With a total value of 33.9bn USD in investments worldwide, fintech (financial technology) brands are disrupting the financial services industry globally. By creating modernized, easy solutions for businesses and consumers, new players in banking, insurance, trading, and financial advice have made traditional financial institutions seem rigid and clunky, forcing them to digitize their services or risk not keeping up.
Yet, fintech startups and scale-ups face their own challenges. They face high competition and rigid compliance laws in an increasingly saturated market. Once they reach new audiences, they’re tasked with building trust in new tech and educating people on unfamiliar products and services, without a brick and mortar presence.
How have the biggest fintech brands managed to get it right? This article explores the world of fintech marketing and shows how fintech companies have built brands worth reckoning with.
Fintech Marketing Take a Customer-Centric Approach
Adopting a customer-centric approach to every aspect of the marketing funnel is something that many companies claim to do, but that few manage to sustain. But when it works, it works, and many fintech brands have made this part of their brand identity.
Take Revolut, a banking app that has continued to maintain an ethos of focusing on the customer’s needs at every level and in every new market. This is something that has enabled them to grow from 150 thousand customers in 2017 to over 8 million by 2020.
Revolut plans to level up their US expansion in 2021, having put it on pause in 2020. They don’t plan to take customers from other fintech brands in the US, but those unsatisfied with legacy banks.
“ Our new customers come from traditional banks, where folks are just kind of fed up with the fees and the lack of transparency and all the things that go with large banks,” says Ron Olivera, CEO of Revolut USA.
Global payments and shopping service provider, Klarna, also bake customer-centricity into their marketing strategy. In 2020, they launched their global ‘ Consumer Council’ program, where consumers are invited to meet and share their experiences of using Klarna’. By listening to shoppers and Klarna users, marketing managers can learn what customers want, what they need, and how Klarna could be more valuable to them.
Similarly, Stripe holds Stripe Sessions, which present a forum for the company to hear directly from its users and delight customers through rich brand experiences.
An Experiential Marketing Strategy is Key to Growth
For fintech companies, particularly those operating largely within a B2B environment, it can be difficult to create opportunities for customers to physically experience your brand. Besides the above-mentioned forums, what else can fintech companies do?
Klarna builds pop-up store experiences and events in different cities, working together with merchants to host and feature their brands. These pop-ups provide Klarna with physical touchpoints for customers to experience the brand and build a stronger emotional connection.
Other popular ways that fintech companies create physical brand experiences is by attending or hosting events, hackathons, or meetups.
A physical touchpoint doesn’t always need to involve a big event or project. Stripe initially sent welcome packages to new customers, in a gesture that both makes the customer feel valued and also allows them to physically experience a brand they’d otherwise only interact with digitally.
Think what opportunities are there for customers to experience not just your products, but your brand? Can you create a way for people to touch and feel your brand through an experiential marketing strategy?
Fintech Marketing Encourages Branded Language
We’ve all heard the phrase “Venmo me”.
Many fintech brands encourage customers to adopt branded language, to “verbify” their brand name, and work it into everyday use. This encouragement can be done via external communications and social media channels as well as from within the app or platform itself.
Branded language fosters familiarity and brand resonance, and in the best cases, the brand name can become central to the product type or industry itself. (Think “Hoover”!)
Online bank N26 used branded language in a campaign that was centered around “26 reasons to pick N26”, playing on the number 26 and building meaning behind their name.
Could your brand name be used to describe an action to do with your product? What other branded language could you incorporate into your communications strategy?
Fintech Marketing Educates Customers
Many successful fintech brands have invested in efforts to provide customers with advice, guidance, and education — not just info on how to use their products. By addressing real questions and providing valuable knowledge, brands can position their products as the perfect solution or next step.
Wealthsimple offers a free investing masterclass, sharing tips that promise to turn customers into a “financial genius”. Through short and digestible videos, the course introduces new consumers to the brand, positioning it as smart and approachable, and making people feel empowered to start investing and building wealth. The language is simple and the topics are tailored to a specific audience.
Knowledge-sharing has also been a key component of Stripe’s marketing strategy, with articles, guides, and even books providing advice on everything from email marketing to engineering. While these topics may seem unrelated to Stripe’s core offer of payment processing, they’re more broadly relevant to Stripe’s key audience.
By focusing on adding value and educating your customers in areas of interest that can be even broadly linked to your brand, you can bridge the gap between interest and action when it comes to trying your product or service.
Gamification
By holding contests, creating puzzles, awarding prizes, or otherwise incentivizing some form of interaction with their products, fintech brands use gamification to generate excitement about new products and build awareness among new users.
In order to generate pre-launch excitement and capitalize on word-of-mouth customer acquisition, stock trading app Robinhood started a clever referral priority waitlist before their product was even launched. It works like this: Join the list and you’re at the end of the queue to join their investment app where you can invest for free.
However, refer a friend and you can move up in line. The more people you refer, the further you move up the line and the sooner you get access to the app. The results were significant, with almost 1 million people signing up prior to the 2015 launch.
Consider how your own brand can generate press or customer interest and excitement before you launch a new product.
Establish Emotional Connection
Fintech companies have a unique challenge when it comes to the emotional connections customers develop with their brands. The emotions we feel about our hard-earned money and the way we use, manage, and spend it, are drastically different from the emotions we feel when we use a food delivery app or streaming service. So when our experience doesn’t match our expectations, the impact can be monumental.
Smart fintech brands know this and work hard to establish strong emotional connections with their customers.
Klarna constantly works to be fundamentally different from other brands in the sector. While almost all other fintech brand logos are colored black or blue, in 2017 Klarna boldly changed theirs to pink. They argued that even if people don’t like it, they’ll have reacted to it, which is the important thing.
Quirky brand campaigns establish Klarna as creative and unique, appealing to communities and segments that are receptive to the product and brand, but still getting a reaction from those who find the brand off-putting.
Influencer and Affiliate Marketing
Incentivizing a third-party affiliate or influencer to promote a brand’s products is a popular growth tactic used by fintech brands. It allows them to access niche communities through trusted and influential people or businesses, and can often have a bigger impact than a splashy and expensive brand campaign.
Influencers who are well-loved in niche communities can be big drivers of culture around specific audiences, particularly among younger people. Wealthsimple leveraged this by collaborating with successful rap artist Awkwafina. The campaign was particularly relatable to her fanbase, who also fit a relevant target customer profile for Wealthsimple.
Working with carefully selected influencers, who can reflect your brand’s image and whose audience matches a relevant segment of yours, can generate significant awareness of your brand or product.
Final Thoughts
The most successful fintech brands are those that reach the right audiences with clever campaigns and customer knowledge, all while experiencing rapid growth and expansion.
Their tactics are transferable and it is certainly worth looking to them for inspiration and innovative ideas when it comes to your branding and marketing strategy. Which of these strategies will you incorporate into your own brand campaigns in 2021?
Originally published at https://www.latana.com.
