Financial Services & FinTech Digital Marketing: Expert Advice

Financial services and FinTech notoriously have a difficult niche for digital marketing. With big businesses able to outspend competition, and Google cracking down on the industry with specific guidelines it can be difficult to rank for keywords. We got with experts across the sector to see what they thought were the challenges, opportunities, and tactics are working the best in their businesses to see what we could find

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The Pros and Cons of Marketing in the Industry:

What makes the industry a unique challenge to work in? Mike LaLonde from Finzmo broke down a high-level overview of what he believes the benefits and cons are:

“On a certain level, the difficulty of generating links and social momentum is proportionate to individuals’ willingness to talk about them. People like talking about money, in general. It can be tougher on a personal level when discussing things people consider private, such as debt or income, but the general principles are widely discussed and popular sources of commentary. That makes SEO for financial services companies easier than many other industries.

But at the same time, you won’t come across many more competitive niches than financial services. There’s a lot of great content on financial topics, and companies invest heavily in growing their organic presence.

This combination results in a few very competent players fighting over prime positions on valuable keywords. So in the end, it’s incredibly hard to break into, as financial providers and fintech companies are up against teams of content producers trying to remain atop the industry (e.g. NerdWallet, LendingTree, BankRate). You may feel good about your content strategy and generating links, but the competition is great at it too (and they’ve been around for years), so overcoming that lead is a major challenge.”

This isn’t the only challenge for financial services and FinTech companies unfortunately, Google places very specific restrictions on the industry to ensure top-quality content and fight anything that might be spammy, illegal, or otherwise not relevant.

“SEO in the financial space is getting tougher, and with Google’s updates in the last year that emphasized E-A-T, SEOs have been trying to get more authoritative content created. Financial companies are usually considered Your Money or Your Life sites as well, so the standards are even higher than for SEOs in other spaces. What this has translated to is that they’re now trying to hire actual experts to write their content. People with experience in the industry, degrees in Finance, etc – they’re ensuring that people have a background to draw on and that they’re not hiring a generalist who is going to research what’s already published on the web.

Further, they’re focusing a lot more on creating comprehensive content. That means that they’re ensuring their content fully covers the topic it’s intended to, including exploring the related subtopics and questions that Google expects it to.”

– Eric Hoppe at CrowdContent

Tactics for Financial Marketers:

Focus on Customer Intent:

Even with the challenges, financial companies can effectively market online if they use the right strategy. Jeffrey Boga of Paxful suggests a highly customer-centric approach:

“Transactions in this industry often amount to thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars as opposed to relatively smaller amounts spent on e-commerce websites. And since large amounts of cash are involved, consumers are much more finicky and require more effort to convert them from being a lead to an actual customer.My advice to fellow SEO professionals working in the FinTech sector is to focus on educating consumers rather than finding ways to circumvent the next Google update.

Remember that search engines are trying to evolve their algorithm to be as “human” as possible so don’t get caught up in the latest updates. Instead, understand what makes your customers tick by placing yourself in the customer’s shoes and in doing so you can serve content that meets their needs to a greater degree. Explain complex products/services with videos, list the reasons why you’re better than the competition, present case studies and whitepapers – anything to capture the attention of your target market and make them convert.”

Plan Ahead for Compliance:

Compliance, compliance, compliance. In an industry so regulated with legalities and rules, marketers MUST be prepared for dealing with compliance. Learning the ins and outs of your industry will go along way in getting your marketing pieces deployed faster.

“What you publish on your website and social media plays an important role in building trust of the potential customers.To comply, all content should be pre-approved by an internal or external compliance officer. Climbing up the search results is a process that many financial services companies fall short on. They miss the opportunity out of fear that they may not be compliant. Employ a process for pre-approving content and accounting for the details so that compliance requirements are consistently met.”

– Sameer Somal is the CEO of Blue Ocean Global Technology

AND… Befriend Compliance:

“The absolute first step when approaching SEO for a financial services company is to create a connection with the person in charge of compliance, as you must learn what can and cannot be said. FINRA, the regulatory body that oversees everything that even remotely represents financial advice, is very strict when it comes to messaging for financial advisors and companies in the financial services industry. Virtually anything you write will need to get approved by the compliance officer before it can be published. Establishing rapport with him or her will make your job less complicated.”

– Logan Brown is a Communications Specialist for Independent Financial Group, LLC, an independent broker-dealer based in San Diego, CA.

Don’t Dismiss Traditional Marketing

“Do not be afraid to make contacts and write to people by mail. Partnerships with major players can save you thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.”

– Sharilov AleksandrCo-Founder and CEO of CoinDataFlow

Focus on Engagement

“The financial industry is a dry subject, so to help our financial clients rank well and stay there – we don’t make the content unique, as that is impossible, but we do make it engaging.

Finance sites have high bounce rates and low page view time and pages per session, we make sure when a user lands, they stay. This increases visit time and pages per visit reflect well in the eyes of Google and other search engines.”

– Sean Clancy is the SEO director of Edge Marketing

Pay Attention to Site Wide Trust Factors

“The difficulty in doing marketing for financial services is building trust. It is not only difficult to identify your ideal client and niche in a broad way using only keywords, but more difficult is your ability to build up enough trust through just content marketing via a blog or website. This is especially true if you are targeting potential clients globally and not just in a defined local, geography. In situations where the client can meet the advisor, face-to-face quickly, then the barrier goes away. Otherwise, flying to the client can, for many advisors, become cost prohibitive, depending on the size of the client. Financial services generally require a great deal of trust and respect. Building up the trust factor remains the single most difficult aspect of financial services SEO I have experienced.”

– Mason Stout, SEO Specialist for Seniorleaf.com

Content Matters

“From a content creation POV, it’s a technical recruiting challenge to source the best writers who can write on fintech topics with authority and confidence. This could be a challenge.

From a content marketing perspective, once you have the content creation process under control, it should be fairly straight forward to promote the content by way of numerous online communities focused on your brand’s CTA/buyer’s journey as well as public relations with relevant online blogs and publications.”

Invest in your content from day 1. Build with an evergreen approach and skip time-sensitive news-like articles. Focus instead on quality resources and how-tos that you can update on a regular basis to stay on top of the latest current trends, and you’ll have at your fingertips content in the form of assets that will bring quality traffic in for years to come.

Look for online communities frequented by your target customers and join the most relevant conversations. Are CTOs venting on Quora about a painpoint that your product solves? If so, joining that convo thread puts you front and center with your most relevant leads.”

– Irina, Cofounder of Galatctic Fed

We know that content matters in any industry, but with an industry that is so focused on personal and business finance, it’s important to get it right. It’s difficult to trust something as important as money with a brand who’s content seems off.

“Developing a content strategy from the start is critical to naturally increase visibility in organic results. These can be blogs, news articles, Q&A sections or individual thematic landing pages properly linked to the website using internal linking.

The content should always be tailored to the needs and intentions of the potential recipient.. Sometimes they will expect an extended article, sometimes just a short, concise response to a direct question.

Linkbuilding will be a support in content promotion. Also here, it’s worth focusing only on high-quality websites that are related to your business. I recommend looking for partners among bloggers or high-ranking editorial staff in the industry. Although such cooperation can be a large investment, it will bring more benefits from the SEO point of view than getting a massive number of links from questionable sources. It is also worth analyzing the competition on an ongoing basis, examining positions for important keywords and drawing conclusions.”

Irena Zobniów – Head of SEO and Co-Founder of Insightland

While working in a competitive industry might be challenging, there are still many tactics you can employ. If you work in financial services or FinTech and you want to see how we saved one company 97% on advertising costs, check out our case study, and don’t be afraid to experiment with your own solutions.

Originally appeared on CanIRank.