You’ve got a product that works, a sales team asking for leads and a board asking why website traffic hasn’t moved since the last funding round. You know you need fintech marketing that does more than announce product updates, but most of the guides you open are written for ecommerce brands or consumer apps and very little of their advice survives a conversation with your compliance team.
A lot of fintechs are in the same place. Marketing teams are small, sales cycles are long and every claim needs checking, so it’s easy to end up busy without building much.
This guide covers fintech marketing from the ground up: who you’re selling to, how to build a strategy, what content and campaigns work, where paid fits, what’s changing and how to market a fintech startup when there isn’t much budget. It’s written for marketing leads and founders at fintechs, payments companies, lenders, regtechs and financial services firms.
What is fintech marketing?
Fintech marketing is how a financial technology company finds, convinces and keeps its customers. It covers positioning, content, SEO, social, paid media, events, partnerships, PR and sales enablement, the same channels any B2B or B2C company uses.
What makes it different is everything around those channels. You’re selling something that touches people’s money or a firm’s balance sheet, so trust has to be earned before anything else happens. Claims go through compliance before they go anywhere public. Buyers tend to be technical, sceptical and short on time and plenty of them have been let down by a vendor before. In B2B fintech, a sale can take months, with risk, legal, procurement and IT all needing to sign off.
So fintech marketing has two jobs running at once. It has to build enough trust that a cautious buyer will take a meeting and it has to give everyone in the buying group the information they need to say yes.
Who you’re marketing to
Before any strategy, get specific about your buyer, down to their role, the type of firm they work at and the problem they’re trying to solve this year. “Heads of payments at UK challenger banks replacing a legacy gateway” is an audience you can write for. A broad label like “banks” gives you very little to work with.
In B2B fintech you’re rarely selling to one person. A typical buying group might include:
- The person with the problem, often a head of operations, payments, lending or finance
- A technical evaluator from IT or engineering
- Risk and compliance
- Procurement
- A budget holder at C level
Each of them needs something different from your marketing. The operations lead wants proof the product fixes their problem, while IT is looking for documentation and integration detail, compliance wants to know you won’t create a regulatory headache and your CFO needs a business case they can take to the board. If your marketing only talks to one of these people, deals tend to stall when they reach the others.
In B2C fintech the challenge looks different. You’re competing for attention with every other app on someone’s phone and trust comes from brand, reviews, clear fees and an onboarding experience that doesn’t make people nervous. Most of this guide focuses on B2B, but the principles on trust, clarity and consistency apply to both.
Building a fintech marketing strategy
A fintech marketing strategy should answer four questions clearly enough that your whole team can repeat the answers. Keep it short enough that people will read it.
Who are we for?
This is the audience work above, written down and agreed with sales. If sales and marketing describe the ideal customer differently, fix that first, because everything else depends on it.
What do we want them to believe?
This is your positioning: one or two sentences on what you do, who it’s for and why you’re the better choice. If your website, your sales deck and your founder’s LinkedIn all describe the company in different ways, start here.
Where do they spend their attention?
LinkedIn, industry newsletters, trade press, analyst reports, events, peer communities and search are the usual places. Pick the two or three channels your buyers use most and do those properly before adding more.
How will we know it’s working?
Agree on measures with sales before you start. Pipeline influenced, meetings booked, demo requests and sales cycle length tell you far more than impressions or follower counts. Traffic and engagement still matter as early signals that something is starting to work.
A lot of fintechs skip strategy because there’s pressure to ship something this quarter. That’s understandable and it’s also why so much fintech marketing ends up as a string of disconnected activity. Even a one page plan gives you something to say no with. If you’d like help building one, our content strategy service starts with these same questions.
Content marketing for fintech
Content is where most fintech marketing succeeds or fails, because it’s how buyers learn about you before they’re ready to talk to sales. Good fintech content shows you understand the buyer’s problem, gives them something useful whether or not they buy and makes the next step obvious.
The formats that tend to work:
- Blog posts and articles that answer the questions your buyers are typing into Google and ChatGPT
- Long form guides, whitepapers and ebooks for buyers doing serious research
- Case studies that show a real customer, a real problem and a real result
- Short video and social posts that put your experts in front of people
- Sales enablement content, such as one pagers, comparison guides and objection handling, that your sales team can send after a call
The most common problem with fintech content is that it plays too safe. Compliance worries are real and they push a lot of teams towards cautious, generic posts that could have come from any competitor. Buyers skim those and move on. Content with a clear point of view, written by someone who knows the space, gets read and shared. We’ve written more about why fintech buyers tune out of blogs if that sounds familiar.
Case studies deserve special attention. They’re often the piece of content that gets a deal over the line and they’re often the hardest to get approved, so plan them early. Here’s what a fintech case study must include.
Consistency matters as much as quality. Audiences build through a steady stream of useful posts published every week or two and that rhythm is what turns a blog into something buyers come back to.
AI search is changing where buyers find this content too. More buyers now start their research in tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which pull from pages that answer questions clearly and come from a source they can identify. Clear headings, direct answers, named authors and a consistent publishing record all help your content get picked up there as well as in Google.
Fintech marketing campaigns
A campaign is a focused push around one message, for a set period, across several channels. It might launch a product, open a new market, promote a report or target a list of accounts.
A good fintech campaign usually has:
- One clear message and one audience
- A hero asset, such as a report, guide, webinar or calculator
- Supporting content cut from that asset for social, email, sales and paid
- A campaign page with a single call to action
- An agreed follow up process with sales
Data led campaigns tend to do well in fintech, because buyers trust numbers and journalists cover them. If you have data from your own platform that can be anonymised and approved, a short annual report built on it can feed your content, PR and sales conversations for a year.
Account based marketing works well when you have a short list of high value targets, which is common in enterprise fintech. It means tailoring content and outreach to specific firms and the people inside them, with marketing and sales working from the same account list.
Whatever the campaign, decide what success looks like before it launches and give it long enough to work. A lot of fintech campaigns are judged after a few weeks, when the deals they influence won’t close for months.
Fintech advertising and paid media
Paid can speed things up, but it’s expensive in financial services and it works best on top of content that already converts.
Things to know before you spend:
- LinkedIn is usually the strongest paid channel for B2B fintech because of its job title and company targeting, though it’s one of the pricier platforms
- Search ads on high intent terms can work, but financial services terms are some of the most competitive in paid search
- Retargeting people who’ve already visited your site or read your content is often the best use of a small budget
- Financial promotion rules apply to ads as much as anything else, so build compliance review into your timelines
Send paid traffic to a page built for that campaign and make sure the offer is worth the click. For cold audiences, a useful guide or tool tends to do better than a “book a demo” button, because very few people are ready for a sales call the first time they see your name.
Inbound marketing for fintech
Inbound means attracting buyers with content and search, then turning them into leads on your site. For fintechs with long sales cycles, it’s one of the most cost effective ways to build pipeline over time.
The basics:
- Publish content around the problems your buyers search for
- Optimise each piece for one keyword and the questions around it
- Offer something worth an email address, such as a guide, template or newsletter
- Nurture those contacts with useful email, then pass them to sales when they show buying signals
- Track which content contributes to pipeline and do more of it
Inbound takes time. It can be months before organic traffic builds, which is why it pairs well with outbound and paid in the early stages. Once it’s working, it keeps bringing in leads without you paying for every click. If you need help producing the content behind it, that’s what our content writing service is for.
Fintech marketing trends to watch
AI search
AI assistants are becoming a first stop for research. Content that answers questions directly and comes from a clearly named expert has a better chance of being cited, so it’s worth checking how your brand shows up when someone asks ChatGPT about your category.
Expert led content
Buyers trust people more than logos. Founders and subject experts posting on LinkedIn, appearing on podcasts and writing bylined articles tend to get far more attention than brand accounts and their content gives your sales team a reason to get in touch.
Video from inside the business
Short, simple video from people inside the business is now normal in B2B. All it needs is someone who knows the subject and a clear point to make. We’ve covered this in more detail in our post on fintech video marketing.
AI and compliance
Generative AI has made content quicker to produce and much easier to get wrong. In a regulated space, every AI assisted piece still needs a person who understands the product and the rules. Here’s why AI doesn’t understand compliance and what that means for your content.
Partner marketing
As more fintechs sell through banks, platforms and embedded finance partners, co marketing with those partners is becoming a bigger channel. Joint webinars, shared reports and case studies with a partner put you in front of an audience that already trusts them.
How to market a fintech startup
Marketing a fintech startup with a small team means choosing fewer things and doing them well. A sensible order:
- Get your positioning clear and put it on the website
- Get your founder posting on LinkedIn every week
- Publish one useful post a week aimed at your buyers’ biggest questions
- Build a small email list and send it something worth reading every month
- Write your first case study as soon as a customer agrees to it
- Add paid and events once you know which messages convert
Early stage fintechs also have a trust problem that bigger brands don’t. Regulatory status, security credentials, investors, partners and named customers all help, so put them where buyers can see them, on your homepage and in your sales deck.
Here’s the thing. Startups that get noticed early tend to pick a clear audience, say something useful to it every week and keep going, whatever their budget.
Common fintech marketing mistakes
Across the industry, a few mistakes come up again and again. They usually happen for understandable reasons: tight budgets, small teams, pressure to show results quickly and long sign off processes.
Talking about features before problems
Buyers care about what changes for them. Lead with the problem and the outcome, then explain how the product gets there.
Writing for everyone
Content aimed at every possible buyer ends up useful to very few of them. Pick one audience for each piece, even if it means writing more pieces.
Letting compliance flatten the message
Bring compliance in early and agree what you can say, then say it with confidence. Late reviews tend to strip out anything specific, which leaves you with content nobody remembers.
Marketing and sales working from different plans
If sales doesn’t use what marketing produces, ask them why and build the next piece with them. Sales conversations are also the best source of content ideas you have.
Stopping too soon
Content, SEO and LinkedIn all compound over time. A lot of programmes get cut a few months in, just before they start to pay off.
Need a hand with your fintech marketing?
Fintech Content is a London based content agency for fintech and financial services companies. Since 2020 we’ve written articles, whitepapers, case studies, video scripts and social content for fintechs across payments, lending, regtech, wealth and banking, all written by people who know the space.
If you want fintech marketing that builds trust and pipeline, we’d love to hear from you. Book a call.