How Content Helped a Niche Financial Player Grow Inbound Enquiries by 58%

Many people in the industry believe that SEO will only bring in low quality leads, and that anyone doing research on Google is likely to be too small a fish. Although it can be harder to target enterprise customers, it's not impossible.

When done well, content marketing and SEO can bring in enterprise and high quality leads, even when the company operates in a niche space. We know this well because we've done this time and time again.

This latest case study proves how we were able to bring in more than in business opportunities for our client, Fintel Connect, a niche player that is competing against large, established incumbents in the space.

In this case study we'll break down how we achieved these results by using Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) strategy and bring in large enterprises and even some publicly traded companies via content marketing and SEO.

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Situation: what Fintel Connect needed

Fintel Connect came to us in late 2023 looking to invest more in content marketing and SEO as an acquisition channel.

Fintel Connect is an all-in-one platform, agency and network, specialized in helping banks, financial institutions and fintechs get cost-effective growth through affiliate marketing.

They also run Fintel Check, a marketing compliance engine that allows banks and fintechs to automate the monitoring, evaluation and auditing of affiliate campaign content. You can read more about Fintel Connect and the story here: Financial services companies are underserved by affiliate marketing platforms. Here’s how we’re fixing it at Fintel Connect.

Fintel Connect was a lesser known player to the market with big, established incumbents. They were exploring channels that would enable them to stand out and reach their audience.

After completing our 2 week Diagnostic, we established that there was an opportunity to get leads, deals and customers via in-depth content and SEO.

Alana Levine, Fintel Connect’s co-founder and CRO, describes the situation as the following:

“We are a niche business with a very niche target audience, and we are lesser known to our market than the big incumbents. We knew content would be an important path to get in front of our audience and demonstrate our value and expertise.

But finding a content writer that not only understands our industry but also the nuance of our business felt like an impossible task. Especially as the expectation from the business was for the content to generate quality, high-intent prospects.

We had known of Mint but I think it took us experimenting and not seeing the results we wanted to realize it would be worth investing and trialing a really specialized agency.”

There were two main issues that made content marketing for Fintel Connect more nuanced than for other companies:

Quality of leads matter more than quantity: As is common in the fintech and financial services industry, the types of companies reaching out was more important than the over quantity. Higher quality leads means larger organizations, such as an established bank rather than an early-stage fintech. A larger bank will have more budget, a more established product and more resources, which translates into higher ROI for Fintel Connect.
The keywords we were targeting had to be very specific. Fintel Connect operates in a very niche space. Financial services and fintech are typically quite a niche industry, but this is doubly so with Fintel Connect since they work with financial services and fintechs and specialize in affiliate marketing.

As they operate at the unique intersection of financial services and affiliate marketing, it didn’t make sense at first to target the keyword “affiliate marketing agency” – anyone in any industry may be searching for that rather than someone in financial services. This made it even more important to select the right “buying-intent” keywords to ensure we were targeting their ideal customer (although it did make sense to target higher funnel keywords once we’d done all the buying ones).

The results: reaching target KPIs, increasing brand awareness, positioning the company as experts

Reached target KPIs within 1 year of working together and an increase of 58% in inbound website enquiries

At the beginning of our engagement, we agreed on a set of objectives of:

Total number of qualified leads per month
Number of “high-value” leads per month

Every month, we measured the total number and compared it against our goal.

We’re happy to say that within a year, we were able to hit both of those goals. 15% of the total qualified leads that came through were at the enterprise level – including a publicly-listed one.

In addition to carefully tracking HubSpot, we would also talk to the sales and marketing team every month and go through the inbound leads and deals to understand the quality as well as what happened in every situation. Although it’s a manual process, it gave us incredible insight as to why certain leads were closing or not, and was a great input into understanding which keywords to target.

How were we able to hit our lead goals? We mainly were able to do this by targeting and ranking for Bottom of the Funnel keywords, the “buying” keywords that Fintel Connect’s target audience was searching for. We go into more detail about what this process looks like in the section below.

Increased brand awareness through higher rankings

By being very discerning about the keywords we were ranking for, we were able to get Fintel Connect ranking for key buying keyphrases.

Not only did this bring in leads and deals that we were able to track via HubSpot, but it also helped bring in new business that wasn’t always trackable via HubSpot. By being very diligent on sales calls with the question “How did you find out about us?”, the Fintel Connect’s sales team could share when prospects mentioned using Google to find them.

For example, there was an instance where an Opportunity that had gone cold, but reached back out to Fintel Connect when they were doing research on an adjacent topic and saw them ranking for those keywords.

A few other key metrics improved:

Impressions on Google increased by 133%
Of the 28 keywords we targeted, Fintel was ranking on the first page for 20 of those keywords
Organic traffic increased by 18% – which is not a huge number, but this is natural since we were targeting BOFU keywords rather than TOFU.

Brand awareness is hard to measure, but the fact that Fintel Connect was now appearing for more relevant terms via Google rankings did help with brand awareness. Some of the best performing articles also helped increase the ranking of their key product pages further helping overall increase brand visibility.

Better positioned as experts

Fintel Connect targets senior marketing leaders and compliance managers, which means the content has to be written at a higher, expert-level to truly be engaging for their target audience.

However, Fintel Connect is different in a quite a few ways, with two being key:

They also act as an agency, actively managing and running the affiliate program for their clients
They specialize in the financial services industry

They also have unique points of view on the industry, such as:

They believe the best affiliate programs should be managed in a consulting way, rather than just via a network with a set-and-forget approach.
Financial services is unique and requires a more rigorous approach to selecting affiliates due to the higher standards of compliance.
Non-traditional approaches and partnerships can be just as effective as traditional link placements.
A partner-first strategy can offer more insights and data to work with and more collaborative—and therefore successful—partnerships.

All of this meant that the content had to:

Properly explain the nuances of their product and how they operate in the industry
Explain their points of view on the topic
Be written at a level that a senior person at a bank or financial institution would be interested in reading

A real article of theirs is probably the easiest way to explain this. In this article about marketing compliance for financial services, we explain the difference between “hard” and “soft” compliance – which are terms that only they use to understand and explain compliance.

Here’s how we broke it down, in this article Marketing Compliance for Financial Services: How to Get It Right:

This type of content can’t be written by regurgitating other companies’ white papers, reports and doing research online. It requires detailed conversations with experts, and a writer who takes the time to understand the product, the reader’s problems and wider industry.

Via our process, we were able to create content that clearly explained their unique points of view on these topics. The fact that multiple enterprise deals came through proved that the content we were creating was clearly written for the right audience.

Although we can’t measure and track “thought leadership”, it’s clear that it’s this type of content that is required to build a company as a thought leader.

How we did it: BOFU content and interview-based content

A content strategy that starts with BOFU keywords

Anyone who follows Mint Studios knows this is the foundation of our strategy: start by creating content that targets prospects who are already close to converting.

With Fintel Connect, we started by doing some research to build a strong understanding of their target audience. Their ideal customers are banks and FIs looking to launch their first affiliate program, or scale an existing program.

We listened to interviews with ICPs, we interviewed the sales team and did our own research. We then set the strategy and targeted the 5 major types of BOFU keywords:

Comparison
Best in class
Use case
Pain points
Product-specific

Eventually, as we exhausted the “buying” keywords, we started moving up the funnel and creating content that was more general, like “affiliate network”.

Whereas most content strategies start with “thought leadership” or more brand awareness type content, we advocate for starting by targeting people who are already aware they have a problem and actively looking for a solution. This way you capture the “low hanging fruit” before working your way up the funnel.

Content based on interviews with experts

In order to convert a reader into a buyer, it’s important to create the type of content they’re looking for. That means staying away from a lot of the content you currently see online: regurgitated, surface level and generic.

This is especially true in a nuanced industry like affiliate marketing and financial services, where you’re targeting well-educated people working at banks. In this case, it’s even more important to write expert-based content.

The quality level we need from content can’t be produced with a 2 sentence brief or by outsourcing to a one-off freelance writer. Instead, it’s important to have a process that helps the writer understand the target reader, properly conveys the company’s point of view and encourages the reader to convert.

We were able to do this with our process, which involved an interview with an expert on the Fintel Connect team, and a lot of time spent understanding the product by using a demo account, watching recorded sales calls and regular communication with the marketing team.

Instead of focusing too much on what we would describe as “secondary information”, such as looking at what people in these positions tend to read, analyzing competitors or reading third party reports, we were focused on: what are prospects and customers thinking, feeling and worried about?

By being obsessed with the position of the reader, we could create content that helped them make a decision on affiliate marketing, and position Fintel Connect as an expert.

We were able to write on topics like:

How the Fintel Check dashboard can help marketing teams better manage compliance
How to optimize a marketing partner program as a bank
What fintech companies should look for when building their own affiliate program
How tracking software that's specialized for financial services can help integrate data and offer click-level insights
How to land placements as a brand on top tier publishers
How to automate marketing compliance marketing for financial firms

This level of quality content meant the team could also use the content for ABM and to reach targeted, larger accounts.

Monthly strategic catch-ups

A strategy is not something you set in stone and leave. Although we had a plan and strategy at the beginning of the engagement, we had monthly discussions where we would discuss:

What’s working?
What’s not working?
Are we on track with our goals?

Reviewing this every month allowed us to ensure we were sticking to our goals, and adapting our strategy or tactics as necessary. When we were not hitting our goals, this approach allowed us to quickly identify what could be going wrong and create a plan to fix it. During this call we’d also catch up with the sales team to understand the quality of the conversations they were having, and what was happening. This would lead to:

More content and keyword ideas for us to target
A better understanding of who Fintel Connect’s ideal target customer was

Whenever a high value lead came through, we would spend time understanding their query, who they compared Fintel to, etc. This allowed us to focus on the quality rather than quantity of leads, and focus on content that would continue to bring those types of customers and understand the questions that prospects had.

This is a good example of why marketing and sales teams should be constantly talking to each other and why so many insights can come from the sales team.

BOFU, expert-based content can work well in a niche sector targeting quality customers

The Fintel Connect team is an absolute joy to work with and we’re excited for our continued collaboration with them.

We hope this case study shows that yes, even if you target enterprise companies and operate in a niche space, SEO and content marketing can work well for you. However, it’s important your content is written for the right level of expertise, and that you begin your strategy targeting buying keywords.

We’ll end on Alana’s overview of the partnership:

“You listened to our needs and demonstrated you understood our challenges and gave us a clear proposal for how to solve them. Since working with you, we’ve had a great working relationship with consistent high-quality bottom-funnel content outputs that contribute to our goals of demonstrating expertise, generating consistent inbound interest, and ranking in top positions for the keywords we care about.

There have been tangible, measurable results, which isn’t always easy to say about content.

You’ve been a true partner where we can really lean into for your expertise and that is able to evolve with our needs.”

Interested in seeing the same results for your company? Reach out below!

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Case Study: How Content Helped a Niche Financial Company Grow Website Inbound Enquiries by 58%