Almost every fintech marketing team on the planet these days relies on B2B inbound marketing to attract new clients and grow their business. The problem is that measuring the ROI of content marketing is tough. Even when fintech companies get past these issues, there are several ways in which your content can miss the mark.
Content encompasses a wide variety of formats. CMI's 2020 Benchmarking Report shows that social media posts, blog posts, and emails are the most widely used forms of content. These are just 3 out of 10 or more ways of interacting with clients via content.
Fintech teams can run into a whole host of issues thanks to the dual complexity of their products. Not only are they technically complex, but their financial function might also come across as opaque. Getting your content wrong is surprisingly easy, as a result.
In no particular order, here are 4 of the most common B2B fintech content gaffes and how to fix them.
It's all About You
Everyone wants to shout across the rooftops about how wonderful their product is. However, the point of content and copy is to communicate with the client in a language that they can understand. Content has to address their pain points and propose solutions.
For instance, an open banking solutions provider might load their web page copy with jargon that demonstrates their technical skill. However, all that talk of PSD2 and API gateways doesn't communicate a solution. It only muddles the picture. Your prospect will have to search for the problem you're trying to solve.
As you can imagine, most prospects won't do this. Instead, they'll click away to someone else. Your content has to be tailored to your client, and ensuring relevance is as simple as going back to your customer personas. Follow a data-driven persona creation process that will help you tie everything from buyer values to pricing strategies.
Creating content that is relevant to those personas will be an easy process.
Lack of Funnel Stage Relevance
Every company has a marketing funnel, no matter how small it is. It's important to define the prospect qualities and behaviors that lead you to qualify them as early, middle, or late-stage funnel occupiers. For instance, if a prospect has visited your website twice in the past and has downloaded a whitepaper, does this make them a late-stage prospect or a middle-stage one?
Mapping the content these people consume to their stage in your funnel is critical since the metrics that indicate content relevance differ. If a top-of-the-funnel prospect spends a lot of time reading your content, this is a great sign. However, for a mid-stage prospect, you want to see downloads, contact information, and a willingness to interact more with your content. Mere time spent on page doesn't indicate anything other than stagnation.
In fact, the lack of progress as measured by metrics might imply that your content isn't hitting the spot. Take some time to categorize your content based on the stage it's at and track metrics that give you insight into how relevant it is.
Make sure you filter by prospect stage when measuring these metrics for analysis. Measuring mid-stage metrics on a top-funnel prospect doesn't make sense. Let your content be guided by your metrics and craft topics according to the interactions you witness on your site.
Listening in on social media such as Reddit and Quora will also give you insight into which topics are currently relevant.
Content Standing by Itself
You want content that is great, but this doesn't mean it should fight a lone battle. All of your content should fit within a larger strategy and have a purpose. For instance, if you've decided to release a podcast, will you use this to transition to a webinar?
Will you use it to talk to potential prospects and figure out what their issues are? All of your content must tie into one another and feed into a bigger brand-building strategy. A great way to build authority in B2B fields is to host events.
Using content in the lead-up to those events is a great way to boost awareness. Podcasts, webinars, and videos give you a chance to interact with potential guests and attendees. Post-event content such as unanswered FAQs and event collateral give your credibility a boost as well.
Many fintechs rely on small content teams to produce all kinds of collateral, and it can be tough to create a coherent strategy. However, to yield the most benefits, you need a well-thought-out content strategy that plays itself out over a defined calendar.
No Goals
While all of your content must tie into one another, every piece has to have a distinct goal. For instance, the goal of top-of-the-funnel content must be to push prospects deeper into your funnel. Pillar content must comprehensively cover a topic and give you leads in the form of contact information or call-back requests.
The preferred way to measure a content's progress towards its goal is via a call to action conversion. Make sure all of your content, even the free ones, have a CTA embedded within them that allows you to measure conversion.
Without these metrics, you're firing in the dark, and you'll never know what's working and what isn't.
Complicated, but Worth it
Content strategy is complicated, and figuring out what to talk about is easier said than done. However, investing in content creation and aligning it to your customers offers the highest ROI of all marketing activities over the long run.