What Your Marketing Can Learn From the Finance Sector

June 8, 2018

The fintech industry is making waves in this category, and there are important lessons that any business can implement into their own content marketing strategy.

1. Interactive Content

The financial services industry is built on data, but there’s a problem: people don’t engage with numbers hidden in dense blocks of text.

This insight is nothing new—it’s why we use graphs to break up reports, for example. But the old pie chart and bar graph has a lot to learn from new digital trends.

If you really want your figures to pop, embrace and adopt data visualisation. When tackling geographical statistics, consider an interactive map.

When communicating demographics, how about an animated infographic that offers new information upon hovering? Rich media should be an integral aspect of any marketing strategy, whether big business or local seller.

Not only are these examples visually interesting, but they invite your reader to delve deeper, discovering pockets of content based on their preferences.

The result is longer on-page reading, higher engagement and more personalised content to a broader audience.

2. Thought Leadership

It wasn’t so long ago that content marketing equated to a good blog for many. But how many times can you read a blog on ‘5 tips to XYZ’?

While the humble listicle certainly has the hook to reel an audience in, the formula tires quickly. Blog after blog using this format does not make for hour-long reading.

Enter your new approach: a collection of insights, in a variety of formats, that position your brand as an innovator ahead of the curve.

Podcasts, expert blogs, videos, infographics, analyses and critiques – when used together, all these formats provide a robust authority from which to educate and guide your audience in a way that suits them.

Morgan Stanely is a financial services marketing mogul for this.

3. Digital Problem Solving

There is infinite opportunity to embrace technology that can be used specifically to make digital content highly engaging.

Is there a common problem that you find your clients struggle with? For those marketing in the finance industry, it was that numbers are seen as being too hard.

When clients have to trawl through competing service offerings, comparing percentages and interest rates, there’s a high degree of switching off and giving up. The answer was painfully simple—calculators that do it for you.

Simplified to require only the basic numbers that readers would likely already have on hand when doing their research, now we’d be shocked to find a bank website that doesn’t take you smoothly through the process.

Think landing page to dynamic ‘home loan calculator’, for example.

4. Accessibility

With plenty of money to put toward their digital transformation, it’s no wonder that financial services brands are powering ahead when it comes to minimising customer barriers—and top of the list when marketing in the finance industry is accessibility.

Many banks are joining the digital transformation and becoming online only, simply because that’s where many of their customers are doing their banking.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen:

• An increase in online banking apps
• Accessible paying options (swiping your phone)
• Increased analysis of how your spending habits and how you can save.

How can you apply this masterstroke of digital transformation to your industry?

5. Brand Differentiation

Travelling to a foreign country, you’d be hard-pressed to pick a bank to align with.

But after a lifetime of engaging with Australian banks’ branding in our everyday lives, we’ve constructed understandings about the institutions in our home city, whether we like it or not.

This is due to banks being particularly good at brand differentiation. A good rate is not always enough to be the deciding factor.

Perhaps you prefer the convenience of a bank that’s all about making the chore of finance as simple as possible. Perhaps it’s their environmental reputation or because they specialise in your demographic (such as millennials).

Key Takeaways

Let’s consolidate the content marketing lessons that the Fintech Industry has taught us. Follow these steps and watch the traffic rain in.

• New content = higher engaged and retained customers.
• Devise digital solutions to solve common customer pain points and improve everyday accessibility.
• Leverage critical and thought-provoking content to establish your company as a thought leader in the industry.

The gradual strengthening of connection that works in tandem with advertising and your hard sell marketing tactics. That’s the key to content marketing.

After all, virtually everyone banks. Every institution immediately has a slice of the pie—it’s just a matter of product offering and clever branding to determine how big (and profitable) that slice is going to be.