Maybe you’ve tried several lead generation strategies for your product, and they no longer work. Or perhaps you’re new to finance and wondering if there are lead generation strategies that work especially well for financial products.
In this article, my goal is to show you one specific strategy to generate leads for financial products that is proven to work: content marketing.
And no, that doesn’t mean writing and publishing articles like “top ways to budget” and “what is a payment gateway” blog posts, don’t worry, it’s more than that.
I’ll show you how to use content and SEO to generate leads and customers for your financial products.
How to generate leads for financial products
The strategy I will be outlining follows the Mint Studios framework, which is the process we use at our agency to help fintech companies generate leads from content.
With this approach, you will be generating leads for your financial product through content that you publish on your website. Does your company website already have a blog? If so, you’ve already been doing content marketing. What this specific framework does is help you turn content into real leads and customers.
Let’s start from the beginning:
1. Find customer pain points
If you do some research, you’ll see that most people will tell you to begin doing content marketing with “keyword research”.
Although keyword research is important, it doesn’t actually make that much sense to start with that: how are you supposed to know what your customers are searching for if you don’t first understand their problems?
Your customers are buying and using your product for a reason. They have issues, and your financial product is a solution. The first step is therefore to uncover what their pain points are.
Although this is something you likely already did back when the company or product was launched, it’s worth doing again specifically for content. If this exercise was done recently, you can rely on notes from your previous research.
If you can, interview 3 - 4 customers. If that’s not possible due to compliance reasons, interview the most customer-facing members of your company.
Ask them questions like:
- What is the primary benefit that you have received from using our product?
- At what point would this product/service get expensive but still worth it?
- What problem were you trying to solve when you initially came across our product or service?
Athough we have our own list of questions we like to follow, Intercom’s free e-book is a great resource on how to do customer interviews.
2. List the pain points
You should now have a list of the main pain points your customers have. Here it helps to categorise them and put them in groups.
To make it easier to understand this part, we’re going to take the imaginary company called Paymentz, that offers global payments for companies. Paymentz’ target market — companies that do regular cross border payments — have several pain points, such as:
- International payment fees are too high which means finance teams are constantly looking for workarounds (like batching payments)
- International payments take a long time to settle, making it hard to reconcile accounts and see where their cash position stands
- Keeping up to date with regulations and compliance in each country is tricky and risky, which means higher restrictions for their customers in certain countries
They probably have many more pain points, but for the sake of this example we’ll focus on three main ones.
3. Figure out what words your target market is using on Google
The next step is to figure out what words your target market is using to find solutions to their pain points (now we’re doing keyword research!). It helps to have an SEO tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs to do some research. But if you don’t have that, you simply start typing on Google to see what comes up. Look at:
- Suggested search
- The “people also ask” section
- Related search at the bottom of the page
So for example, a keyword that you’ve heard customers use a lot is “international remittance”. When you put this into Google, you find plenty of keywords through suggested search, frequently asked questions and related searches.
Keep putting keywords and phrases into Google that you think your ideal customer might be using. Keep asking yourself “would my ideal customer be searching this up?”. You can only really know this if you have a good understanding of your customers (hence, the interviews).
Based on those pain points, Paymentz has found several keywords related to pain points that are worth targeting:
- International remittance api
- Paymentz vs Remitly
- Ach vs credit card
We’ve put them on a spreadsheet and categorised them based on pain points or type of posts. The number on the right is the volume of keyword searches based on SEMRush.
4. Prioritise BOFU keywords
You’ve now been doing keyword research based on the pain points and interviews with your customers. Your goal is to look for keyphrases that are very “Bottom of the Funnel”, indicating someone is literally looking for your product.
For example, if you sell an accounting tool for freelancers, a keyphrase like “xero for freelancers” is literally describing your product. Someone searching this up is already aware of their problem, knows the solution and is ready to buy.
Bottom of the Funnel keywords are the holy grail of content marketing; if you’re not creating content that targets them, then you are literally leaving customers, and therefore revenue, on the table. It doesn’t mean you should never do middle or top of the funnel, it just means make sure your prioritise all the bottom of the funnel ones so you don’t miss out on customers.
Learn more: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?
In this case of our company, Paymentz, the keyword “Paymentz vs Remitly” is incredibly Bottom of the Funnel: our reader has already identified that our solution solves their problem, and they are now comparing us with a competitor. This type of article will generate a good amount of leads.
Essentially, in this section we want to prioritise the keywords we believe will generate the highest number of conversions, since the person who is typing them into Google is very ready to buy.
5. Create content that is in-depth and focused on interviews
Finding the right keyword and ranking for it is only half the battle: you then need to write a compelling article that would get a reader to convert into a customer.
If you are a B2B fintech like Paymentz, your article might be a bit more advanced or technical. Since it’s Bottom of the Funnel, you might also be mentioning details about your product — which means you can’t just hire a generalist writer off Upwork and expect them to write an amazing article. In fact, hiring a freelance writer and just giving them a brief and hoping it’ll generate leads is not a good strategy.
Instead, your best bet is to hire a writer who will interview the right people on your team (and perhaps has the right background). Your team has all the knowledge and are subject matter experts in the area — they are the ones who need to be interviewed.
For something like Paymentz vs Remitly, the writer would interview the product team to understand how Paymentz works exactly, and how it compares to Remitly. You’ll also be able to explain everything you know about your competitors, and then let them write a clear comparison.
In this case, the article will be biased — of course, Paymentz is writing the article. But instead of trying to hide the fact and just writing a negative article about Remitly, the best is to lean towards transparency and owning the fact that you are writing the article. We have a specific framework we use at Mint Studios, where we make it clear that Paymentz is writing the article and that this might be biased (e.g. we use a phrase like “We understand that our product is designed for everyone, and that at times other products might be a better fit”) . This builds trust and reassures the reader that we’re being honest.
You also want to make sure you add Call to Actions where needed, case studies, and formatting that makes it easy to read an article (20px font size, narrow paragraphs, black font).
6. Do content distribution
It doesn’t end there! Once you’ve created a stellar piece of content that targets a BOFU keyword, you want to be pushing it out there so it gains traction early on and you don’t have to wait around for SEO to start working.
Expert content marketers will bake in distribution within the content, by featuring experts and doing more. If you want to learn more about content distribution, I recommend reading the distribution strategies in this post: Why Fintech Companies Need to Consider Content Distribution
Depending on your product and target audience, distribution means different things. It could mean doing guest posts on a different site, or partnering with a blogger or influencer to promote your content. It could also be joining online communities and sharing the content whenever it’s useful.
7. Don’t forget to track!
If you don’t track how your content is performing, you won’t know how many leads you can attribute to content and which type of content your readers love.
You want to make sure your Google Analytics (or product management tool) is set up in a way that allows you to track the conversion from each blog post. This could be tracking how many people submit a contact form, or click on “Sign up”. It’s not a perfect science, but it’s a lot better than tracking nothing at all.
We use the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics and use Tag Manager to track clicks and form submissions. Here’s an example of how the tracking looks like for Mint Studios:
As you can see from the screenshot, the blog article /fintech-social-media brings in the most amount of subscribers.
A real life example: Pomelo Pay
How does this look in practice?
I’ll use one of our clients as an example. Pomelo Pay is a payment service provider that helps companies accept payments via multiple payment methods.
Although traffic was steadily increasing at the Pomelo website, conversions (and therefore leads), were not.
So we set up a call with the sales team and asked them the most common questions they were getting from prospects, their unmet needs and the most important things prospects need to know before signing up to Pomelo Pay.
We found some specific keywords that were worth targeting, such as “payment links”, “payment methods”, “nfc mobile payments” and “payment gateway”.
In order to target those keywords, we produced quite a few articles including:
- Best Card Payment Machines: How to Pick the Right One for Your Business
- What are NFC mobile payments and are they safe?
- Best Payment Link Provider: Where to Begin
Although we can’t share specific numbers, the conversion rates on the three articles are the following:
Best card payment machine: 1.4%
NFC mobile payments: 1.1%
Best Payment Link provider: 5.4% (it’s high because the pageviews are low)
Those are above average conversion rates, simply because the articles are focused on customers who are ready to buy – rather than general educational articles. If you’re getting 500 pageviews per article with a 1% conversion rate… well, you do the maths.
Hopefully now you understand a bit better the power of content marketing and SEO and how it can help you generate leads for a financial product. Although it takes time and effort upfront, once you start publishing high quality content targeted towards your best customers and are ranking on Google, the results can be mind blowing.
Want someone to help you put this into practice? At Mint Studios we’ve helped several fintech companies acquire leads via content with this exact framework, including Pomelo Pay, Money Dashboard and Parpera.
Want to learn more about how we work? Read about the Mint Studios framework.
