Why video should be the first consideration for your fintech marketing strategy

Kylie Taylor
2 years ago・12 min read

How video cuts through the noise, drives ROI and what categories to employ for best effect.

Fintech marketing, or specifically marketing tailored to financial technology companies, is not an easy path to pursue. With a traditionally ‘dry’ subject matter, deploying the right fintech marketing techniques to cut through the clutter and ensure your business is a success is an increasingly difficult challenge in an increasingly saturated market.

Why? Well from a consumer’s point of view, ‘financial services’ have traditionally been viewed as boring – don’t shoot the messenger! – with the shutters coming down the moment we even read those two words. With people only tempted to dive in and engage with marketing campaigns if and when they truly need to, its essential fintech companies recognise this first and foremost in order to work around this challenge. Because you absolutely can.

These challenges are easily overcome. While the B2B fintech story is a difficult one to tell – it doesn’t exactly scream bedtime reading – the very nature of this difficulty is exactly what makes fintech organisations so incredible. Powered by complex technology to overcome a very real consumer challenge and bring innovative solutions, fintech companies often trip themselves up by focusing on the wrong factors in marketing campaigns, like technical details rather than the benefits they bring to customers. And with the fintech industry using new technologies to improve the use of financial services to consumers, there’s a lot to celebrate in terms of those aforementioned benefits.

Another opportunity for fintech companies? Audience – the potential reach for fintech business is colossal. According to EY’s 2019 Fintech Adoption Index¹, 64% of customers around the world already use at least one fintech platform, while 96% are aware of the existence of at least one app or service. It’s a great starting point – the appetite is there, but the challenge is breaking into the market, which makes your fintech marketing strategy even more vital. The industry is rife with competing and conflicting companies and to an untrained eye, it can be difficult for everyday consumers to understand exactly what they do – not to mention capture audience attention long enough to educate them on this.

So, a complicated, bordering boring product and a saturated market… As a fintech company, how do you cut through the noise and deliver a message that resonates and connects with the audience? Not to burst the fintech marketing bubble, but this is even more difficult when you consider that, for the most part, you’re competing with big-name banks, with staggering marketing budgets… In fact, according to findings from EMI research², in 2018 the top five US banks spent an eye-watering US$1 billion each on marketing! Contrast this with your everyday fintech start-up and the disparity in marketing budgets is inconceivable.

With limited resources – both financial and personnel – as well as having to establish a brand in an already cluttered market, and put a spin on a traditionally uninteresting product, there’s only one solution for it – video marketing, your ROI-proven savior.

Why? A well-crafted video, one that cuts straight to the heart of an issue can grab and retain consumer attention more so than any other marketing method. But don’t take our word alone for it – the statistics speak for themselves:

Consumer demand: nine out of 10 consumers want to see more videos from brands and businesses in 2022³ and come the end of the year, video streaming will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic⁴. Social media posts with video have 48% more views⁵ and video-led campaigns on LinkedIn have 50% higher viewership rates.⁶
Lead generation: Social Media Week recently revealed that emails with the word ‘video’ in the subject line are opened on average, 7% more than emails without it. What’s more, marketers who use video generate 66% more qualified leads per year.⁷
It’s effective: moving visuals are processed 60,000 times more quickly than text⁸; they’re more emotive, engaging and can communicate ideas in ways words simply cannot. Viewers retain 95% of a message when ingested via video, contrasted strongly with just 10% when read.⁹
Clear ROI: marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users and 88% of marketers report a positive return on their investment.¹⁰

Et voila! The power of video is unrivaled and delivers results unlike any other medium. What makes it especially effective for fintech companies is the ability to reach and connect with audiences, as well as communicate potentially complex information in a short amount of time. Concurrently, you’re ensuring that information is going to stick with them for the long haul, not be lost in the information void with your competitors’ marketing campaigns.

While we’re admittedly biased, video content is more valuable than ever, but even more so for fintech businesses. For example, Millennials, whom by 2025 will occupy 75% of the workforce¹¹, are traditionally put off by fintech business, seemingly uneducated in the health of their finances or future-proofing – as such, they’re a tough nut for the fintech marketer to crack… And yet, a recent study¹² found that 45% of Millennials want financial products and services that help them handle their financial situation, and yet 37% cited they couldn’t find access to online educational resources on vital financial topics. This presents a fantastic opportunity for savvy fintech marketers.

But where and how do you begin? With 90 Seconds of course. As the world leading video content creation, we’re extremely adept at producing award-winning content that delivers exactly what it needs to – and from anywhere in the world at that. Working with businesses like Barclays, Standard Chartered Bank and Nium, we’re extremely well-versed in the marketing challenges the fintech industry face and even more accomplished in how to overcome them. If you’re unsure where to start, read on for tips, or of course, skip ahead and get in touch straight away!

Awareness first and foremost

Geared towards creating a sense of familiarity with your product and raising overall brand awareness, awareness-style videos are an excellent first step in terms of launching your fintech video marketing strategy.

With the aim of emotionally connecting with your customers, a Company Story video does exactly what it says on the tin. By introducing the audience to your business, you’re providing them with a sense of who you are, what you stand for and how you operate. People Stories can also foster a similar effect and are a great option for those who wish to bring their people alongside to illustrate their product and/ or service.

Authenticity is essential here. The main purpose of awareness videos is to push prospective customers further down the channel, rather than securing their funds there and then. Draw the audience in – don’t scare them off, which is expertly done in this example by Capital Markets who showcase the variety of deals they’ve worked across in South Korea, in a way that grabs attention rather than gets into the technical details.

Webinars – lead generation

Webinars have become a staple of the start-up ecosystem only strengthened by their prominence during the pandemic. A long-form style of video content, the aim is for a business to use these to establish themselves as a thought leader and educate the audience, cementing their authority and position as a subject matter expert. Not usually readily available to the public, typically viewers need to register in order to view them which is an excellent lead generation tool.

Nurturing leads

So, you’ve lured the audience in with your awareness video campaign, secured leads with your webinar, now you’re at a point in the sales funnel where you understand that a customer, in all likelihood, is interested in your product or service. All that is left is to cement a relationship with them, educate them on the array of benefits your business brings and then convert the lead into a paying customer… To do so, you need to demonstrate value – for the fintech industry there are three main video styles that work in partnership with you to do exactly that.

Product Demos, or a broader, general video addressing common questions and providing an overview of your products or services, are a must have. They can be an especially powerful tool when placed on a homepage, with 74% of people who watch product demo or explainer videos going on to purchase the product or service.¹³

Standard Chartered Bank provides an overview of their Discretionary Portfolio Solutions in this demo, which uses animation to capture audience attention.

Customer Stories: we humans are social beings and just as we filter our Tripadvisor searches by ratings, we too seek affirmation when making a fintech purchasing decision. With trust from unbiased sources being more naturally cultivated, producing customer stories or testimonials speaking to your business is a powerful way to gain a competitive market edge.

This example from Elo featuring GrabScanGo brings to life their touchscreen technologies and shows the direct benefits it brings to its customers, without isolating viewers with complex technology and terminology – and in a way that garners trust by use of third-party endorsement.

Case Studies: using a customer as an example, relaying how your product or service helped them is an incredibly powerful sales pitch – not to mention, effective in terms of maintaining engagement. Namogoo uses this video technique incredibly effectively in this case study produced with Kurt Geiger in partnership with 90 Seconds.

So, with brand awareness high, leads generated and content created its time to think about distribution – essentially the vehicle fintech companies are using to get their content out to their demographic.

Get your home in order

While it may sound obvious, first and foremost, make sure you house video on your homepage. People spend twice as long on pages with videos, therefore it’s not surprising that those that include them on a website’s homepage are 53 more likely to rank on Google’s first page of search results.¹⁴ A subsequent benefit of this uptick in ranking is that it enables you to grab further traffic – according to Wix, approximately 157% more. And if that weren’t enough to tempt you, studies have found that having a video on a landing page can boost conversion rates by up to 80%.¹⁵ In short, videos on your fintech homepage generate wins all round when it comes to SEO, brand awareness and customer conversion.

Mobile optimised

In 2022, the average American will spend approximately a month and a half on their phone¹⁶ and this already staggering figure is only set to grow, with it already up 69% from 2016.¹⁷ As a fintech marketer, if you’re not operating a mobile-first strategy you’re missing a core opportunity to reach and connect with your audience.

From ensuring your website is optimised for mobile – and with 52% of all online searching done via mobile, you really can’t afford for it not to be¹⁸ – to ensuring social investment, a suboptimal mobile experience will sink your brand quicker than you can say ‘we told you so.’

Thankfully when working with 90 Seconds, we take the legwork out of this and do it for you. With our intuitive workstream which enables us to cut and resize videos within seconds, we’re a one stop-shop from content creation to distribution.

Choose your social channel wisely

When it comes to fintech marketing, identifying your target demographic is all the more essential. The answer to these questions directly feeds into the next one: your selected social channel/s for amplification. And general terms aren’t enough – you must really hone in on your target audience and then hone in further, creating sub targets within groups. Linked In, Instagram, Facebook or TikTok – all platforms whose users and algorithms favour different types of content.

Once the groundwork has been done and decisions have been made, from here you can choose to produce tailored content to each group, or using the 90 Seconds workstream, cut different edits of the same overarching piece to narrow down to each audience across individual social channels.

Influencers to influence

While an influencer strategy may not seem like a hidden secret when it comes to fintech marketing it is still – surprisingly – relatively under the radar. But that shouldn’t be the case. With millennials trusting user generated content (UGC) twice as much as content from brands¹⁹, brands should look to harness the power of UGC as an integral part of their marketing strategy. Given the explosion of TikTok’s success this will come as little surprise.

But if your budget doesn’t stretch to big names, don’t fret. Social media platform, Socialbakers²⁰, recently revealed that the pandemic has resulted in a rise of what they refer to as ‘micro-influencer activity.’ Essentially, to get the most effective results, brands need to look to engage with more authentic, natural influencers who post “more relatable content that emphasises real-world human situations over aspirational and manicured posts.” Combined, user-generated and professional video content increases brand engagement by an average of 28%,²¹ so if you’re looking to reach new audiences, position yourself as a leader and create strong connections with influencers, then it’s a guaranteed way to drive results. But it doesn’t just stop at connection – customers who end up on an e-commerce site through a UGC video are 184% times more likely to purchase and when they do, they’ll spend approximately 45% more²².

You heard it here first, micro-influencers are the marketing force of the future!

While a fintech business has it seemingly tougher than most in terms of breaking into the market, with a creative and considered marketing strategy centred around video content creation, you can ensure your product or service is reaching the right audience and in turn, engaging them enough to drive conversion. Speak to us today to see how we can partner to drive results.