The Best Fintech Content Strategy [8 Steps]

By Grant Bartel CONTENT-MARKETING

Execution without a strategy in place is a waste of time and energy. This is no different for your fintech content marketing strategy, which doesn’t have to take an enormous lift to complete. In this post, you’ll learn eight steps to develop a proper fintech content marketing strategy. That way, your content marketing team can create high-quality content that’s 100% dialed in with your target audience.

Why You Need a Content Strategy in the First Place

Fintech companies need to get more strategic with their content marketing. As tech continues to eat finance, the financial technology space will only become increasingly competitive. A fintech business that ignores content marketing and refuses to create content around a coherent strategy is going to be in trouble.

The benefit of developing a good strategy for your content is that the content that you create becomes grounded in your fintech company’s vision and goals. Without laying out a strategy that fits your fintech company, you’re just publishing content willy-nilly and hoping your brand awareness and online traffic grow. For this reason, we’ll now dive into the eight easy steps to create high-quality content based on a solid strategy.

8 Steps to an Effective Fintech Content Strategy

Building a good fintech content marketing strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. As a matter of fact, your company already has the strategy embedded in its company genes. What it comes down to is extracting that information and laying it out in a format that can help you propel your content marketing efforts and, ultimately, improve your fintech business.

Step 1: Define Your Objectives and Goals

Identifying your content marketing objectives and goals is the first step in developing a strategy for your content marketing. As I mentioned before, knowing your fintech company’s vision and goals can help shape this, but it can also get more fine-grained than that.

Each company is going to have different objectives and goals, so here are a few that may resonate with your company:

Improve customer acquisition and retention
Nurture newsletter subscribers
Increase lead generation for more leads
Reach new audiences
Build credibility as a thought leader
Rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages)

A great way to clearly understand what your fintech content marketing aims to achieve is to set SMART objectives. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Actionable, Realistic/Relevant, and Timely.

Specific: fix real pain points your customers have in the real world.
Measurable: find a quantitative or qualitative metric that can measure your objective.
Achievable: the discovered pain points should be solvable and improve company performance.
Realistic: the content marketing manager or team members should be equipped to achieve the objective.
Timely: create a deadline or series of deadlines for when results should appear.

Following these steps to create your content marketing objectives will give your company a huge leg up and make the next steps a hundred times easier.

Step 2: Understand Your Target Audience

A major part of any strategy for content marketing is knowing your exact target audience. Knowing to a “T” who you’re speaking to and understanding their pain points is important because, without that information, you won’t know what kind of content to create in the first place.

A great start is to answer some of these questions to find your target persona:

Who are they (demographics)?
What do they like/dislike?
What are their pain points?
What are their goals and aspirations?
Where are they located?
What are their affinities?
What kind of community are they attracted to?

These may seem like basic questions, but being able to answer them is going to position your content marketing tactics extremely well.

Building out a database like this takes time and effort. A lot of it will come down to conducting market research and digging into the analytics. Once you have a clear idea of some of your top personas, you’ll want to organize them into some documentation so everyone in your marketing team has access to it.

Step 3: Conduct a Content Audit

What does your existing content look like? Is it quality content that speaks to your ideal audience? A good way to get started on a new project is to start, but as you learn new things along the way, it’s important to go back and iterate. The same goes for content marketing. Most likely, the first blog post you wrote isn’t exactly aligned with your objectives and it probably doesn’t speak to your audience as well as you’d like.

You must go through every piece of fintech content you’ve created and audit it. It may take time, but this is necessary to build brand authority for your fintech company. I suggest creating a list of every piece of content you’ve created and going through them individually. Your content marketing team might be creating content while you’re doing this, so make sure they’re on point as well.

As you go through this process, you should also keep an eye out for any content gaps. The content creation process isn’t a science and it’s easy to miss opportunities to speak to potential customers with topics they’re interested in. In the fintech industry, producing content that’s interesting and relevant should be a top priority.

Step 4: Determine Content Types and Formats

Creating content for your audience is one thing, but you have to figure out the most effective content types they prefer. It can be articles, long-form content, industry data overviews, in-depth insights from thought leaders, social media content, webinars, podcasts, videos, infographics, how-to guides, or something on your website. To really max out your digital marketing efforts, knowing the right type of content to produce is incredibly important.

A great example of how fintech companies can really make their content marketing shine, regardless of the content type, is by creating content in a format that’s clear, informative, and engaging. Even if you know the type your audience wants to hear from you, fintech companies that ignore the quality of format just because they know how to deliver the content are going to hurt their brand long term.

Step 5: Develop a Content Calendar

To really get your fintech content marketing dialed in and operating at a high level requires a content calendar. A content calendar is going to keep your content marketing team organized and accountable since it’ll be a no-brainer on what content needs to be created and when. It’s one thing to write content regularly. It’s another thing to publish content regularly.

Here’s an easy set of steps to create a killer content calendar:

Audit your content across all your channels, including social channels
Find the gaps in your content
Create content ideas to fill those gaps, ideally with high-intent keywords
Organize those content ideas into a schedule
Split up the content across multiple channels
Start executing your content plan

You see, a content calendar is just a content plan with deadlines. It’s the source of truth for what needs to get done and when, regardless of whether it concerns guest blogging, posting on social media, influencer marketing efforts, or anything else.

Another great reason to use a content calendar is it can help you align your content with key events and industry trends. A great example is if you know a major fintech conference will take place, and it makes sense to produce a certain type of content leading up to it, during it, and following it. Again, a content plan like this keeps your content relevant and organized.

Step 6: Create and Curate Engaging Content

The name of the game in content marketing is creating and publishing content. Whether it’s in the form of blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, infographics, or whatever, fintech companies must produce great content that resonates with their audience.

The problem with producing engaging, quality content in the fintech world is that your content writers have to understand a bit of technology and financial information. The only way you’re going to be able to build brand awareness and grow your business with content is if the people writing the content know what they’re writing about. Otherwise, it’s going to show through your articles, website, etc, and your prospects and customers will notice.

A hugely important part of producing good fintech and financial content is being able to curate relevant content. This means organizing your content in an understandable way using topic clusters (or categories), tags, authors, etc. Depending on your business, you may have a set of topics you want to cover religiously and others you don’t. Understanding how to do this properly will also help people find your content in search, which we’ll cover next.

Step 7: Implement SEO and Promotion Strategies

Search engine optimization (SEO) is widely important in content marketing. It’s the sibling that stands side-by-side with content marketing and is an important topic if you want your message to be heard by as many people as possible. Getting your website, articles, and content on other channels to show up on search via SEO is the principal inbound marketing strategy.

First things first with fintech SEO is conducting keyword research. The ticket here is to know what your customers are searching for online and how your service offerings fit into those search queries. Once you know that, you can create topic clusters for various keywords ranging from high to low competition and high to low traffic volume.

Following that, you must invest in on-page and off-page SEO strategies. On-page refers to ensuring your content has the proper keywords in place and the page you’re publishing is engaging and formatted properly. Of course, there are a ton of things you can do here, so learning about it is paramount. Regarding off-page, that’s all about building as many authoritative links pointing to your site as possible. Guest posts and outreach link-building are effective methods for increasing your SEO via off-page.

A common mistake a lot of companies make is ignoring social media. Promoting your content via social media is free and will drive traffic to your website, which increases the organic traffic to your business. This also is an easy way to build brand awareness since everyone is online. Consumers are craving content, so why not put it right in front of them where they hang out online?

Step 8: Measure, Analyze, and Iterate Your Fintech Content Marketing Strategy

To absolutely dial in your content marketing, you must measure, analyze, and iterate. Like anything in your company, be it operations, software development, or product, a continuous improvement approach to your content is key to an effective content marketing strategy.

Depending on your company’s goals, you may have different metrics and performance indicators you want to optimize for. Ensure your content marketing team knows exactly what they should be tracking so they can optimize the content creation process so it’s 100% aligned with your company’s goals.

This step is collaborative across multiple teams, especially marketing, product, and analytics. These teams should meet regularly to dive deep into the data and extract any insights. This is how improvements will be made regarding reaching more prospects, building brand awareness in the industry, helping your customers in the buying process, improving customer acquisition, and, ultimately, driving sales.

Final Thoughts

We just went through eight easy steps to take to improve the strategy of your content marketing efforts. People like to overcomplicate things, but in reality, most things are simple. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s easy. Ensuring you and your team stick to creating content built on a solid foundation can take discipline and continuous effort. But that’s how fintech companies who take their content marketing seriously end up on top.

Author

Grant Bartel

Grant's a fintech content marketer and SEO strategist who works 100% remotely. With years of professional experience working alongside the largest fintech brands and marketing agencies, he's well-equipped to help grow his clients' businesses with effective content and SEO strategies.