What is Inbound FinTech Marketing

Inbound FinTech Marketing is focused on attracting potential customers, users and investors through relevant, timely and useful content value at every stage of the customer’s journey to a purchase, investment, ICO or sign-up.

By concentrating on potential inbound customers, and on people already seeking a solution to a problem or challenge they have (although they might not know what that solution is yet, or even the problem), you’re not fighting for attention in the same way as traditional “outbound” marketing.

If your content is useful it will attract qualified leads who trust your brand and, if you nurture them, will (on average) make 47% larger purchases. Inbound FinTech marketing is much more effective than traditional marketing methods and is the best way to turn strangers into customers, users and promoters of your product.

How to Use Inbound FinTech Marketing to Attract Customers, Users or Investors

Inbound marketing has a particular focus on content creation and curation through blogs, social media, and pillar pages or eBooks, along with search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). The key to Inbound marketing is offering timely and useful content to potential customers, and to do this you must understand the phases of Inbound marketing as they relate to your potential leads.

Buyer Personas

Before doing anything, creating buyer personas for your potential customers is a must. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers written down in a concise profile that allows you to understand who they are, what their goals are, and what problem or challenge they have that you can solve. 

While you’re making these, don’t forget to create negative buyer personas too. These are personas of people that, for whatever reason, you don’t want to attract to your product – which is helpful if there are certain people or markets that you can't service. By having both positive and negative buyer personas you can narrow down your audience and focus on providing them with highly relevant content.

From these personas, you can create a GamePlan, which will form the backbone of your marketing campaigns.

The Inbound Buyer's Journey

Every buyer online goes through the same journey before purchasing a product, investing, or signing up to a service. The Buyer’s Journey is a way to represent this, and allow you to consider your content offering at each stage and to intertwine this with the four phases of Inbound Marketing. The stages are: Awareness, Consideration, Decision.

Creating content for each stage of the process is essential to attract visitors and convert them into clients. Having a team on hand to do the right research to identify which content is most valuable at each stage of the Buyer's Journey will make your campaigns much more effective. 

Four Phases of Inbound FinTech Marketing

Using the four phases of Inbound FinTech Marketing you can successfully attract users, customers, and investors to your FinTech company by offering them timely and relevant content.

               Attract                

As we said, you want to attract your ideal customers, users or investors, regardless of where they are in their Buyer's Journey. During this initial phase, you can do this by writing blog posts (and providing educational content that speaks to them) and using social media to execute a content strategy informed by your buyer’s challenges or problems. When conducting a search on their mobile device, smartphone users say that they look for the most relevant information regardless of the company providing the information. The door is wide open for you to attract the audiences you want if you use the right content. 

• Example: given the relative niche nature of blockchain and FinTech in late 2018, if your ideal user is a digital nomad millennial (which is very likely as research has found millennials to be among the most positive generation towards cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum) you might write a series of blog posts focused on how to travel with bitcoin and various countries that accept cryptocurrency. Maybe your FinTech product isn’t this at all – it’s a blockchain app for freelance workers to promote themselves and get hired – but you know that your audience is already using or seeking to use bitcoin when traveling and are searching for solutions. Their first interaction with your product will be you offering them the exact advice they need.

               Convert                 

• Example: Continuing with the digital nomad buyer, your website visitor was reading about traveling with crypocurrencies but has downloaded a resource from your site about working in foreign countries while on a travel visa. Now you have a qualified lead that you can continue to nurture and move down the sales funnel.

                  Close                 

Transforming the leads you have into customers is a vital part of the sales funnel. During this phase, nurturing your leads is important. Nurtured leads aren’t just more likely to convert – they’ll give you more money.

• Example: Your digital nomad spends a lot of time on your site reading content about issues and solutions for working remotely and getting travel and work visas. Based on their engagement data you show them an offer for a free trial of your freelance work app and they sign up! 

                Delight                 

The process doesn’t stop when you’ve made a sale or gained a user, you need to provide exceptional experiences for your users or investors no matter what. The more you delight them with offers, useful content, and positive interactions the longer they will stay with you and the more likely they are to turn into your very own evangelists, recommending you to business partners and friends.

How to Kill It With Inbound FinTech Marketing

The world of Inbound marketing moves at lightning speed – and that includes FinTech Marketing. Part of increasing your qualified leads, ROI and ultimately improving your bottom line is all about staying up-to-date with current trends and changes in regulations when it comes to digital marketing.

For us, this means is dedicating time in our week to researching changes to Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and the search engine optimization landscape alongside the current state of social networking platforms, email providers, and web platforms. To effectively deploy an inbound FinTech marketing strategy, you need to have expert knowledge of inbound marketing alongside a creative mind.

Here are some areas you can start to focus on today to really take your FinTech marketing to the next level:

Email

People, on average, receive over 121 emails a day but despite this email still has a powerful ROI at 122% and is an essential part of any content strategy. Email marketing is a skill set in itself that’s important to master but when you’re starting out some key areas to focus on include:

• Customization: Personalized images and text can work like a charm in email marketing. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, and marketers see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences. Airbnb use this all the time to create visually stunning emails that are widely shared on social media.
• Regulation: Email marketing isn’t just about knowing how to capture attention and increase conversions, knowing the regulations put in place by various bodies is just as important – especially if you want to avoid being categorized as spam. Rules for email marketing can include anything from how to place a physical address to opt out rules.
• Nurturing: Don't try to sell all the time. Offer helpful content that people can use and then will gently move them down the funnel.

Social

A third of the entire world uses social networks regularly so it’s important not to ignore social media platforms in any campaign you produce. Online adults aged 18-34 are most likely follow a brand via social networking (95%). If one or more of your buyer personas includes a profile of a millennial, how you handle your brand on social media truly matters.

• Facebook: 79% of Americans use Facebook, and 53% claim to use it “several times a day”— its usage still far outnumbers any other social network there is. The platform with the second closest usage percentage is Instagram, at 32%. Offering your audience timely, relevant, and even native content on Facebook is an important part of any social media strategy of GamePlan.
• Location: Tagging your location on social media can increase engagement, leading to increased conversions but it depends which platform you’re using. On Instagram, where the majority of users are under 35, posts tagged with a location (79%) have significantly higher engagement rates. Location is important on Facebook too, but in another way. You can target organic and paid posts on Facebook by location meaning you reach the exact audience you want to speak to. 

Blog

Content creation is the backbone of Inbound FinTech Marketing. Not only will this help potential users, investors and customers trust you and what you’re all about – it helps them actually find you in the first place since fresh content influences search engine rankings.

So, what should you blog about? A blog can be used for updating your users, but it’s also a perfect way to connect with new potential customers, investors, or users before they really know you. This is where you can place informative and educational content to engender trust with strangers and turn them into your biggest fans. Trust is a key component in any purchase or sign-up – the simple act of placing reviews on your site can decrease cart abandonment by 67% – so ignoring the creation of educational or useful content is something you do at your own risk.

Producing evergreen content – content that never grows old – is also a great thing to focus on with blog posts but we’ll touch more on that in SEO.

In the blockchain world some good blogs to keep an eye on include:  

• https://z.cash/blog/
• http://cryptokittyworld.com/blog/
• https://ripple.com/insights/

SEO

Search engine optimization is a key part of your marketing strategy. In 2017, Google accounted for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Bing at 7.27%, Baidu at 6.55% and Yahoo at 5.06%. Handling 63,000 searches a second, search engine traffic is a valuable part of any plan you put together.

Some things to focus on include:

• Evergreen content: Evergreen content works well, in fact some report increasing their traffic by 1800% over a period of 14 months as a result of producing content that’s relevant for a long period of time. Why does it increase traffic? Useful evergreen content doesn’t lose its relevancy over time, meaning your content continues to influence your search rankings over years and not weeks or months. Because it stays relevant for longer it can influence your domain authority more than a transient piece of content might.
• Informational content: People turn to Google to as Who, Where, What, When, Why and How. Having those answers will get more people to your site. Make sure you focus on content that you can then nurture to convert into leads. 

Creating Useful Images And Diagrams

A picture is worth a thousand words, and in FinTech Marketing, a diagram or infographic might be worth as much as 323X more than that. Studies have found that people following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations, so if your blockchain or FinTech product requires users following direction you’re going to need to produce illustrations.

Even before that, when you’re trying to attract new people, it’s important to use infographics and images. In particular, infographics are "liked" and shared on social media 3X more than other any other type of content. This makes infographics great tools for spreading brand awareness.

When used on a site, infographics and diagrams can be a great way of increasing time spent on a page and conveying information. Your audience are skim-readers so informative images are a great way of making sure messages stick. Eye-tracking studies show that when information carrying images are relevant to a webpage, readers spend more time looking at the images than they do reading text on the page. 

Are You Ready?

If you're ready to increase visits, leads and drive conversions for your blockchain company with Inbound Marketing, we're ready to help! Contact Us today for more information on how Meticulosity can help your business grow.