Fintech marketing is unique in SaaS because of the very high trust required by its audience before making a purchasing decision in both B2C fintech and B2B fintech. As a result, developing an effective strategy can be more difficult than for other SaaS industries, so we’ve written this guide that breaks it down into 4 steps:
- Establish the marketing goals for your fintech product
- Clearly identify the target audience for your product
- Understand and choose the right marketing channels
- Create thought leadership content and distribute using each channel
We’ll begin with the first step you should take: establishing goals.
Establish the Marketing Goals for Your Fintech Product
Having a clear goal established at the outset of your campaign lets you anchor the remainder of your fintech marketing strategy, providing a true north to guide your decisions. Most fintech companies will have multiple goals for their marketing, and the table below outlines the most common:
Fintech Marketing Goals: B2B and B2C
| B2B Fintech | |
| Goal | Recommendation |
| Increase Brand Awareness | Invest in multiple channels to increase your reach |
| Generate MQLs and SQLs | Test your target markets with targeted PPC before transitioning a more cost-effective channel like SEO long-term |
| Establish Industry Authority | Create thought leadership content and distribute it through SEO, email, and LinkedIn |
| Educate Customers and Create Upsell Opportunities | Create and promote webinars, video marketing, and thought leadership content |
| B2C Fintech | |
| Goal | Recommendation |
| Increase Engagement | Create accessible short-form video content and social media posts with engaging graphics |
| Drive Sales | Utilize targeted CTAs in your content to provide viewers a direct path to purchase and work with influencers to increase general awareness |
| Build Brand Trust & Loyalty | Promote loyalty and rewards programs on your website and on social media |
The goals for your marketing may shift over time. For example, a B2B fintech company may begin a PPC campaign with the goal of generating MQLs and SQLs but after establishing a customer base, their primary marketing goal might then shift to customer education and increasing upsell opportunities. To support this change, they would then reduce their PPC spend and increase their investment into creating thought leadership content and promoting webinars. This change in primary goal would naturally result in a shift in target audience as well.
Clearly Identify the Target Audience for Your Marketing
The next step when developing a fintech marketing strategy is to select your target audience based on your goals. Newer fintech companies who are still determining their product’s value proposition can look to to their main competitors within the industry to understand which audiences are being underserved. More established fintech companies should instead look to their existing clientele to identify patterns in existing audiences.
Once the marketing team has an understanding of these challenges and opportunities, they should develop a full customer persona for each audience. These personas are fabricated individuals that represent the key target demographic of your fintech marketing strategy, however they are fleshed out and made as real as possible with everyday anxieties and relationships included. This makes them more relatable to your marketing team, allowing them to more accurately create content that speaks to their needs.
Below are two examples of customer personas, geared towards B2B and B2C fintech marketing strategies, respectively.
Example Fintech Customer Personas: B2B & B2C
| B2B | B2C |
 Sarah Abrams is a middle manager at a small cybersecurity startup. Her day is hectic, as her position forces her to wear many hats. Although she does not have direct purchasing power, Sarah effectively runs the day to day operations of the company; if she claims that something is necessary, she is likely to get it approved. She is always on the lookout for anything that makes her job easier. |  Peter Sherman is a father of 3 and devoted husband. In the middle of a career change currently, Peter is in charge of the family finances; a responsibility which he is only now discovering the weight of. He is desperately in need of some kind of software to help him balance the family finances, but the wealth of choices online has him stumped. He needs something simple and easy to use. |
These personas can be as detailed as you want them to be, so long as they actively contribute to your understanding of how to sell to that person. These personas can then be used to determine the ideal value proposition to use when targeting each audience by answering the following questions for each persona:
- What problem does your fintech product solve for the customer?
- How does your product compare to others in the market?
- How knowledgeable is your audience when it comes to financial jargon?
- Will your product be the first of its kind that your customers use?
- What type of marketing are they likely to respond to, and what channels do they look to for financial information?
B2B fintech companies should also answer the following additional questions:
- What position does your target audience occupy in their company?
- Do they have purchasing power or do they need to go through someone else?
- How is their performance evaluated?
The answers to these questions will help flesh out your understanding of your audience, and create marketing content that effectively builds trust with them. Before creating that content, however, you must first determine which channels are best for reaching each audience.
Choose The Right Marketing Channels
Your audience will determine which channels are most effective for your marketing strategy. For example, a B2C fintech app designed to help young people save their money is much more likely to reach their target audience through social media than they are by email, no matter how good that email marketing content might be. Conversely, B2B fintech companies won’t be well served by investing into most social media. The table below provides a more thorough breakdown of the top 4 fintech marketing channels:
The Top Fintech Marketing Channels, 2024
| Channel | B2B vs B2C | Average Monthly Cost | Average ROI | Average CAC | Average Time Until Results | Notes |
| SEO | Both | $12,000–$15,000 | 748% | $647 | 4–6 Months | SEO is an investment, taking longer but generating warm leads organically. Ideal for someone looking long–term |
| PPC | Both | $3,000–$30,000 | 36% | $802 | 1 Month | Effective in the short term, but leads will disappear as soon as you stop paying for the ads |
| Social Media Marketing | B2C | $5,000–$20,000 | 192% | $983 | 3–4 Months | Although typically used for B2C campaigns, business oriented platforms like LinkedIn can generate B2B leads |
| Webinars | B2B | $15,000–$35,000 | 430% | $603 | 2–4 Months | Requires the company to have a “charismatic expert” to run the webinar. |
There are many more channels to choose from, and our articles on B2B marketing channels and customer acquisition channels discuss this topic in more depth. You may wish to also read our guide to SaaS marketing budgets to help determine the ideal budget allocation for each.
Once you’ve determined which channels will best support your fintech marketing goals, the next step is to create content for those channels.
Create and Distribute Thought Leadership Content
Because of the sensitive nature of fintech, no matter who your target audience is, you need to establish trust with your audience. The best way to do so is by creating high-quality content—sometimes called thought leadership content—for each audience.
We’ve already written extensively about how to write thought leadership content, but the key points are:
- Take care of your reader: Above all else, your content should answer the searcher’s question quickly. On average, viewers of a web page spend 30 seconds determining if the page they are looking at has what they want, at which point they will either keep reading or click away. Contain the essential answer in your introduction, and spend the rest of the article holding the reader’s hand as you detail the more intricate ins and outs of the subject.
- Keep your reader engaged: Focus on skimmable content that keeps the reader’s eye moving down the page. These can be bullet points, charts, graphs, tables, or other graphics that make the page visually appealing and easy to read. Keep paragraphs short (no more than 5 lines).
- Conclude with practical next steps: Always give the reader one or several options for where to go next. Link to a landing page that details how your service addresses the pain point they clicked on your article to address. If you feel like they are not ready to buy yet, link to additional articles for further reading or provide a link to sign up for a newsletter for further contact.
Because fintech companies face heavier scrutiny on their content, your marketing team team should work closely with your legal team ensure that everything published is compliant with financial regulations. You may wish to also work with financial subject matter experts to ensure the accuracy of content. Because these considerations make fintech a particularly challenging industry to create content for, a modular content strategy is particularly effective. By creating single, larger pieces of content, your team can streamline the compliance-checking process, and then later split up that content for use across multiple channels.
An additional consideration when creating content is which stage of the marketing funnel your audience is most likely to be in when interacting with each channel, as shown below:
Which stage an audience member is in will impact what kind of content they’re most interested in, as well as which KPIs you should use to judge the effectiveness of each of your marketing channels. These KPIs should also be used to adjust your strategy as needed. We discuss SaaS marketing KPIs and benchmarks in more depth here.
Implementing Your Fintech Marketing Strategy in 2024
However difficult all of this seems on paper, the reality is that bringing it all into a real-world situation is even harder. We talk to fintech and finance companies routinely who struggle to bring their fintech marketing strategy to life, sometimes even despite having an experienced in-house team.
It’s for this reason that many companies choose to work with an expert. Our agency is the largest thought leadership SEO agency in the United States, and our teams are particularly adept at developing compelling thought leadership content for fintech and finance companies to grow your online visibility. Contact us here if you’d like to learn more about our services.
