satisfied as they have to spend less time trying to solve a problem. Customers do not want to start guessing where to look for their solutions.
If we were to ever come across a website where it was difficult to find what we were looking for, then it would not take us long to click off and look elsewhere. We already have a problem on our hands, and we do not want to waste more effort trying to comb through a cluttered design. By avoiding excessive distractions and random elements, you can improve customer satisfaction and boost customer reception. For your website, you should look toward adding a sense of consistency when it comes to fonts, colors, and the general layout. This way, customers will feel more relaxed, and they will be able to predict what is coming up next as they load onto different pages. You can also look to incorporate AI usage within your websites. Customers love an AI chatbot. These bots will solve customer queries within seconds, which saves up on the customer’s time and effort.
Focus On Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is one of the simplest yet greatest digital marketing tools that startups can use to boost the number of customers they get. The strategy itself seems like a difficult one to master, but when you break it down to its core, it is a simple process that every company uses. The key to mastering SEO is understanding that you are trying to make your website pages seem like the best options available to multiple search engines like Google. The way it works is that when customers head over to Google and search for solutions for a problem, the websites ranking highest in terms of SEO usually find themselves at the top of the list of searches on Google.
To rank well in search engines, there are a couple of things that companies need to look out for. The first step focuses on being efficient with your information. Search engines tend to provide people with the best information available, and for that, your website must follow these criteria. The most important part of SEO is focusing on keywords and phrases. Keywords and phrases refer to the specific terms that customers may search for when looking for a solution. This comes easy to those companies that understand their potential audience really well and can imagine problems or questions that these people may have. When you have an idea of what your potential customer may be looking for, you can manipulate your articles and information to involve the keywords relating to that problem. This way, your information will show up as one of the very first links on sites like Google.
Another aspect that companies need to focus on is compatibility across all platforms. Google is not going to show you websites that are not easily accessible on devices like a phone. So, to ensure that you keep ranking amongst the highest links on search engines, you must ensure that your website works just as well on both computers and mobile phones. The best way you can rank high on search engines is by putting yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. Imagine how you would search for solutions and try to implement those within your articles. Now, let us clarify one thing: there is no exact way to master SEO. The algorithms that make up search engines are evolving constantly, and because of that, so are SEO practices. As a result of that, you must always look into refining your work, updating it, and improving it when needed.
Moving into Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media is the place to be if you want to start looking for new customers. When it comes to social media marketing, there are two ways companies can go about this: traditional marketing and paid marketing. Traditional SMM simply refers to marketing your products on your own. Your own team will be responsible for creating and publishing content that is aimed at capturing the attention of potential customers. On the other hand, paid marketing refers to the use of digital marketing agencies to try and boost brand awareness. Social media marketing is a dynamic strategy that is used to connect with potential customers through advertisements or posts. There are a couple of things you should consider before you get into social media marketing. Which platforms are you going to choose?
Answering this question is important as it deals with several aspects that must be considered. When choosing a platform to market your products on, you must select an app that aligns with the audience that you are trying to target. For example, if Gen Z happens to be your potential customer audience, then you should look toward apps like Instagram, TikTok, or X. The next step would be to create a profile. Usually, we would say you should have a professional presence on the platform, but nowadays, you never want to seem too professional. Everybody loves a good mix of professionalism and casualness. When you are promoting your products on social media, ensure that you are providing consistent updates and uploading content frequently. This way, you can maximize customer engagement by capturing their attention through posts and even replying to comments or messages. Remember, building relations with your followers is very important.
Working with Influencers and Getting Partnerships
In today’s world, there is a very clear audience that companies are trying to reach out to, and that is Gen Z. Gen Z rule social media, and they are obsessed with their influencers. Nowadays, a lot of companies will partner up with social media stars in order to leverage the influencer’s reach, credibility, and customer engagement. Social media influencers can target new audiences like no one else, and using that to your company’s advantage is a great way to go about increasing the number of potential customers you get.
The first step to leveraging partnerships with social media influencers is picking the right person. The smarter choice would be to focus on someone who talks about FinTech or finance-related topics, as their customer base is more likely to understand and be interested in your company. After that, you want to focus on what the influencer believes in. Oftentimes, influencers are very open about how they feel regarding a certain topic, so you must ensure that their content aligns with your brand. Another thing to focus on is the partnership negotiations. When your company is reaching out to an influencer, you will have to offer something in return. This can either be money or free products. In return, you should clearly define what you are expecting from the influencer and encourage a deal that benefits you.
Providing Incentives
While this stage doesn’t exactly fall within the realm of digital marketing, it can be incorporated into it. As much as we hate to say it, the easiest way for your startup company to attract new customers is by providing incentives. People respond to incentives. Whether it is free products, a free trial of your services, or an exclusive sale off of your products. As a startup, you should be willing to take this risk and be ready to provide these incentives through the mediums that we have listed above. Think about it: if you were being offered a product or a service for free, wouldn’t you want to join?
Final Thoughts
A successful customer acquisition strategy is a crucial part of FinTech startups. In an industry like FinTech, there is a lot of competition, and because of that, companies need to be able to bring in new customers from the get-go. With technology being an integral part of our everyday lives, it is necessary for startup companies to start using that to their advantage. By using SEO to send your website links to the top of search engines or focusing on marketing through social media, startups can start building long-lasting relationships with their customers, boosting brand awareness and customer loyalty. To find and attract new customers, your company needs to understand what people want — That is the foundation of a good marketing strategy. Once you can get that out of the way, your company can then focus on using the different stages of digital marketing to expand your target reach and focus on appealing to these new potential customers.