6 Pillars of Great Fintech Marketing

As the financial technology industry continues to expand rapidly, fintech marketers need to find ever more creative ways to stay ahead of the competition. Successful fintech marketing requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals of marketing strategy as well as how to apply these fundamentals effectively within the fintech space in particular. 

To help you develop your fintech marketing strategy, we'll explore the six key pillars of a successful fintech marketing plan. By structuring your marketing efforts around these six pillars, you can craft fintech marketing strategies with real business impact. Let's dive right in and break down each pillar in detail.

1. Referral, Affiliate, or Influencer Marketing

Referral marketing and affiliate marketing are effective ways to increase brand awareness and drive sales for your fintech product. These fintech marketing strategies work by incentivizing customers who refer other people to your financial services with rewards such as discounts or free products. 

Partnering with influencers who have large followings on social media platforms can also be a great way to promote your brand. Influencers can create content that showcases your services in a positive light and encourages their followers to try them out.

Referral vs. Affiliate vs. Influencer

Now let’s break down the specific differences between referral, affiliate, and influencer marketing:

Referral marketing is an effective form of word-of-mouth advertising that encourages customers to promote a business's products or services to their friends and family. Businesses can offer rewards or discounts as incentives for successful referrals, making it a win-win situation for both the customer and the company.

Affiliate marketing is an online sales strategy that rewards partners for driving customers to a business through their own promotional efforts. An affiliate is an individual or business that promotes products or services for another company in exchange for a commission on each successful referral. Affiliates use various methods of promotion such as website banners, email campaigns, and social media posts to drive traffic to your company’s website and generate sales.

Influencer marketing involves using influential people within your target audience to promote your product or service. These people could be celebrities, industry experts, well-respected bloggers, or social media personalities who have gained the trust of their followers. Typically, businesses pay influencers for their promotional work with free products or monetary compensation.

2. Gamification Techniques

Gamification is an innovative marketing strategy that can help your fintech services stand out from the competition. By incorporating elements of gameplay such as points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards into your product or services, you can improve user engagement. From quizzes and surveys to interactive activities or even virtual reality experiences, gamification offers endless possibilities for you to captivate your audience and keep them coming back for more.

By leveraging gamification tactics such as discounts, special offers, and rewards for completing tasks, you can encourage your users to fully explore the features of your fintech services and become more familiar with them. This not only creates an enjoyable learning experience that helps build loyalty and trust among customers but also drives sales. Using this approach, you can ensure that customers have positive experiences while also giving them more reasons to engage with your services.

Here are some examples of common fintech marketing gamification techniques:

Leaderboards are a common gamification technique used in many industries. By displaying user rankings, you can encourage customers to reach goals like improving their financial literacy, which will also result in more engagement with your brand.

Quizzes and challenges are an excellent way to both educate customers on financial topics and provide them with a fun experience. As a fintech company, you could design quizzes that allow customers to test their knowledge of financial topics, or offer virtual training courses that help customers learn relevant financial skills. This combination of education and entertainment is a great way to engage customers while helping them gain valuable knowledge.

Badges are another popular gamification technique. Awarding badges to customers for completing product education courses or achieving product usage milestones is another gamification technique fintech companies can use to incentivize user engagement. Badges serve as a visible form of recognition that can be displayed on user profiles. This social proof can fuel friendly competition among users and motivate other customers to utilize your product or service more actively.

3. Quality Content

Quality content is essential for successful fintech marketing campaigns, as it helps to build trust and credibility with potential customers. To be effective, fintech content should be well-researched, accurate, up-to-date, and offer real value to readers. Your content should provide clear explanations of relevant topics in a way that's engaging and easy to understand for novices and experts alike.

Fintech marketing content can include blog posts, videos, infographics, ebooks, webinars, podcasts, case studies, whitepapers, research reports, and more — all tailored to the needs of your target audience within the fintech market. In addition to being well-written, quality content should be optimized for search engines in order to increase its visibility among people who may be interested in your services or products. This means taking SEO best practices into consideration, like keyword research and meta optimization.

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media is an invaluable tool for fintech companies looking to build relationships with potential customers. By creating accounts on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, you can share content related to your services and generate brand awareness. 

Fintech Social Media Marketing Tips

Here are some tips on using social media effectively for fintech marketing:

• Identify which social media sites are most popular with your target audience and focus your efforts there. 
• Respond promptly when followers comment or ask questions about your products to show that you care about their needs. This will help foster connections between your brand and customers over time, leading to stronger customer relationships and increased loyalty.
• Track analytics to measure the success of your social media campaigns so you can adjust future efforts accordingly for maximum impact.
• Run activities like contests or giveaways on social media platforms to give your audience a reason to engage and to create buzz around your brand's social media accounts.

5. Community Marketing

Community marketing involves creating meaningful connections with people in your industry or niche to turn them into brand ambassadors within their own digital networks and communities (such as online forums, social media platforms, and other websites). This can be done through content creation, attending networking events, and participating in other industry activities. 

Engaging in community marketing allows you to access new markets while also positioning your brand as a reliable source of information in the fintech industry — which can boost potential customers' confidence in your financial services. By building strong relationships with influencers and thought leaders within the fintech industry, you can leverage their reach to spread awareness about your products or services to a much wider audience.

6. Great Branding

Having a strong, recognizable brand identity is essential for effective fintech marketing efforts. With the right branding, you can create an emotional connection with new customers that will make them more likely to trust and remember your company. Great branding also differentiates your business from competitors, helping it to stand out in the increasingly crowded fintech market.

Creating a strong and recognizable brand identity is essential for your fintech business to stand out from the competition. Your branding should be consistent across all channels, including website design and copy, logo and color scheme, social media presence, email campaigns, advertisements, promotional materials like flyers or brochures, and any other marketing materials. 

But it's not just about creating a unique look for your brand — you also need to craft a powerful message that resonates with potential customers on an emotional level. This message should clearly convey the values of your company in order to engage them in a meaningful way. Put simply: create an identity that gives people no choice but to take notice!

Storytelling in Fintech Branding

Unfortunately, not many consumers find fintech to be the most intrinsically engaging subject. While they may recognize the need for fintech services in their lives, it’s unlikely your fintech product’s features are pulling on anyone’s heartstrings. But with so many fintech brands for potential customers to choose from, finding a way to create an emotional connection can give you a serious advantage. 

Prioritizing storytelling in your brand's messaging can help you create stronger emotional connections with your existing customers by enabling them to relate to your brand on a personal level. By telling stories about how your fintech company has helped customers achieve their financial goals or how it has improved their lives, you can foster an emotional connection with customers. Leveraging storytelling as a branding tactic helps customers to see themselves in the picture and better recognize how they can benefit from using your company’s services.

Fintech Marketing Mentorship

These six pillars serve as the fundamentals of many kinds of marketing tactics, including fintech marketing, but it’s important to tailor each tactic to play to the unique strengths of your product and business. Understanding the needs of your specific target audience is the key to using these six pillars successfully to create effective marketing strategies for your fintech business. It’s also crucial to monitor and measure the success of each marketing tactic you use so you can continually optimize your strategy for maximum impact.

One of the best ways to develop your fintech marketing plan is to talk with an experienced fintech mentor. They can share with you how they’ve used each of these six pillars to successfully market their own fintech startups and guide you as you tailor your fintech marketing strategies for yours.