Guest post by Yana Lapitskaya, Managing Director at Yay!Starter Marketing
The UK has, for years, been known as a home to thousands of fintech businesses. With the 2020 global pandemic and bank closures, fintech services became essential to professional and personal life and crowned London as the fintech capital of the world. As a result, the UK Fintech sector raised a total of $2.9bn in Q1 2021, setting a high tempo for the year ahead. Digital marketing for B2B fintech startups has a number of specific considerations that will inform your outreach strategies. Here’s what you need to know to get started in the right direction.
How are Fintechs different?
Fintech companies aim to improve the delivery of financial services for businesses and private customers. The marketing techniques used for fintechs must be specifically tailored to the financial field. This is especially true for the B2B realm as their target audience is interested in a very specific type of content. Something that works for a product-sale-driven business like eCommerce, will not work for fintech companies that are primarily SaaS (Software as a Service) businesses. Creating a high-quality product is the first step to success, but using the right digital marketing tactics is what will get your product in front of potential clients and, eventually, make it a success.
So what digital marketing channels do marketers recommend for B2B fintech businesses?
Google Ads
If you are lucky enough to be marketing a product that has a high search intent, Google Ads is a channel you do not want to miss. Between search, display and retargeting, there are a variety of ways in which you can generate quality leads. When using Google Ads, it is important to make sure you have optimised landing pages on your site to convert the traffic that comes from the ad campaign. It is also crucial to ensure that you have set up email automation (nurturing programme), with lead scoring capabilities so that your sales team would only be notified of the warm leads that need following up and would not have to waste time sorting through leads that will never convert.
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn is the main social network for B2B marketing and offers a variety of ways in which it can be used to promote your B2B fintech business. One of them is LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn Ads can be quite expensive, so using them as a lead generation may not be the most efficient way of distributing your marketing budget. However, they could work well for brand awareness campaigns targeting employees of specific companies or industries, especially at the initial stages of marketing your fintech business. LinkedIn ads also work well for content promotion – if you are running a webinar, or promoting a thought-leadership piece – use them to attract highly specific personas from your target audience and generate top-of-the-funnel leads.
LinkedIn Outreach
LinkedIn outreach is an effective way to start a conversation with your buyer personas in a cost-effective manner. You can connect with them directly on LinkedIn with the option of personalising each message as opposed to having the same ad for every person in your target audience.
B2B fintech companies can use LinkedIn outreach to message the people that they want to work with. This can be done via automated LinkedIn messaging campaigns which require some time to set up. Once it is all in place, all you would have to do is wait for new messages to appear in your inbox and take the conversation from there.
Email Cold Outreach
Email cold outreach is also highly recommended as a digital marketing channel for B2B fintech businesses. It will allow you to email your buyer personas directly while staying GDPR compliant. It is important you avoid using personal email addresses for your email outreach campaign.
The secret to a successful email outreach campaign is to create a content-based or content-led campaign. An example could be anything like an ebook or a report or educational video content that will provide value to your audience from the beginning. Remember, these contacts do not know you and did not ask to receive any information from you or your business, so adding value to build trust is paramount. Keep your emails short, value-driven and most importantly, not salesy!
When done correctly, email cold outreach will provide fast results and put you in touch with your perfect prospect without having to spend too much on ads.
B2B Fintech Digital Marketing in Practice
Looking to see a real-life example of all of the above tactics at work? Take a look at this Paybase case study from Yay!Starter to get a feel of how digital marketing techniques can help your fintech business achieve brand awareness, generate leads, and grow in size.
Conclusion
Setting a specific target audience with several personas is the key ingredient whether you choose to go for Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Email cold outreach or LinkedIn cold outreach. When choosing marketing channels, make sure to identify your goals first. Is it increasing brand awareness or lead generation? If you are looking to generate leads then Google Ads or running a cold outreach campaign may be what you need, if you are looking to raise brand awareness for your product, you may want to consider LinkedIn Ads. Whatever you pick, make sure to narrow down your target audience and personalise your message as much as possible. If you sound like you know them and understand their pain points, you will see tremendous results!
If you need help with reaching your target audience and generating leads you can get in touch with Yay!Starter Marketing here.
About Yay!Starter Marketing
Yay!Starter Marketing is a London-based digital marketing agency founded in 2016 by Yana Lapitskaya. Following eight years of experience in global advertising and digital agencies, Yana launched Yay!Starter Marketing to help businesses grow, offering a boutique level of service and attention for clients of any size.
Yana Lapitskaya is a marketing expert and a digital native with over twelve years of marketing experience. She worked in a number of independent and OMNICOM-owned agencies with a variety of specialties across PR, marketing and digital. Her proudest professional moments include working on marketing campaigns for Coca-Cola at the World Cup 2018 as well as delivering the ‘Thank you, Mom’ campaign for Procter and Gamble during the London 2012 and Sochi 2014 Olympic Games.
