The ultimate guide to B2B marketing fundamentals for fintech's

While building a great product is the first step towards revolutionising this industry, deploying the right B2B fintech marketing techniques is often a challenge in an increasingly saturated market. 

We know first-hand what it’s like to run a business and how tricky it can be to find the time to dedicate to your own marketing.

But without it, you risk having no sales pipeline.

To help you, we’ve distilled over 25 years’ fintech marketing experience into this checklist, starting with the basics, to help you generate demand and convert more sales…

The foundations

Content, content, content.

The most important element of demand generation for a business of any size, with any budget is content.

Here’s why:

• Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don't blog. (DemandMetric)
• Businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don't. (HubSpot)

• 70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than advertisements. (DemandMetric)

While some financial services content can be a little dry, it can be extremely valuable. With so many regulations, market changes, and risk challenges, you have the opportunity to decipher this into valuable insight that can guide your audience.

Senior Risk professionals for example, often don’t have the time to wade through a 50-page FCA report. This provides a brilliant opportunity for a B2B fintech provider to distill the key points, share their opinion and add significant value.

Valuable content builds trust and trust is vital for selling anything, especially a considered purchase to banks and financial services firms.

With content as your base, this should be placed on several key channels as a minimum, to help build sustainable demand.

As a minimum, we recommend these channels:

1.       A clear website (with a clear value proposition)

Over 80% of buyers visit a website before making a purchase (Hubspot 2021). Without it, or with a bad one, it can be a quick way for a potential customer to rule you out.

A good website gives you an opportunity to clearly articulate your product and service offering (value proposition) and differentiate from competition.

💡Here are some tips:

• Make it really clear straight away what you actually do on the first page (i.e. we manufacture smart sensors for businesses)
• Have a simple layout where people can easily understand who you are and what you do to help them
• Define the niche you are speaking to so that your messaging resonates with them – if you have a lot of competition, the niche will set you apart from others and ensure you win sales
• Regular new blogs on the website are key.

2.       Post content on industry publications (such as Finextra!)

We appreciate it can be super tough finding time to write these (and people find it especially hard to write about themselves and their services) but creating and publishing regular content on industry publications helps with:

• Shows you are up to date with the latest industry trends and changes (and therefore creates trust)
• Provides your ideal target audience with information to help them make an informed choice
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – by building backlinks to your site from leading industry sites.

3.       LinkedIn company page and regular posts

Like a website, LinkedIn is a key marketing channel for your B2B audience. Over the past two years, LinkedIn has reported record levels of engagement growth, with the pandemic and work from anywhere, driving more professionals to engage on the platform, through its evolving meeting, posting and ad tools.

💡Here are some tips to make the most out of the platform:

• Like most things, consistency is key, we recommend posting, commenting, and engaging with other professionals at least twice a week, or ideally three times a week (we aim for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – although weekends get good engagement). 👉Here’s what you should be posting.
• Ensure you have a mix of content types to make communications pop out on the feed and appeal to the different preferences – video, guides, blogs, and text-only posts.
• Share industry-curated content such as new research pieces – this adds additional value to your audience so that they want to follow your channel.
• The first two lines of a post are essential so make them a strong hook
• Use emojis to break up copy, and aim for no more than 3-4 relevant hashtags (you should research which ones have most followers), keep your posts short, snappy, and scannable

 4.       Keep both your personal LinkedIn profile up to date and contribute with regular posts

Linking to point two, your company page is one half of the impact. Your personal account, as a business owner or Director, is equally as important for gaining reach and awareness with your target audience.  You are seen as part of the brand, and the human part is key – people are more likely to buy from people so its best practice to show the human side of your business wherever you can.

💡Here’s some things that help:

• You should make sure your ‘about’ section, work history and such are up to date
• There’s an option to feature ‘promoted’ content – this could be articles, or relevant posts.
• Posting company content from your personal page is more likely to get engagement (it also helps build a direct relationship with your ideal customers.

 5.       B2B email marketing

A recent study revealed that 83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 40% of B2B marketers say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success. But note, this is such a popular channel now that you need to be super polished to get your email read, and those all-important clicks.

There are two key parts to emails. First and foremost, it’s the data… and then the actual email. It doesn’t matter how great your email is if you have poor data…

Data:

• In our experience, we find it is best to only email those that have previously shown an interest in your brand – such as whitepaper downloads, or demo requests. We have seen so many email campaigns perform badly due to a brand having purchased data.
• Make sure your data is clean – first name personalisation helps to get through SPAM filters and feels more like a one-to-one conversation.
• Ensure your data is tidy – all columns aligned correctly, capitalisation on first names.

Systems to build emails:

• There are several systems you can use that offer free or low-cost mailing.
  • Watch out for ones that have mailing list caps and charge for duplicate contacts)
  • And make sure you pick one that offers a mobile optimised template
  • We recommend using a system that integrates to a CRM tool like Hubspot – this helps you to manage GDPR and provides a slick user experience.

The email content:

• Subject lines need to pique interest. Keep them short, focus on hot topics and solutions to your customers pain points. Statistics work really well, or teasers for case studies (Find out how *client name* is *benefit or your services here*).
• Have one clear call to action (CTA) and make it really obvious – buttons, images, bold hyperlinks work well. For a newsletter, having multiple CTAs is perfectly acceptable. We tend to have a focus piece that leads the email at the top and is what the subject line focusses on.
• Write human and engagement copy that sparks a conversation and welcomes a direct response.

👉Here are 5 tips for best practice B2B email marketing.

Final note: Keep going!

Consistency is key. It’s essential to keep momentum going. Keep posting content, keep writing blogs and sending newsletters – even if you aren’t getting the engagement rates you hoped for straight away.

There are a lot of ‘secret stalkers’ who are waiting for the right moment to get in touch! The key is to ensure consistency, always show up, and stay top of mind for when your ideal customers are ready to buy. 👉 Here’s how to maintain your ideal customer’s attention (including secret stalkers)

👻 Myth buster: It’s unlikely that you will get sales straight away. People need to feel they can trust you before they buy from you so it may take a couple months after that initial engagement before they ask for your proposal. Although we have seen direct responses from the first email when they meet the best practice criteria above.