How Fintech Startups Can Scale Their Content Marketing Strategy
To grow a company in the super competitive fintech space, your product and messaging needs to be completely on point. You need to know your target customer inside and out, and everything you do needs to speak directly to them.
It can be challenging to find great writers that know your industry well enough to execute to your high quality standards, but it’s not impossible.
Scaling it is where it gets tough.
But at the end of the day, volume is important. A blog post here or there isn’t going to get you new customers, no matter how high quality it is. You need lots of great content, and you need it every week.
Getting started with scaling your content marketing strategy is all about developing an infrastructure to grow at a pace that aligns with your business goals, budget, and industry.
But what do you need to do to get started with scaling your content marketing strategy in the world of fintech?
Why is content marketing so important for Fintech startups?
Content marketing is useful in almost all marketing strategies. But in the fast-paced, dynamic world of fintech, it almost becomes a necessity for startups to embrace a solid content strategy.
Create authority and trust
Fintech products and services often deal with highly sensitive information, whether they’re B2C or B2B. So while your product or service might be up to scratch legally, potential clients still need to be convinced.
We’re talking about money here, and when it comes to cash, people don’t want to mess about.
Content marketing helps your brand build trust by providing high-quality information without pushy sales tactics. It develops your brand image, and sets you out as a thought leader in your space. In fact, according to research conducted by Demand Gen, 95% of B2B customers use content as a metric of trustworthiness, and 96% want more input from thought leaders in industry.
Drive leads and enhance brand awareness
I mean, this is what it’s all about. It’s great if potential customers like you, but hugs don’t pay the bills. Luckily, content doesn’t just leave warm and fuzzies. That trust building creates the perfect situation to turn interested passers-by into hot leads.
Organic content that initially attracts customers with value rather than direct marketing and ads, feels less aggressive and gives the reader more reasons to come back. That means more time spent on your website, with your brand, and with your product.
It's hard to build brand awareness as a startup, but telling your brand story through a company blog is one of the best ways to do it.
Embrace cost-effective marketing
According to Hubspot, organizations with primarily inbound marketing techniques like blogs and other SEO content experience a 61% lower cost per lead than organizations focused on outbound marketing techniques.
Damn, you’d take a bit of that wouldn’t you.
Not only that, but content can stick around forever, and continues to provide value over the years. Unlike most paid methods, evergreen content can generate leads over and over again, and you only have to pay for it once.
The key challenges with scaling content
Scale is always the most challenging part of growing a business. Whether you’re talking about your product, finance or marketing, something that’s pretty simple to begin with becomes more and more of a headache the bigger it gets.
Here are some of the key challenges with scaling content:
The hiring and onboarding process
Finding good writers and content marketers is difficult. But it’s doable if you only need 1 or 2. But what if you need the volume of 10 writers. Or 20. Well hopefully you’ve got enough time to spend half your week as a mini-HR department, because that’s what you’re in for.
Not all hiring and onboarding processes look exactly the same, but some of the stuff you’ll have to do is:
Scouting
Interviewing and test articles
Contracts
Developing tone
Feedback and editing
Then, of course, if any of your writers aren't up to your standards, you either have to spend time and money getting them up to par, or think about replacing them. In the fintech space, you don't want to settle for subpar work, because your competitors sure aren’t.
Not to mention the fact that finding writers who understand the concepts they are writing about can be a challenge in itself.
Time management
The development of a cutting-edge Fintech product or service demands a lot of time. And if you’re a Head of Growth, a Founder or a VP of Marketing, you’ve got plenty of plates to spin.
Trying to micromanage the day to day details of your content marketing isn’t something you should need, or want, to do.
Ideally, you want to bring someone on board to handle the day-to-day operations of your content strategy. They can then handle the hiring process, article ideas, keyword research, final edits, and publishing. That might get it off your plate, but it still doesn’t solve the issue of content scale for your company.
Growing the team too early
Keeping a regular stream of content coming is a good thing, but even the most prominent startup doesn't want to spend excess cash in the early stages.
The last thing a company wants to do is experience growing pains because its infrastructure isn't developed equally. Getting too big a writing team at the beginning of your venture could leave you short on funds required in other areas.
You want the ability to scale, buy you also need flexibility.
Developing a content strategy as outlined below, is a solid way to decrease the likelihood of growing your content team too quickly and mitigate growing pains.
How can you scale content strategy as a Fintech startup?
Ok, we’ve told you all your problems. Now the juicy bit. If you’re convinced of the benefits of content scaling, you can follow the steps below to get a strong foundation that you can tweak as you see fit.
Consider your needs
Take a look at where your business is and where you want to go with your content, including how much you want to spend.
Deloitte's Annual CMO Survey suggests that companies will spend about 13.6% of their overall budget on marketing in 2023, recovering from a two-year covid dip. Typically, B2B companies spend less on marketing than B2C companies, but startups spend more overall.
You can use this as a metric to decide how aggressive you want to be with your overall marketing strategy, which will likely also include other marketing material and perhaps paid ads.
You should try to account for potential future growth; after all, scaling your content marketing strategy is all about creating the infrastructure to put out more content when you need it.
Design a content strategy
Probably the most time-consuming part of scaling your content is designing a content strategy. Your strategy dictates how much content you intend to put out and in what manner. A good strategy will help you stay on the right track and keep organized.
A mix of content will help establish you as an authority and a one-stop shop in all things related to your niche. The content you may want to consider publishing includes:
A company blog
Industry-related topical pieces
Evergreen articles
Whitepapers
Guides and case studies
Fintech and industry news
Email newsletters
Podcasts
Maybe even video content for YouTube and TikTok
Coming up with ideas beforehand and creating a content calendar or roadmap will give you much more flexibility than deciding what content to write on the day. New startups should aim to have about three months of content ideas in the pipeline at any one time.
Develop a brand voice
Developing a brand voice is a key aspect of your brand image. Those consuming your content for its value are coming not just for what you say but how you say it. Your readers might feel your content is disorganized if you constantly change between formal, informal, warm, and intense.
In the eyes of your customers, your company is a person. So treat its voice like one!
If you are looking for an example, Monzo Bank, a B2C online banking platform in the UK, has a great set of writing guidelines they have made available to writers. They suggest sticking primarily to an empathetic, conversational tone, using clear, jargon-free language.
Some startups simply don't have the time or budget to have an in-house team of writers, so developing a tone established in a set of writing guidelines that freelance writers can mimic will help keep your content consistent.
Scale with an agency
The last thing you want to do is put out content written by people who don't know about the topics they are writing about. Finding a freelance financial writer comes into play here. You don’t want any old generalist. But not only that, you need an arrangement that can scale.
Finding individual freelancers might save you a bit of money in the short term, but it’s not scalable. Every time you reach capacity with your current writers, you need to go through the same hiring and vetting process all over again. Now, as a content marketing agency, we’re obviously biased, but an agency solves these problems.
A content agency that understands your business and only works with clients like you, will be able to hit the ground running and scale quickly with your business. If you need to double your content next week, you won’t be able to do that with a hodge hodge mix of individual contractors. With an agency, you can.
But you can’t just scale for the sake of scale. If your content sucks you’ll be worse off. In the age of advanced Google algorithms, the bottom line is that thin, surface-level content might do more harm than good. You also need writers who can write content that relates to readers that might include senior finance managers, CFOs and accountants. They’ll see through novice content within the first paragraph.
At Hedge, we’re fintech experts. We can provide whatever level of content you need, at the highest levels of quality in the industry. A content partnership with us is one that can truly scale with your business.
Regularly put out content according to your strategy
Fintech startups, especially those disrupting traditional finance sectors, are fast-moving. Rolling out a continuous stream of insightful, valuable content is a surefire way to stay relevant, build brand awareness, and drive leads.
The more consistent you are with your content, the more return visitors you will get. A whopping 50% of visitors are more likely to click a result if your site appears multiple times in a search engine's results.
Wrapping up
Scaling your content strategy just makes sense for the long-term success of your business, but it can be challenging to find the time when you're managing a startup in a fast-paced industry.
If you're looking for a scalable, all-in-one solution to take care of your content needs, click below to learn more about working with us.
