Fintech is easily one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. In fact, its valuation has more than doubled between 2018 and 2021, from $127 billion to $300 billion. And the competition to gain market share is fierce!
In the first quarter of 2021 alone, fintech app marketers invested $1.2 billion in user acquisition. That's more than double what they spent in Q4 of 2020!
But unlike other industries, fintech marketing is tricky because users can quickly jump ship to the next competitor promising the biggest reward. In 2019, fintech apps experienced an average uninstall rate of 35.5% — a $100K loss per month on average!
What is Fintech Media Buying?
Fintech marketing is the strategy and tactics used to reach and gain customers for the financial technology sector.
Finance technology is a complicated topic that is often hard to grasp by the typical consumer, but it's essential for marketers to make their fintech apps more customer-friendly.
As a result, fintech marketers must utilize creative and educational strategies to build their brand and gain loyal customers. The primary fintech marketing strategies are the same as in other industries. But the execution is different in addressing the unique concerns of the finance sector.
Paid Media Advertising Services Include:
- Acquisition & advertising strategy development
- Audience targeting
- Paid media campaign management
- Campaign testing & optimization
- Tracking, analytics, and reporting
- Creative concept & ad development
- Design and copywriting
- SEM – Google Ads, AdWords, Bing/Microsoft
- Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads & other social media advertising
- Display advertising
- Programmatic ad buying
- Native ad buying
- Video advertising
- Remarketing & lead nurturing
Paid Media Advertising Platforms
There are many different platforms for paid media advertising, including but not limited to:
Search Engines:
- Google Ads
- Bing Ads
- YouTube (yes, it’s a massive search engine)
Social Media:
Ad Networks:
- Facebook Audience Network
- Google Network
- mMedia
- Adknowledge
- Yahoo Network
- Apple Advertising
Other:
- Direct ad placements with websites and publishers
Struggles of Media Buying in Fintech
Lead Acquisition
Acquiring and moving leads through the sales funnel is a challenge for media buying specialists in fintech.
Fintech companies don’t have any legacy clients — they must find, acquire, and move new leads through the sales funnel in order to compete with traditional financial institutions and their extensive roster of past clients.
Ineffective Marketing Campaigns
A successful marketing campaign contributes to business growth and bottom-line results. Inversely, an ineffective marketing campaign reduces traffic and customer interest.
In order to be successful in today's competitive marketplace, a fintech company must focus on its target audience and develop a strategy that makes sense for each individual consumer. The most successful strategies will be those that have been designed with the goal of driving traffic and building customer interest. However, this is easier said than done!
A fintech company must understand what it takes to attract new customers before it can begin implementing an effective marketing campaign that works for everyone. This means ensuring your marketing efforts are personalized based on the needs of your specific target audience. If you don't know who you're targeting or why they're important then it's impossible for anyone else to understand either!
Poor Quality Leads
When you're a fintech company, you have to be on your toes if you want to succeed. And one of the biggest issues facing fintech companies today is poor quality leads.
For a long time, marketers emphasized the importance of quantity over quality. Today, 70% of B2B marketers prioritize quality over quantity. You could be connecting with 1,000 leads daily but not all are genuinely interested in your services.
Quality leads are intrigued by what companies offer and are more likely to become customers than other leads. Unfortunately, fintech companies are often not targeting the right customers and poor quality leads are extremely difficult to convert.
Writing content marketing for fintech products can be challenging, but it's not impossible.
The first thing you need to know is that the industries you're trying to target are heavily regulated.
More often than not, the industries that are being disrupted by new fintech brands have their own set of established rules, regulations and legal frameworks.
In producing fintech content, writers must approach the subject with a sharp eye for factual accuracy when it comes to educating on topics that are guided by finance-related laws and regulations. This means that writing in an overly promotional tone of voice that emphasizes product promises (a style commonly used by generalistic content marketing agencies) could have your company fall foul of regulators.
Instead, fintech content marketing writers must understand how to write objectively, depend on outside experts (not personal opinions), and learn when it’s better to sound neutral than promotional.
Shrinking Budget
With a tight budget, it’s difficult to organize marketing campaigns and related activities. Eventually, tech costs sap marketing expenditure and leads slow to a trickle.
When your budget is running low, you might think that cutting back on marketing is the best way to get by. But that's not always the case.
In fact, when you're in a tight spot, it can be more important than ever to invest in your marketing and make sure that your brand stays top-of-mind with your customers.
Dead End Media Buying Solutions in Fintech
Fintech companies use several tactics to boost their lead generation efforts. Here are a few common strategies that tend to yield minimal results.
Doubling Down On Ineffective Acquisition Strategies: Doubling down on a strategy that doesn’t work will only increase your losses. You can’t throw money at your problems; you have to rethink your tactics.
Sunk Cost Fallacy: Sunk cost refers to the investment made in a project. The sunk cost fallacy is the belief that all projects must be seen through once they’ve been invested in. They expect if an ill-conceived project continues, they “may” recoup the costs. However, it’s more important to consider future costs than past ones when evaluating the viability of a project.
Non-human Focused Attitude: Fintech companies can sometimes be automation-crazed. However, studies reveal that most consumers still prefer human interaction over bots.
Outdated Technology: Old tools no longer work in the fast-paced digital world
How to Take Advantage of Media Buying on Social Media Platforms?
Social media is one of the most powerful fintech marketing tools today. Everyone is registered to at least one platform, and whether you like it or not, you’re missing out on customers if you’re not doing any form of social media marketing. However, most financial institutions use social media in a rather boring manner and have the misplaced conception that it’s only for fun and quirky brands. Fintech companies can benefit significantly from using social media with the right marketing plan.
There are many fintech companies who have successfully used different types of content on each platform to engage their target audiences. It’s essential to understand these before crafting a social media strategy.
The way people engage on Facebook and Instagram is different from how they interact on YouTube or TikTok. Knowing the various requirements will help you create content that resonates with these platforms’ audiences. With the rise of fintech, it's more important than ever to understand how to use social media for marketing. It's no secret that social media is a powerful tool that can help you grow your business, but it can also be extremely confusing. There’re so many platforms out there and each one has its own unique audience. How do you know which one is right for you?
The answer is simple: You should identify your target audience and the platform they frequent. While every social media platform has representative audiences, there are dominant groups and profiles in each one. Gen Z dominates TikTok, while professionals flock to LinkedIn. Know what market you want to target with each social media platform and tailor your strategy accordingly.
At H1, we're always looking for new ways to make our clients' campaigns more effective. One of the most effective ways to improve advertising campaigns is by making them more relative — and that's where personalization comes in.
In today's world, there's a lot of advertising coming at you from all sides. But if it hits you, you'll notice it. As a company that's always focused on the customer, we know that it's important to have a well-defined target audience.
We recently had the opportunity to work with one of our fintech clients who wanted to increase the ROI on their campaigns. But when we launched the project, we were just trying to get the ball rolling as fast as possible. We made one ad for everyone, and then, once time allowed, We divided their audience into 14 segments, each with a different theme and creative. This is important because it only works in a divide-and-write ad pair.
And as the result we saw that the ROI went dramatically up in comparing with one-ad-for-all. The one-for-all campaign saw an 81% increase in ROI, while the other with 14 creatives saw a 140% increase! Social media is not a one-way street. It's supposed to be a social connection between two entities: you and your target audience.
And don't forget — if you want to build a great community with your audience, you'll need to be consistent! If they see you posting once a month or less, they might forget who you are. Posting regularly will help keep your brand top-of-mind for customers and potential customers alike!
If you want your posts to be seen by as many people as possible, then consistency is key. To make sure your audience sees your content consistently, you need to post and run paid campaigns consistently
Create multiple campaigns for different audiences or interests. If there are different groups of people who would benefit from seeing your content but aren't necessarily interested in each other's posts, then creating separate campaigns and using different promotion tools will allow you to reach all of them at once while keeping things organized and easy.
Omnichannelism
Omnichannelism is all about using different channels with different metrics to evaluate your marketing strategy. Think of this term as the art of combining all the different marketing channels you have at your disposal to make sure that you're reaching your target audience in every way possible.
We run display ads for reach and search ads for performance, but you can't evaluate display ads by performance metrics because then they would be considered ineffective. At the same time, display media ads warm up audiences and make them more loyal to the brand, which leads to higher conversions from search ads.
“As an advertiser, you can spend anywhere from $0 to $100+ per click. But what are those costs actually getting you?
A lead from a search ad could cost as little as $2.64, while a lead from a display media advertising ad could cost $48. Can you really afford to ignore the value of display media advertising?
We had a client who was convinced that search was the only way to go, and that a display media advertising campaign was a waste of time and money. After running search and display media ads for them for six months, we saw that their leads from search were less than half the cost of those from display media ads — but they didn't see it that way! They insisted on disabling their display media advertising placement because they thought it was too expensive and wasn't driving enough traffic.
After disabling their display media advertising placement, we got less interested traffic which was converting less at our site — and the cost of conversion on search has grown to $7.8! This way we were able to show the importance of media advertising to the client and convince him to return the placement.”
The best way to think about omnichannelism is like a pyramid: you have a base level of engagement, like social media or email newsletters; then you have a level of engagement that's higher quality and more valuable, like direct mail or paid advertising; and then at the top of your pyramid you have something like an in-person demo or an event where you really get face time with prospects or customers. You need all three levels in order for your business to grow — you can't just focus on one without thinking about how it fits into the bigger picture of your marketing strategy!
Omnichannelism is a lot more complicated than this example makes it sound — but this gives you an idea of how it works!”
Media Buying Solutions
The lead gap is a serious problem for fintech companies. Here's how to fix it.
If you're running campaigns for a fintech company, then you know that there's a huge gap between the number of reached audiences and the number of leads that are actually made.
Here are a few steps to take for improving your media buying game:
- Better marketing: Ineffective marketing campaigns reduce your chance to acquire leads, but several fintech giants ran successful marketing campaigns in the past. You can get in touch with professionals with years of experience in the related industry and seek expert guidance to leverage your marketing strategies and fix the lead gap.
- Updated tools: Fintech is impossible without innovative and advanced tools. You need to leverage the latest tool available to target quality leads.
- Better data analytics: Don’t rely on two or three statistics to determine the right strategy for acquiring leads and lending processes. You can make better lending decisions through deep data analytics
PS
If you're looking for a way to grow your fintech company, chances are you've already tried some of these fintech marketing strategies. But if they haven't worked out, it's time to take a different approach.
You need a professional fintech marketing agency — one that knows how to navigate the complex but exciting space of fintech marketing. H1 can help you with your fintech marketing strategy by:
- Creating a fintech marketing campaign that unifies your product’s features with the pain points of your target customer
- Producing high-quality content that’s guaranteed to create awareness, drive engagement and bring repeat customers
- Managing simultaneous campaigns and measuring their performance versus set goals
- Developing your product’s brand to appeal to your target audience