How to Create Effective Fintech Content Marketing

Content marketing is a powerful driver of marketing and business results — and financial technology companies know that. According to a study by BackBay Communications, 96% of the largest fintech companies create thought leadership content consistently.

So how can companies cut through the noise with all the content generated in the fintech space? Quality.

“The fintech landscape has never been more competitive, which has made differentiation a moving target,” says Tylor Tourville, director of BackBay Communications. “Quality content has, therefore, become a cornerstone of building an effective public relations program.”

If your company is ready to break through the crowd and reach your audience with impactful, high-quality content, try out these content marketing best practices for fintech:

A persona is a representation of your ideal customer. Your description of a target persona might include demographics, motivations, buying behaviors, pain points, values, hobbies, and budget. (HubSpot has a great tool you can use to create buyer personas.) By thinking through who the individual members of your audience might be, you can equip yourself to reach those people, engage with them, and support them with hyper-relevant content.

When you create fintech content that’s relevant to key members of your target audience on an individual level, you can strike a chord with your audience in a way that wouldn’t be possible with vague “blanket” content that covers topics broadly.

ShopKeep is an example of a fintech company that creates content with a specific audience in mind. The brand maintains a hub of content for small businesses that includes articles that cover topics like operations, finances, sales and marketing, payments, and customer satisfaction.

We all use money and have to engage with finance in some capacity, but those of you who work in the fintech industry day in and day out are uniquely positioned to provide helpful, educational content that can help the average Jane make informed financial decisions. So step into that role and share specific advice that people can act on in their own lives.

SoFi’s website offers up a robust resource center. It includes how-to guides, tools that can help people make good financial choices, and infographics that illustrate complex topics like how a graduate degree can affect lifetime earnings.

You don’t have to be a huge company to provide helpful resources like this. Here’s a great place to start: Consider the questions your sales team hears regularly, the questions your audience asks on social media, and common questions people search related to your offerings, and then start writing up blog posts that answer those questions. Once you’ve built up a bank of these blog posts on your site, you can explore other types of content, like guest posts and gated content.

Like I mentioned before, doing some keyword research to figure out what questions people Google about your industry and service offerings is a great place to start when deciding what topics to create fintech content around.

One way our team does this is by Googling a topic we want to talk about, copying the URL that’s in the No. 1 organic spot in search results, and then pasting that URL into Moz Keyword Explorer‘s “Explore by Site” section to see which keywords that high-performing piece of content ranks for. This allows us to see what search terms people actually use in relation to that topic, as well as what keywords we might want to consider including in order to compete with that high-ranking content.

Another approach we use is going into Moz Keyword Explorer’s “Explore by Keyword” section and doing a search for a topic we want to talk about. From there, we can see related keywords and their performance, and we can select specific types of keywords we want to explore, such as questions.

When you refine your content topics according to what your audience members search for, you can create high-quality, relevant content that directly answers their questions. (Plus, you can also help your content rank higher in search results, which drives more eyes to your site and ideally leads to more business.)

The fintech space is full of complex information that can be difficult to understand, so it’s important for companies to find ways to make their fintech content more visual and interactive to enhance understanding and provide a more engaging user experience.

NerdWallet’s “Get a card recommendation” feature is a great example of a fintech brand tapping into the power of interactive, personalized content. By answering a series of questions in an interactive quiz, NerdWallet’s audience members can provide the necessary information to get recommendations personalized to them.

In a world where 91% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand that provides relevant offers and recommendations, it’s vital to provide engaging avenues for your audience members to get personalized recommendations from you.

BackBay Communications found that fintech companies tend to struggle with translating tech jargon for their audiences and avoiding overtly promotional content. Of course, this can be a struggle in every industry, but the finance world is especially prone to creating indecipherable text. To provide an engaging experience, make sure your content is comprehensible in the eyes of your target audience.

Robinhood does a great job of providing financial information in a way that’s easy to understand — the tagline on the learning section of the site even says, “In-depth financial info — in lingo that makes sense.”

Take a page from Robinhood and embrace being conversational and approachable in your content. People want to read content from people — not robots devoid of personality. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes to make sure the content would be clear and digestible. And when in doubt, have a colleague in another department read your content to make sure it’s not too jargon-filled.

Of course, you don’t want to get so casual with content creation that you run into trouble with your legal and compliance departments. Creating content can be tricky for those in the fintech space because there can be so many regulations and so much bureaucratic red tape to consider.

Bring in your legal and compliance team during the content planning phase to make sure it’s OK for you to cover the topics you plan to write content around. And then loop the legal and compliance team back in after the content has been written to make sure the content doesn’t cross any lines. This way, you can provide high-quality, helpful content to your audience without getting your company into legal trouble for giving a piece of advice that it shouldn’t.

With so much fintech content being created, it can be tough to reach your audience members with that content and have meaningful interactions with them. Put these six tips into practice to start boosting the quality of your content so you can break through the crowd and be found by your target audience.