If you’ve clicked on this article, then you must already know that a robust fintech marketing strategy is non-negotiable for success. Fintech moves fast with ever-changing priorities, regulations and fierce competition. This industry comes with unique challenges, as it has never been easier for consumers and B2B clients to shift to a competitor dangling the next big reward. Retaining and converting users has become increasingly difficult in such a complex market.
Fintech brands need to connect and reach their target audience through engaging and educational content across multiple channels. Resonating with customers, demonstrating the value of your product or service quickly and intelligibly, and showing how it can solve financial problems is vital for gaining trust and loyalty. But before you can successfully implement an effective fintech marketing strategy, you need to understand what channels are right for your audience and brand.
Our fintech marketing strategy guide explores the ins and outs of defining and implementing your brand’s strategy. Along the way, we’ll look at regulatory and compliance requirements that could impact your marketing activity, as well as the tactics you should consider as part of your fintech digital marketing strategy.
If you’re looking for something specific, use the links below to navigate to it.
- What is fintech marketing?
- Why you need to invest in your fintech marketing strategy
- Working with regulations and compliance in fintech marketing
- 7 stages of an impactful marketing strategy
Ready to get started with a fintech marketing agency? For a free consultation, speak to our team today.
What is fintech marketing?
Fintech marketing is a specialised strategy designed to connect digital financial services with both consumers and businesses. It’s about using tailored tactics to reach your target audience and effectively promote how your technology and automation enhance and simplify their financial lives, moving beyond traditional financial models.
The primary challenge for marketers is earning trust and cutting through the complexity of the service. Most customers view the financial sector as tedious and daunting, often feeling confused by complex terms and unfamiliar conditions. Adding to this difficulty are rapidly evolving industry trends, fierce competition, and strict regulatory environments, all of which make it harder for brands to entice and retain users.
The execution of fintech marketing is unique because of these challenges. To build credibility and foster loyalty, content must be both creative and highly educational. It’s key to demystify complex financial topics and provide clear, engaging messaging. This specialised focus on trust, clarity, and education is vital for converting customers into long-term users.
Why you need to invest in your fintech marketing strategy
In the fintech industry, trust is the currency. Customers must have absolute confidence in who handles their money and sensitive financial data. This is why your fintech marketing strategy is essential: it actively provides reassurance, builds credibility, and educates customers on the value of a product or service. In this competitive and rapidly evolving market, effective marketing isn’t just about promotion; it’s about clearly communicating your unique value to build the long-term customer loyalty your brand needs to thrive.
Brand awareness
The fintech market is highly saturated, and so it can be a tough industry to establish yourself against the competition, especially when you are in the start-up phase. With such fierce competition, standing out requires more than just a great product or service. Branding is what will make you stand out and be seen as a trusted leader. Brand awareness is a key component to ensure your fintech business is seen while building credibility and fostering trust.
To become a trusted leader in the space, clearly communicating your value through consistent messaging will help you reach your target audiences on various platforms. Showcasing your unique value can be the key factor that sets your fintech business apart from the rest, resulting in long-term success. Strong branding can attract customers, and when combined with showing your USP, you can ensure you’re seen as a trusted leader in the fintech space.
Customer engagement
Focusing on existing customers is just as important as attracting new ones. Nurturing your current customer base through engaging and valuable content, as well as new features tailored to their evolving needs, can help to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Customers feel that their feedback is heard when questions about your products and services are answered upfront. They are more likely to stay engaged and trust your brand.
Building a sense of community around your brand can also foster deeper relationships, using social media platforms to interact with customers while creating a space for customers to discuss their thoughts, comments and questions with others. This space allows your customers to feel heard and become more connected to the brand, turning them into advocates who support your fintech business and help you reach your long-term growth goals.
Building trust and credibility
Trust and credibility are crucial for fintech brands because the industry deals with sensitive financial data. A strong reputation is built on demonstrated security and reliability, and it is the foundation for attracting and keeping customers. You can build this trust through consistent and transparent communication, which reassures customers that their finances and data are protected. In essence, this is the perfect opportunity to employ the storytelling maxim, “show, don’t tell,” by consistently demonstrating your security and reliability.
This is where Digital PR comes into play. It’s an excellent way to showcase your product or service’s unique value proposition and demonstrate your industry expertise. By highlighting how you stay current with industry trends and strict regulations, you can position your brand as a knowledgeable leader in the fintech market. This not only encourages customers to rely on your service but also enhances your overall reputation within the industry. Crucially, it also ensures visibility even when a user isn’t actively in the market and connects your brand to other trusted organisations—a powerful “halo effect.”
Reach new audiences
Attracting new customers within your target market is a key goal for any fintech business. Strategic fintech marketing is essential here, capturing interest and effectively showcasing your product or service’s core value. Equally important is educating your audiences through testimonials and helpful content, which clearly explains your offering, its benefits, and the specific problem it solves. This approach not only informs potential customers about your services but also actively engages them and builds confidence in your fintech brand.
Working with regulations and compliance in fintech marketing
As a fintech brand, you already manage the broad regulatory standards that govern your business. But those rules don’t stop at your product, they impact your marketing and advertising activity too. The strategies and tactics you use must adhere to strict legal requirements. Read on to learn more about keeping your marketing compliant.
Data privacy and security
One of the main regulatory concerns in fintech marketing is data privacy. Handling financial and personal data, such as payment details and identity verification, comes with its own set of responsibilities. All marketing activities must comply with locally applicable data protection regulations, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the EU. Not only does this maintain trust, but ensures legal repercussions are avoided. We have previously written about GDPR considerations for marketers, but fintech faces additional scrutiny due to the sensitivity of financial data and sector-specific regulations such as PSD2 and FCA guidelines.
Fintech marketers must meticulously manage customer data, which includes securing explicit consent for marketing communications with Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) compliance. This applies more strictly in B2C communications, as B2B can work with more of a ‘soft opt-in’. This is a regulation that works hand in hand with GDPR.
Ultimately, fintech marketing strategies must prove that they have robust, transparent and compliance systems in place so that they have audit-ready record keeping.
Advertising and promotion compliance
All fintech marketing activities must follow strict advertising and promotional guidelines. Financial regulators have clear restrictions on how financial products can be marketed, prohibiting things like exaggeration about investment return claims, loan terms, or downplaying any risks to users. All promotional content needs to be accurate to ensure it doesn’t mislead customers in any way, showing transparency and fairness.
Failure to protect customers from making risky or uninformed financial decisions can lead to fintech companies facing regulatory scrutiny, penalties and a damaged reputation. Compliance should be the main focus in any marketing campaign to build credibility with new and existing users.
Financial promotion guidelines
In the UK, financial promotions are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), referring to any advertising that invites customers to engage with financial services or products. This type of communication includes social media, a website, email marketing, or paid advertising. These guidelines from the FCA state that all marketing materials need to be clear, fair and not misleading to consumers or B2B clients. Any language that could misinform or confuse customers should be avoided. Terms and conditions also need to be transparent to ensure all product information is accurate and presented in a balanced way – including any risks with a fintech company’s services.
Monitoring regulatory changes
As an industry renowned for its ever-evolving, strict rules and regulations, fintech brands have to stay up to date with the latest industry trends and news in the legal landscape. Whether it’s new technologies, emerging risks, or customer protection, remaining compliant with these changes will maintain credibility and ensure trust remains with customers. Regularly monitoring these laws and regulatory changes will help a fintech business avoid compliance gaps. Failing to stick to compliance guidelines can lead to hefty fines, legal disputes and a loss of customer trust.
Integrating how you adapt to regulatory changes directly into your marketing is a transformative move. This establishes your brand as a proactive leader, visibly demonstrating that you are on top of regulatory developments, and ready to communicate what this means for your customers. Whilst major legislative changes typically come with sufficient notice through consultations, industry briefings and the FCA’s regulatory sandbox, it’s crucial to stay agile as some regulatory shifts happen with little lead time. By continually monitoring developments and leveraging early consultation opportunities, you secure that strategic advantage.
7 stages of an impactful fintech marketing strategy
We have established that fintech is constantly evolving and hyper-competitive. Success is rooted in strategic agility and the ability to connect with real people. With this in mind, what are the stages that will get you from a ‘great idea’ to a flawlessly executed marketing strategy that drives maximum impact for your bottom line?
1. Understanding your audience and market
The first stage is perhaps the most vital: understand your audience. Your products or services need to solve their problems, so it’s essential to define your target ideal customer profile(s), making sure you know their needs and what their pain points are. This begins with a competitive analysis to see what the competition is currently doing, identifying any gaps in the market, and using the opportunities found to differentiate your unique offering. Once you’ve narrowed down your niche and who you’re targeting, audience research is the natural next step.
2. Tracking trends
Keeping track of emerging trends relevant to your niche helps you stay ahead of competitors. It also ensures your strategy remains aligned with market expectations, allowing you to refine your offering as customer needs evolve.
For example, B2B fintech platforms offering embedded finance solutions should pay close attention to the growing demand for real-time payments, particularly within e-commerce and supply chain sectors. Creating marketing content that highlights faster B2B transactions can demonstrate how your business is adapting to this trend, positioning you as forward-thinking and customer-centric.
Fintech clients have seen strong engagement by aligning their content with this trend, emphasising the benefits of real-time payments in terms of customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage.
3. Setting goals and planning
In the planning process of any fintech marketing strategy, it’s important to set and define goals. Setting objectives can ensure all efforts align with one another, as well as being measurable to see the success of a campaign. Using SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) can provide a clear framework to help guide all strategic decisions in the planning phase.
Our fintech clients often turn their broader goals into much more measurable ones. Instead of creating a generic goal, such as “increase brand awareness, tuning this objective into a more measurable and time-bound one can be highly effective. For example, “increase organic traffic to our blog by 20% over the next 3 months” helps teams determine their focus, allowing them to assess what’s working and what’s not. If a tactic isn’t working, this can be amended accordingly.
4. Selecting the right channels
Choosing suitable marketing channels based on your target audience, market trends, and competitor analysis is crucial in a fintech marketing strategy. For the fintech industry, it’s also important to ensure all regulatory guidelines are compliant in your marketing activities to avoid fines or penalties. Whether it’s paid media, email marketing, or social media platforms, all of your marketing activities should be tailored to your audience. If your fintech product targets Gen Z, your channel mix should include platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat to engage with your audience through short-form educational content, such as videos and reels. This generation values authenticity, so being present on their preferred digital channels with content that appeals to them can improve engagement.
Once you’ve chosen the right marketing channels, any key metrics should also be determined to track progress and measure the campaign’s success. Again, for Gen Z-focused campaigns, this could include metrics like engagement rate, completion rate, or shares to measure and understand how your audience has interacted with your content.
5. Creating content and messaging
The fintech industry can often feel highly complex and intimidating to customers, especially for those unfamiliar with financial terminology. That’s why educating your audience with clear and compelling content is so important. Breaking down the complexity and the unknown of your product or service can ensure they gain a better understanding while gaining credibility. If you can show how your product or service can solve real-life problems, you can make it easier for users to engage with your offering.
In such a competitive market space, it’s essential to clearly communicate your product or services’ key features and benefits to display its key value – all while being highly transparent in how it works. Messaging should be tailored to specific segments of your target audience, addressing each segment’s specific needs and preferences. This personalised messaging can build trust with the audience and ultimately, drive more meaningful engagement.
6. Launching your campaign
Once your strategy and content are in place, the next step is to launch your fintech marketing campaign across all of your chosen marketing channels. Whether it’s through email, paid channels, SEO, or social media, maintaining consistency of messaging across all platforms is essential. Each marketing channel should showcase your core message and USPs to customers, no matter where they interact with your fintech brand.
This stage is also about actively engaging with your audience, especially on social media. Using social platforms provides the opportunity to build a community, starting meaningful conversations about your product and its offerings. Conversations should be encouraged, whether that’s through responding to comments and questions, or providing interactions and responding to feedback. It’s essential at this stage to strengthen customer relationships, building trust to ultimately turn users into customers.
7. Analysing results and reviewing performance
Once your campaign has been live for a certain period of time, you can begin assessing its performance against your original objectives. This is the stage where you can track and monitor the performance of any metrics, such as engagement rates, conversions and return on investment (ROI). Monitoring these indicators through a well-structured marketing data stack, combined with the right media solutions, can provide insight into what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to make any adjustments to your campaign to drive better results.
This is also an opportunity to optimise and refine your marketing efforts. By analysing the data, you can identify any trends and find new ways to improve the performance of your fintech campaigns. Using A/B testing can be highly effective, allowing you to test different varieties of your campaign’s content or messaging.
With a few variations, you can track and monitor the different versions and see which performs best. Conversion rate optimisation is also an effective way to make your existing traffic work harder by identifying any barriers to conversion. By refining the user journey, you can help users convert more efficiently and make your campaigns more impactful, using results-driven data.
Optimise your fintech marketing strategy with Impression
Thank you for joining us as we have explored how you can build an effective fintech marketing strategy. From understanding your audience and building trust to launching campaigns and using data to further optimise performance. Impression offers specialist fintech marketing services to help take your B2B or B2B fintech business to the next level. To find out what we can do for your business, speak to our team today.
