You’ve closed the round, the product is nearly ready and somebody on the board has asked who’s doing marketing. The answer is you, on top of everything else you do, with no marketing budget to speak of.
That’s normal for a fintech startup. Early money goes on product, compliance and the first hires, so marketing waits until there’s traction to show. Traction is hard to get when buyers don’t know you exist, though. A bank or a lender rarely takes a call from a company it’s never heard of.
Here’s how we’d approach fintech startup marketing when the main thing you can spend is time.
Get your one sentence right first
Before you write a post or a page, write down what you do, who it’s for and why they should care, in one sentence a buyer could repeat to their boss. Everything after this borrows from it: the homepage, the LinkedIn bio, the pitch deck and the first line of every email.
It’s harder than it sounds, because founders know the product so well that they describe how it works. Buyers want to hear what changes for them. We wrote a whole guide on how to say what you do in one sentence if you want to work through it properly.
Pick one buyer and one channel
With very little time, spreading it across five channels means doing all of them badly. Choose the buyer who signs the contract, whether that’s a head of payments or a finance lead, then find out where they already spend time.
For most B2B fintechs that’s LinkedIn, with trade press and a few industry events around it. Go deep there before you add anything else. Our piece on B2B fintech marketing covers why the buying group is bigger than one person and who else you’ll need to reach later.
Put the founder on LinkedIn
At this stage the founder is the most credible voice the company has. You know the problem, you built the product and you can talk about the market without a script.
Post two or three times a week about the problem your buyers have, what you’re seeing in the market and what you’ve learned building in a regulated space. Comment on posts from the people you want to sell to. A company page with a few hundred followers won’t reach many people for a while, so your personal profile does most of the work.
If your product is regulated, check with whoever handles compliance before a post talks about rates, returns or what the product does for customers. Financial promotion rules apply to a founder’s posts too.
Write the five articles your buyers search for
A startup site with a homepage and a contact form gives search engines and AI tools nothing to quote. Look at the questions that come up on every sales call: how does it work with our systems, is it secure, how does it compare with what we use now, what does compliance need to see. Each one is an article.
Five useful articles that answer real questions will do more for a fintech startup than a weekly post you can’t keep up. Put a named author on each one and answer the question in the first line under every heading, because that’s what AI tools tend to lift. If writing them is the thing that keeps slipping, that’s what our content writing team does.
Start an email list on day one
Everyone who joins the waitlist, books a demo or swaps details at an event should land on one list. Send them something useful once a month, written by the founder, with a subject line that says what’s inside.
It doesn’t need to be long. A short note on what you’ve shipped, one thing you’re seeing in the market and a link to your latest article is plenty. We covered the rest in fintech email marketing that people open.
Earn coverage with real stories
Trade journalists need stories and a startup has more of them than it thinks: the funding round, the first partnership, an opinion on a new regulation or anonymised data from your own product. Pick one and pitch it to the two or three titles your buyers read.
You don’t need an agency for the first few pieces. Our guide to PR for fintech walks through how to pitch without a big budget.
Turn your first customers into proof
Your first customer is worth more to your marketing than any campaign. Ask for a quote, permission to use their logo and one number you can both stand behind, then get it signed off while everyone’s still excited.
A short case study with a named customer will open more doors with banks and lenders than a page of features. Make it easy to find on the site and send it to every prospect at the same stage.
Show buyers you’re safe to work with
Banks and larger firms check early whether a startup is safe to work with. A security page, a clear line on your regulatory status (your own authorisation or the partner you work through) and how you handle data answer a lot of that before anyone has to ask. They also save your sales team a lot of back and forth on security questionnaires.
When should a fintech startup get marketing help?
Get help when the founder’s posts and articles stop happening because the company has grown around them. That usually shows up as a LinkedIn profile that’s gone quiet and a blog with three posts from launch month. Bringing in help at that point keeps everything you’ve built moving.
Want help getting your fintech startup known?
We’ve been writing for fintech and financial services companies since 2020. We can build a content strategy around your one sentence, interview your founder for posts and articles in their own voice and get it all through compliance.
If you’d like to talk about where to start, Book a call.