Fintech Marketing Strategy: 7 Replicable Examples

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) in fintech keeps climbing, and most articles about fintech marketing strategy don't do much to help. They either rattle off generic tactics or parade VC-funded campaigns you'll never get the budget to copy.

So you're left knowing something has to change, but not where to actually start. We've been there.

In this article, we break down seven financial technology companies running smart, fintech marketing strategies you can genuinely replicate.

• What does a great fintech marketing strategy look like?
• Top examples of excellent fintech marketing strategy
  
  • 1. Content marketing: Implementing Bottom of the Funnel content (Fiska, WorldFirst, Yapily)
  • 2. Community: Setting up and managing a B2B fintech Slack group (Moov)
  • 3. LLM visibility: Moving fast to dominate AI search (Fiska)
  • 4. SEO: Targeting and ranking for competitor keywords (Wise)
  • 5. Trade shows: Having the largest presence on a smaller budget (Brex)
  • 6. LinkedIn: Building a personal brand (Tilled)
  • 7. Social media: Focusing only on Twitter / X (Capital.xyz)

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What does a great fintech marketing strategy look like?

A fintech marketing strategy is your competitive advantage and an underserved market opportunity, combined.

It sits at the center of your go-to-market (GTM) strategy, deciding your channels, message, and audience before any campaign launches. That makes it different from broad financial services marketing: you're selling something new to a skeptical, regulated market.

Why fintech marketing is different

Fintech products are regulated, and buyers rarely trust them on sight. B2B sales cycles are long, technical, and run through multiple stakeholders, which drives up customer acquisition cost (CAC). Your buyers need education before they commit.

Generic marketing playbooks assume a fast, emotional purchase. Fintech rarely offers one. A playbook built for consumer apps won't survive contact with a compliance team or a six-month procurement process.

A strategy is not a list of tactics

If you look up "fintech marketing strategy" online, you'll see a generic summary of what a strategy is, along with a list of tactics.

Don't worry, we're not going to start giving you a generic definition of strategy (which you probably already know). Instead, we'll take the time to differentiate between the two.

To us, a strategy is simply:

1. Figuring out what your product does best (your competitive advantage).
2. Finding an opportunity in the market, something that has been ignored or that competitors are not focused on.
3. Combining the two: taking your competitive advantage and using it to take advantage of an opportunity.

If you want to get deep into strategy, a great book on this topic is "Good strategy bad strategy" by Richard Rumelt. In the book, Rumelt explains how, with strategy, Hannibal was able to defeat the Romans with an army half the size (40,000 vs 80,000 soldiers). Now that's strategy (you can read up on it here).

The other issue with a lot of articles on fintech marketing strategy is that people often use examples of financial services companies that were only able to execute on that strategy because they had huge budgets and VC dollars. Sure, WealthSimple's content marketing is incredible: but they're interviewing celebrities and doing in-depth videos. It's a lot easier to do that when you've raised $610M at a $4B valuation like they have.

Also, a lot of examples of fintech strategy are not replicable: that marketing strategy worked because the fintech company was in the right time at the right moment and with the right budget. Monzo's waiting list and referral approach was very clever and worked very well for them – but it's been repeated so many times now that it's unlikely it would work in 2023.

In this post we've put together examples of great fintech marketing strategies, with many that are replicable today and most that don't require a huge amount of money.

If you want to read B2B fintech marketing tactics specifically, check out: Top B2B Fintech Marketing Tactics (with examples)

Top examples of excellent fintech marketing strategy

1. Content marketing: Implementing Bottom of the Funnel content (Fiska, WorldFirst, Yapily)

A lot of marketing teams will approach content marketing the following way:

• Come up with content ideas from brainstorming sessions (not customer research).
• Create content that targets anyone who would be interested in the topic through whitepapers or reports.
• Create content that targets anyone who would be interested in the topic.
• Hire writers that write based on desk research.
• Create content for brand awareness purposes only.

The issue with this marketing technique is that it takes years to see results, and it's also a huge missed opportunity: content marketing can also generate sales.

This is a fintech marketing strategy that helps generate leads and acquire customers, while also positioning your company as the expert:

1. Start by creating content that focuses on those close to converting (Bottom of the Funnel). Do this by understanding who your best customers are and what their pain points and challenges are.
2. Base all your content on interviews with experts.
3. Write for your ideal target audience, not just anyone who would be interested in the topic.
4. Track sales-related metrics and results.

Learn more about how this content marketing strategy works here: Fintech Content Marketing Framework

In essence, the strategy is about using expert-based content to target your ideal customer profile via SEO and LLMs.

This works with high ticket payment contracts of $500k+, and it also works with SMB B2B products.

It's also key to growing your LLM visibility. Tools like ChatGPT tend to surface brands for bottom-of-funnel, product-focused queries, not broad awareness topics. Nail your BOFU content and you give LLMs a reason to name you (more on that in example 3).

Here are examples of pieces of valuable content that target the ideal buyer and brings in leads:

• PayFac vs ISO: What's Right for Your SaaS Platform?
• How to Source Wholesale Using 1688.com Outside China
• Open Banking for Business Accounts: What You Need to Know

Want to see how this works in practice? Read the case studies:

• How We Helped Fiska Build a 7-Figure Content Pipeline From Scratch
• How We Helped WorldFirst Reach 50+ Conversions per Month with Content
• How Content Helped Yapily Achieve 2.8x Growth in Organic Inbound Website Leads

Reading examples is one thing. Building the system behind them is another. If you want content that fills your pipeline instead of just your blog, get in touch with Mint Studios.

2. Community: Setting up and managing a B2B fintech Slack group (Moov)

Community is almost a buzzword these days, with more marketers thinking about building a community for their company. The good news is that it can work very well in B2B digital marketing as well. Moov runs their own fintech Slack group, where developers who are building on their platform can ask questions, talk about the fintech industry, and more.

If you enter the group, you'll see that there's barely any information on Moov. It's very focused on answering questions.

The strategy here is that by enabling discussion, more people join the Slack group when they have technical questions. It's one of the only places to ask these types of questions. Even though there is no mention of Moov, this helps with brand awareness, build trust and Moov can also use it to answer questions and get a better understanding of their customer journey.

We dig into community-led growth and other fintech strategies on our podcast, Fintech Marketing Lab.

This customer-centric strategy really works if the founder of your company commits to not using it for sales purposes.

3. LLM visibility: Moving fast to dominate AI search (Fiska)

When Fiska, an embedded payments company, looked at the usual playbook for acquiring customers online, they knew they'd have to take a different approach. Their domain rating was low, so SEO would take months to rank. PPC meant bidding against giants like Stripe, which was far too expensive.

So Fiska took a third path: LLM visibility. The goal was to get named directly in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI tools, where the giants weren't paying attention yet.

It worked fast. Fiska generated inbound leads within a month of prioritizing LLM visibility. In under a year, their visibility across 50+ key prompts grew from 4% to 53% (tracked with Peec.ai). LLM leads rose from 3 a month to 14+ a month, an increase of over 360%, and LLMs became more than half of Fiska's total inbound leads (for Fiska, each of these leads can be worth six figures in revenue).

We helped Fiska put this into place, here's who:

• Built a realistic prompt list. We interviewed sales, product, and internal experts instead of trusting generic keyword-tool suggestions, matching prompts to their ideal customer profile, because intent matters more than exact wording.
• Wrote "GPT articles." These are a distinct format from SEO content: shorter (500 to 1,000 words), structured with tables, bullets, comparisons, and FAQs. Each one targets a single prompt, clustered around five prompts per topic, paired with a long-form bottom-of-the-funnel SEO article.
• Fixed attribution. Because people rarely click through from ChatGPT or Gemini, they added a "How did you hear about us?" field and tracked it in HubSpot.
• Focused on visibility, not citations. The goal was getting named in the answer, not treating LLM referral website traffic as the success metric.

Why it worked comes back to a theme running through this article: find an underserved opportunity and move before your competitors do. LLM visibility was a channel the giants were ignoring, so a small company with a low domain rating could win outsized share fast. It's replicable for any fintech willing to move early.

Read the full breakdown in our Fiska LLM case study, and learn how to write GPT articles that get your brand recommended by LLMs.

4. SEO: Targeting and ranking for competitor keywords (Wise)

Wise is a large company, but this specific strategy can be replicable for companies with a smaller budget as well.

The strategy is simple: target people who are researching competitor related keywords. These are some of the articles:

• How to close your ING Australia Bank account
• How to close your UBank account
• How to open a bank account with Westpac
• St. George Bank international transfer: Fees, rates and transfer time

This is a clever strategy for two reasons:

1. Someone who is looking up "how to close your ING bank account" is someone who might be changing bank accounts or looking for alternatives. They are more likely to convert to Wise than someone typing up "what is a bank account"
2. Even if that person is not ready to convert, Wise is controlling where the person reads. Someone is looking up how to open a Westpac account, but they're reading it on the Wise website. That can only be a good thing for the Wise brand.

We do this regularly for our clients as well, since it's such a good strategy to acquire new customers. Here are examples of relevant content we've written in the digital payments space::

• Adyen vs Stripe vs Zai: Which is best for Australian businesses?
• Sola Payments alternatives for SaaS: Comparing the 5 options

There is a skill to writing about competitors, we break down how to do that here: Why You Should Write About Your Competitors as a Fintech Company

5. Trade shows: Having the largest presence on a smaller budget (Brex)

In his Twitter thread, Sam Blond, ex CRO of startup Brex goes into detail about how Brex made the most of trade shows.

The key message is relevant and applicable no matter what your budget is: don't spend money on a booth at a trade show and expect leads to come in.

In order to make the most of a trade show, you need to have a strategy and be clever about it.

As Sam says, in the remote and distributed world, it's nearly impossible to have a physical concentration of people who are in your target market. This is what trade shows and events solve for.

He explains that in order to make the most of SaaStr, there are several things Brex did to stand out:

1. Sponsor key cards for hotels. This meant that when an attendee checks into the hotel, their key card looks like a Brex credit card.
2. They hired people dressed in Brex gear giving out "Brexfast" burritos on the corner outside the conference.
3. They hired a magician at their booth, which meant there was always a huge crowd at the booth watching his shows – all which incorporated the Brex fintech product offering.
4. They bought all the bus shelter billboards within a mile of the event.
5. According to Sam Blond, Brex focused its budget on these high-impact tactics to stand out at the event.

By Blond's account, this focused approach gave Brex one of the biggest presences at the event despite a comparatively modest total spend.

As Sam says "An attendee would check in to their hotel and get a Brex credit card they need to use several times a day to get in their room. They pass our shelter ads to and from the conference, lunch, dinner, etc. They get a Brexfast burrito as the first thing they experience at the event"

His tips on how to do a trade show are:

1. Pick the 1-3 best events for your target market each year. No more. Go big at these events.
2. Schedule a meeting with the 3(ish) most important stakeholders to start planning. For Brex this was often a late night white-boarding session. Each person come with a list of their 3 best outside the box ideas. This is where you'll come up with your version of the key cards, burritos, magician. Pick your favorites and have the person who came up with idea own making it successful.
3. See what works and what doesn't. Repeat the things that have the biggest impact, scrap the ones that don't for new ideas.

You can read more about Brex's approach here: Maximize event sponsorship: a breakdown of Brex's approach, co-authored by Sam Blond, who first shared it in this Twitter thread.

6. LinkedIn: Building a personal brand (Tilled)

When done well, LinkedIn can be huge for B2B fintech startups. It's how many of the top fintech influencers built their following.

In this case, the strategy for Tilled was straightforward: build a personal brand on LinkedIn and position Tilled as a thought leader.

Caleb, Tilled's founder, started creating content and marketing Tilled a full 12 months before launching the product. At the time, he had 500 LinkedIn followers (he now has 12,000) and he was mostly a lurker. But he had seen people build a personal brand online, and he thought it would be an interesting strategy to start posting on LinkedIn.

He hired a part-time ghostwriter to interview every week, and then turn those interviews into LinkedIn posts and blog posts for the website.

Caleb understood that if Tilled published content, this would help position themselves in the market and become a natural destination for people who wanted to learn more about payments, payments facilitation and financial technology.

That was the strategy: share interesting content, or answer some of the questions people are asking. One piece of content did particularly well: 5 signs you're ready for a Stripe alternative - Tilled. In this article, Tilled was willing to talk about something that everything was thinking but not saying out loud, which is how frustrating it is to work with incumbents like Stripe and Worldpay. The article went viral, and that helped with fintech brand awareness.

The results are pretty astounding:

Since founding Tilled, Caleb told us their lead generation flow is over 54% inbound organic. Their close rate is a mind boggling 59%.

Their content also helped with reducing recruiting costs. With just content, Tilled was able to hire most of their 63 person team, with their average time to hire at 27 days.

Read more about how they did it: How Tilled Gets 75% of Leads Inbound with Content Marketing

7. Social media: Focusing only on Twitter / X (Capital.xyz)

Social media platforms like TikTok are a very difficult nut to crack, and often those who do best are those with the biggest budgets (e.g. CashApp running a marketing campaign every Friday to give away free money or investing in influencer marketing). For inspiration, here are 9 fintech companies doing social media right.

But here's an example of a fintech business that invested a lot into social media marketing for a very strategic purpose: to lower their customer acquisition costs so much that it would give them a competitive advantage.

Capital started its life as Party Round, the easiest way for founders to raise money from investors.

They were highly focused on tech Twitter. Rather than spreading thin, they bet everything on a single channel. As Capital co-founder Jordi Hays told TechCrunch:

"We were very comfortable saying that in the first 18 months of building this company, we're going to ignore every single possible channel except tech Twitter, and that was the best possible strategy we could have done. There's 100,000 early-stage founders and investors signed up for our email list."

That single-minded focus is what built the list.

Their key insight was that in order to solve for high CAC (a big problem in fintech), they decided to position Capital as a media business via specific marketing efforts.

Capital.xyz did spend a lot on drops, guerrilla fintech marketing campaigns and even an event called "NYC Tech Week". By investing so much time and money on one channel, they focused a lot on brand marketing. Essentially, their marketing plan was to treat marketing as CapEx instead of OpEx – in other words, an upfront investment that would pay off over time.

For every new customer Capital acquires, their CAC goes down – which means it's a lot more cost-effective than paid acquisition.

This is how they were able to grow their list to 100,000 early stage founders and investors – and when they launched their waiting list, they had 50k founders waiting for the new product.

To learn more about their approach, check out Packy McCormick's case study: Capital and Taste

Of all the fintech marketing strategies, this one is the least replicable. But it's a great example of how product and business growth strategy can merge with marketing. If anything, you can send this case study to your boss to explain why and how marketing is so enmeshed into fintech.

And there you have it! Seven solid examples of financial companies that executed brilliantly on a fintech marketing strategy. We hope these give you the inspiration you're looking for and help you put your own strategy together.

If you're looking for more resources on fintech marketing, we recommend:

• Joining our newsletter! We primarily talk about how fintech companies can use content in their marketing.
• Listen to our podcast, Fintech Marketing Lab.
• Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.