Navigating Fintech Marketing: Strategies for Building Trust and Brand Awareness

Look, my 2 cents in this is that don't go to an influencer for your, like your end all, be all advice on your finances, right? Talk to a professional, get actual real advice from them.

Mm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew. I'm your host, Brett please subscribe to this podcast and leave a five star review. Really just help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm doing. But this week we're gonna talk about FinTech marketing. Yes. The other side of marketing that is. To some people, a little boring, but it's still very important because we all care about our finances, especially businesses. Anyways, I have Anne with me, and she's a marketing problem solver, strategist, and content creator that helps entrepreneurs and founders grow and amplify the inspiring work they bring to the world. And she's in, she has a. In trenches mentality comes from 20 year marketing career, working with a variety of companies, large, small, clean startups in the market, research, tech, financial services, and animal health industry. But welcome to the show, Anne.

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Yes. The first question is all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

Coffee? A hundred percent. All the way. Once in the morning and in the afternoon.

Got you. Is it more of a, just gimme whatever coffee's there, or are you like specific on what coffee you actually drink?

Okay, so if I'm at home, it's whatever coffee happens to be here. But if I'm out, I definitely have a Starbucks order. I have a Dunking Donut order. It it's a little dependent I suppose. I love coffee.

Nice. Now you have a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do?

Yeah. So right now I run a marketing consultancy for early stage startups. So we're talking about early companies that have maybe zero ish, half, half an employee perhaps to to about 10 to 20 employees in the series A, series B, prese. Seed round stage. I help with marketing strategy, messaging, execution, little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. It's a lot of fun.

Nice. And so what are some of the biggest challenges in marketing FinTech products or services?

I think a lot of times in FinTech companies lean on features and features only. And to your point in this wonderful intro today, people are concerned about their finances. There's a lot of, I think financial tumultuousness that is happening and it's a great time for FinTech companies to be talking about benefits. As well as features, right? To be talking a little bit more about how this ultimately affects your life, whether it's a consumer using the product or even a financial advisor. I think it can be a challenge to get the balance right.

And is AI concerned since a lot of AI is very public? And I've seen some financial services are like, we got ai. And I'm like, wait a minute here. So how can you like market that feature but also say that it, we've we're protecting your privacy, your data because it's very important. I.

I think if you want to loop AI in, or you have looped AI in you, you just nailed it right there. You have to be very transparent about what the security privacy features are that you have in place to make sure that the information running through AI or whatever system that they have is not going out to chat GPT or not going out to the masses. It should be very cleanly kept behind a wall. And you should be able to very easily explain how it's being used. I think if you can't do those things, that is an accident and a bad accident waiting to happen.

So how do FinTech companies approach building brand awareness? I know you talked a little bit about trust, but is there anything, because like you said, we could have all the features in the world, but if no one knows who you are, it doesn't really matter.

Yeah. I think just like with any brand, you have to know where your audience is first. You have to know who you're catering to, and once you know who you are serving, who you're solving problems for. Where do they live? Do they live on social right? Are they gonna be on Reddit all the time? Are they gonna be at conferences? And then plan your strategy or outreach strategy around that audience and knowing where they're going to be for early stage companies. At any early stage company, I definitely lean heavily on content and the things that you own first, because they frequently require a lot less budget and mobile of the startups I work with don't have huge budget. So whether it's FinTech or not, making sure that you are one, paying attention to where your audience is and two, leaning on the resources you have access to easily it's is key.

So how do you remain scrappy? Because, it's funny you mentioned. Lean budgets. 'cause it feels like almost every business in the marketing department is lean.

Yeah, I definitely see myself as a UA utility player, right? A Swiss army knight, someone that can come in and do. Pretty much anything because after 20 plus years, I think I have done just about everything. Obviously marketing is changing all the time, so I'm sure some of you are like, but you haven't done a ton of influencer marketing anyway. My, the point here is that I'm scrappy because I like to come in and actually do the work. I don't just hand off a plan and say, have fun executing. I can actually come in and do the work of, for the plan that I've developed, and I'm happy to do it. And if I can't do it myself, I know a ton of contacts that I can put my clients in touch with that can get it done. So that's why.

Do you feel like influencer marketing isn't as prevalent in the FinTech because. It feels like trust is the most important thing with FinTech because again, you are dealing with financial records and that's very important to people.

There are definitely, there's definitely influencers in the financial space, right? Whether they're on TV talking heads, you for sure they exist. And it can, it's, they scare me a little bit, some of them, right? But I think that whether you are a pet parent. Doing a video for the latest, pet chew or pet toy, or you are a financial advisor that is sharing some of the great advice they have to their potential customers. I think both can be really valuable, but I think you've already nailed it here. The key is building trust, right? I think if you come out of the gate as an influencer trying to be hokey or I don't like. Feel famous or whatever. You're like, you have to have the right motivation to come out and do that type of work because particularly in financial services, I think it, it falls flat eventually if people don't trust you.

Plus for influencers, you gotta say a lot of hard things for finances of getting your finances in order. Look at David. David Ramsey's probably the, one of the more bigger ones. He's the one that's you gotta get your finances order. You have Rich Dad, poor Dad, who is on the opposite side saying that you can use debt. To help build your business. You really gotta pick and choose which one you wanna follow. 'cause they all almost differ from each other and. Don't agree with each other.

Little scary. Look, my 2 cents in this is that don't go to an influencer for your, like your end all, be all advice on your finances, right? Talk to a professional, get actual real advice from them. You can maybe see the en entertainment value that comes with influencers. You could get ideas, right? Like it's also how I use track GPT. It's great for sparking ideas in conversation, but that I might not go off and change my investment strategy based upon. What I hear on TV or even a podcast.

Gotcha. And what marketing strategies have you found that actually is great for acquiring customers? Because like I said, you, for FinTech, you need to acquire customers and you need to have their financial records. So what have you found that works well?

Again, looking at the, where my consumers were financial advisors webinars actually were. Worked insanely well at getting new leads, partially because advisors need continuing education credits. And so if you can offer really powerful, fantastic webinar content that they need, brings in a lot of good leads in the door. Now look, just because somebody watches your webinar doesn't mean they're gonna convert in the next 15 minutes, but it does give you a new pool of marketable advisors or marketable audience that you can now reach to. Content has also been just extremely powerful, whether that's through thought leadership, social media, or even some, like native advertising. I found that's all worked really nicely. It just building awareness and some credibility more than anything else.

And even to like conveying this to your bosses, it probably takes time for webinars to build that. From potential customer to actual customer, just like podcasting takes time for a first listener to an actual like lover or fan.

A hundred percent. And I, one, you have to be able to, if you're gonna do a webinar series, just like with podcasting, all right? You have to have kind of a library of topics or content that you think you wanna tackle and be able to produce them regularly so that people know what's coming. And then you need a plan to nurture those people. That come in from the webinar, right? How are you gonna follow up with them? What are you gonna send them after the fact? How, what are you gonna send them two months after the fact? It's not just even producing the content, it's the whole strategy around what we, what do we do with these people next? So key

and how do you balance that educating customers with a con, with the complex financial products. Because, finance is always complicated and not everybody understands. All of it. So how do you balance that with keeping the message simple? Because people want simple, but they also want compelling. So how do you balance all that?

That's a great question. I think that there is again, depending on your audience, so if we're talking about consumers mom and pop investor, it definitely needs to be, and also depending upon the channel, sorry, I know it all that the, it's so annoying to hear. It depends. It does depend though. If you have savvy consumer investors, you can put a little more technical information into content that's produced, whether it's an article maybe that you submit to an online publication or blog posts that you're creating for your business. And then promoting if that's not the case and those aren't your consumers, you need to make it digestible. And I think, and learning, how much content to share at once. Is key there so that you're not overwhelming them and they're not tuning you out. Now if you're working with financial professionals, I think almost the opposite is true in the sense that they need to know that you know your stuff and that you have street cred and credibility and know how to walk through the pieces, the technical pieces of your, let's say your financial planning, service. Service. To know that your platform has the chops to help them out. I think it's, again, it goes back, you gotta know your audience to know how much to feed them and how much to or not to feed them in terms of content.

And would you. Technically, you just put 'em into buckets like these are your regular customers that don't really know much and don't understand lingo in the industry specifically, and then your financial advisor, everybody else, you could get away with more lingo than let's say your regular customers that have no idea what you're talking about, and it's all a different language to them.

But it's even, it's, you know what? I think that's definitely one approach to it and it's important, the lingo piece, actual vernacular. But even think about the approach again with mom and pop investor. I might want a story. I. I might do better with this information in a story format, something that's relatable to me. Whereas an advisor might want the facts, they might just wanna know these features will help you do this with your business, or something to that effect, right? A, maybe a story isn't exactly what they need. Maybe they need a case study. I don't know. I shooting a little from the hip here, but, so it's not even the lingo, it's how you actually present ultimately that information to them to matters.

So should you put your content marketing different buckets? Maybe it's maybe this could be for both people. Maybe this is just for your customers, and then maybe this is just for the financial advisors, but you could have some for both and then others just completely spit off.

For sure. I think yes.

Got you. And then where can you leverage the analytics of this to optimize the marketing campaigns? Because we all can create campaigns and then go, wait a minute, this isn't working as well as I thought it would.

Yeah. Look, part of the joy and the pain of marketing is when things don't, is the experimentation of it and learning from the things that don't go well. And, I've definitely had campaigns where I sent something out and was like, why did this do well? And it was a shock. And so I think when that happens, depending on what it is that you've sent to, whether it's an email or even a webinar or whatever, I think it's a good time to just sit down after and be like, okay, was it the open rate? Was it the click rate? Was there not enough attendance? You have to like to stop and ask some important questions of what actually didn't do well? I know. And then see sometimes too, do you have anything else to compare it to? Was there a, did you run any content with a similar topic at some point? Did it do better, worse? I. And then see if you can make tweaks. I do this a lot actually at a side note with my own LinkedIn content, and I'll take the same post, which maybe did poorly one day I'll tweak a couple words and then run it again on a different day and we'll see potentially a different result. So I think sometimes when you look at analytics, you have to be willing to, one, ask yourself some hard questions, make some tweaks, and try again. I think that's, I think that's the best you can do.

And do you have any best prac practices for compliance and regulatory considerations in FinTech marketing? Because that's the other side of it, is that the B2C, which doesn't do any financial regulatory, you can sh shoot from the hip a little bit more. But from like medical and like FinTech, you have a lot of regulatory that you have to understand.

That's true. So there are. Like different software. I'm thinking of social media in particular that can help track the social media posts that you're putting out there. There's different types of it like, or compliance services or software that can really help keep you in line and keep you. Just in accordance with where you need to be. I would say too, make sure depending on what kind of business you are, again, if you're a larger FinTech company, you likely have lawyers already involved, right? They're already looking over your stuff. Perhaps you have regular compliance review of documents that go out. I remember back in the day, I used to work for a large tam and any. Any content that we wrote, how to go get FINRA approval and that would take weeks. I think one, you got it to your point, you have to know your audience here again and know, like where are the legal lines drawn? And make sure that you are just utilizing, I think, the appropriate tools that are out there available. There might be more than people think.

And how do you approach personalizing and targeting your campaigns and strategies in FinTech marketing? Is it just the regulatory or the financial advisors and then the mom and pop, or is it a little bit more split and or do you get a little bit more personal with the regular customers and less, more professional with the. Financial advisors or is it a mixed bag because everybody has different personalities and you're just kinda I think most people like this, so I'm gonna try do that one. And I think most people like this, so I'm gonna try that one.

Yeah, it's a good question. So generally speaking, the financial services companies that I've worked with all cater towards, they're all B2B, so they all work with financial advisors. Almost exclusively now, there may be some content that you have to make that the advisor could hand out to their clients. So there is some B2B, B2C, but for the most part we're dealing with a financial advisor audience. And within that you have registered investment advisors. Like you've got broker dealers, like there are their own segments that are with, within that realm of a financial advisor. And they all work very differently and think very differently too. So I think, how you approach them also depends upon how much flexibility they have within their organization. But I think if you have an independent advisor that you can maybe be a little more casual with or send out, have more flexibility to send things their way, they're gonna have different needs. I think that's how you at approach that bucket. I think if you have a broker dealer that's definitely more constrained and refined as to what you can send them, you have to keep that in mind as you're sending them content. And then obviously if you are creating content for the end user it has to be unbranded and likely more casual and definitely less technical than whatever you produce for financial advisors. So hopefully that answers your question. It

does, but what is the, what emerging technologies or trends do you think will have the biggest impact? I know we talked about ai, but is there any other, like actual, other emerging trends that you see for technologies that are coming in for the FinTech marketing in the coming years?

I think there has still been this trend of larger companies scooping up. Different smaller FinTech providers and getting them under one roof. So is it one stop shop versus independent partners that are working together with integrations And there still seems to be this seesaw battle, I don't know what you wanna call it, of which is better. And I won't say I necessarily have a favorite, but from what I hear, these larger businesses that are scooping up smaller FinTech companies. The issues that they're seeing is that it's a lot of clunky technology that wasn't made to be under one roof is being mishmoshed under one roof, which isn't fantastic. And on the other side, when you're independent. And have kind of partnerships, you still have to build the integrations, right? So that's not necessarily seamless either, but it does give you more flexibility to choose which providers that you work with. So that seems to be the trend that I'm still seeing. I feel like it's been happening for a while, but something to keep in mind as you're navigating FinTech for sure.

And has the crypto effect done anything for the FinTech marketing? We knew, we know we have blockchain slowly being implemented within mainstream. It's not there yet, but is that also the coming, emerging thing? I know Web3 was big for two years and then AI came and nobody cares about Web3 anymore.

It has not affected any of the marketing I've done for any FinTech clients I in the last couple of years. It's not to say that it doesn't affect someone, but I personally have not had. Any issues or, and or experience having it come through any of the marketing I've done,

got you. And how do you measure the RO of your marketing or FinTech marketing initiatives? Is it basically awareness or is it again, depending on what your actual initiatives are?

Yeah, awareness is tough unless you're doing actual market research to know where you are even to begin with. But I think, typically if you're running a campaign. If it's, you need to look at are we looking for registrations? Are we looking for sales? Are we looking for someone to download a white paper? Who's downloading white papers? But are you looking for someone to download something? So how you measure, I suppose it's not always ROI, but it's just the effectiveness overall of your marketing. Did they do the thing we asked them to do? If the answer is no, then you know, you have to go back and look at what could we change the experimentation piece again. If the answer is yes, then I think that's where you begin to hopefully, feed the machine of, okay, our efforts should pay off in sales. It's a little more complicated than that, but I think that's how, all those different phases of the marketing funnels should start to generate ROI when they're playing nicely together.

What advice do you have for a new startup, let's say in FinTech, trying to build that awareness into sales? What advice would you have for them? Because there's probably a ton of startups going on. They're just trying to get that little piece of the pie. So what advice do you have for that?

I think you have to really know what makes you different. Like, why is it you? Why is it your business? And how do you solve for enough pain that your audience is feeling that they're gonna want you? You gotta be able to answer that. And if you, until you can, to me, if you're just more noise in a noisy channel,

and people listening to this episode W Wing, learn more about you. So where can they find you online?

You can find me@finmarketingm.com or on LinkedIn where I live often.

Any final thoughts for listeners?

Yeah, I'm saying good luck with the upcoming election and the changes I'm sure that we are about to see here. FinTech is a fun industry and a crazy industry, but yeah, best wishes to everyone.

Alright, thank you Anne for joining Digital Coffee Marketing, bringing, sharing knowledge on FinTech marketing.

Thank you for having me,

and thank you for listening. As always, please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps. We have a five star review. It really does help with the rankings and let me know how I'm doing, but join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR in marketing industry. All right, guys. Stay safe. Get to understanding your FinTech marketing if you're in that industry, or just your marketing strategies in general, and see you next week later.