4 Fintech Lead Generation Tips

Lead generation in fintech requires a delicate balance. You want to appeal to consumers who need help with their finances, but you don’t want to strike a nerve while doing so.

So, the goal shouldn’t be to try and convert them right away. Unless your fintech solution has a well-known and trusted bank behind it, it’s going to be very difficult to do that.

What you need to do instead is steadily work on earning their trust. And you’ll do that by attracting the right kinds of leads with content and then gaining their trust over time.

How to Generate Leads for Fintech

Let’s take a look at some practical but creative solutions for getting good leads (and customers) for your fintech solution.

Tip 1: Listen in on Your Target Customers

Financial technologies aren’t the easiest to sell consumers on.

For one, there’s the hurdle of fear that many fintech companies have to clear.

While an Ondot Systems study found that 64% of Americans would be willing to buy a product from a fintech company, 74% were nervous about their data being sold. Fear of fintech comes from other places, too, like not understanding how the technology works or worrying that an unregulated product could put their data or money at risk.

Then, there’s the serious nature of fintech to think about.

With other solutions, like a dating site or a fitness app, you can appeal to leads with some incentives and pressure. “What are you waiting for? Get $20 off your first month of membership!”

But what kind of signal would that send about a financial product that’s supposed to reduce stress and fear? Because many fintech solutions are aimed at helping customers do things like manage their money, get out of debt, or pay off loans, you have to be careful. There are just too many buttons that can get pushed with the wrong approach.

So, let’s say you’ve built a money transfer app, like Venmo.

The Venmo landing page shows a GIF of the app in action and lets prospects know they can "send money and make purchases at approved merchants" with it.

There’s no room here for jargon and buzzwords. The safest way to go about positioning your solution—both on your landing page as well as across your marketing channels—is to use your prospects’ words and feelings. That way, you don’t come off sounding salesy or preachy or out of touch with their needs.

This landing page from Venmo actually handles this quite nicely. But how did Venmo know not to say something like, “The smart, secure way to transfer money in the cloud”?

It might seem like common sense, but you’d be surprised at how many fintech companies have made the mistake of overcomplicating their messaging.

What I suspect Venmo did, and what you need to do, is listen in on your prospective audience to see how they talk about their relevant pains and the solutions they need. You can use a number of tools to do this:

Google Keyword Planner is valuable since you can find the most popular way people phrase their searches for relevant topics.

A search for “money transfer app” in the Google Keyword Planner yields over 1,700 matching keywords ideas.

Public-facing reviews (like on tech review sites or in app stores) are helpful because you won’t just see how users talk about related fintech products, you’ll get a better feel for their emotional state before and after using them.

For instance, this is what a recent PayPal mobile cash app user said:

A user left a positive review for the PayPal mobile cash app and how easy it is to transfer money to other people.

“Pay for anything.”

“Transfer money to someone.”

“PayPal gives me peace of mind.”

This one quote alone has a ton of soundbites that’ll clue you into how your audience talks and feels about solutions like these.

Social listening tools are also useful, especially if you tune into existing competitors’ feeds to see what customers often complain about or praise them for. Most social media management tools include this feature (like Hootsuite or Buffer), so check on yours before investing in something new.

By positioning your solution in a way that makes the most sense to prospects (i.e. in their own words), you’ll take the fear and doubt out of their minds. You’ll also make it easier for them to find you in search and on social media since your messaging is written the same way they speak.

Tip 2: Appeal to the Top-of-Funnel Segment

Finding the right audience to sell your fintech solution to is one thing. Segmenting that audience is another.

While your users ultimately share the same pain, they’re going to reach your website or app when they’re at various stages of dealing with that pain.

• Top-of-funnel prospects are just starting to feel the pain, wondering what they can do about it.
• Middle-of-funnel prospects are starting to realize they’re going to need help for it, so they begin to research their options.
• Bottom-of-funnel prospects are neck-deep in the pain and need a way out, so they’re ready to pull the trigger once they’ve zeroed in on the best solution.

To generate leads, focus on the top-of-funnel prospects, the ones who are just starting to feel the pain. By planting the seeds here and establishing an open line of communication, you can more easily guide them through the middle and bottom of the funnel to conversion.

Let’s look at an example of how you can use this audience segmentation to start building your list of prospects.

Xero is accounting software built for small businesses:

The home page for Xero accounting software lets small businesses know that the fintech solution is for them and that it “works anywhere you do.”

The end goal of this financial software is to help owners better manage the money going in and out of their businesses. But not everyone is thinking that way when they first get onto the site.

Many small business owners hold onto the bootstrapping mentality that they need to do everything themselves for as long as they can. That if they don’t spend money on team members, services, or products, they can capture more of the profits in the end. That’s not really how it works since their time is worth money, too, but they don’t always realize this in the beginning.

So, the bootstrapper would likely show up here looking for self-help guides, and they should find it right within the navigation of the site) not buried within the footer:

The Xero website provides a huge selection of Resources of small business guides, accountant/bookkeeper guides, podcasts, videos, blogs, and more.

The Resources section is huge and it provides a great variety of content (more on that next).

This is exactly what you need to do if you know your prospective users are searching for tips on how to relieve their pain. Just remember to give them the option to opt-in to your newsletter (or you can require it by gating off content):

Xero asks interested readers to download the "Your guide to starting a business" ebook.

When the pain gets bad enough, you’ve now given those prospects an easy way to start narrowing down their list of fintech options.

Tip 3: Provide a Steady Stream of Actionable Content

There’s a ton of debate over financial literacy education. In terms of introducing it at the grade school level, yes, this is something that must happen to teach smart money management practices early on. But that’s not the audience you’re selling to.

Adults who need your financial solutions may not have the healthiest money habits. And while they have the option to seek out an advisor, accountant, or other finance professional for help, they’ve chosen to look online instead.

Educating leads on relevant financial matters is all well and good. However, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to convince them to make a change in how they manage their money.

If you want leads to subscribe to your newsletter or sign up for a product demo, you’ll have to continually provide them with a steady stream of content.

The first thing to do is to create a huge and ongoing repository of blog content that answers any question leads might have about your particular product and the kind of problem it solves. Not only will this help your site rank for all those relevant questions in search, but it’ll make it an authoritative resource that’s worth subscribing to.

One product I like that does this well is Stash. It has an entire section of its site (and app) dedicated to “Education."

The blog is great because it provides extensive coverage on the subjects of retirement and investing.

The Stash blog covers topics related to securities lending, high-dividend stocks, and other investing and retirement related topics.

This is where you’ll answer all those burning questions your leads are thinking about. But don’t stop there.

The second thing you can do is provide tools they can use so they get more invested in educating themselves and, later, investing in a solution. Stash has two of them.

The first is on the “How to invest” page:

Stash provides a tool that helps leads see why investing matters and what a difference it can make. By using the slider, they’ll see how much more than can save.

It’s a simple enough tool, but it’ll be a powerful influence if it shows them how much more they can save by retirement with more money invested.

The Stash Retirement Calculator is another useful tool:

Stash visitors input their personal info into the retirement calculator to see how much they will need in retirement.

It’s a very simple calculator—asking for basic demographics and earnings info—but, again, it’ll have a strong impact on what they do going forward. If they can actually see with their own two eyes how much money they’ll have in the bank by retirement, that fact, coupled with all they’re learning about investing, could be enough to get them to subscribe and eventually convert.

There are other ways to create compelling content for leads. For instance, live social media videos (like on Facebook or Instagram) or webinars are a good option as leads get to see your face and hear your voice. It’s much easier to trust in a solution if a real person is giving you thoughtful and actionable advice, rather than a website or app that’s telling them to “Download Now” or “Schedule a Call Today.”

Tip 4: Continually Optimize Your Landing Page for Leads

Each of the above tips assumes that you have a well-designed landing page or website for your fintech solution. And if you’re at the stage where you’re generating leads for your product, then that’s true.

However, I’d advise you not to give up on the landing page.

I know it’s tempting to put all your energies into updating and optimizing the financial product itself. After all, if the experience sucks, you would’ve wasted all that energy generating leads and courting them to conversion in the first place.

But you never want to stop attracting new leads and, not only that, you want your landing page to do more and more of the work for you.

In order to optimize your lead generation strategy, I’d recommend using the following set of tools to create a winning landing page (as well as omnichannel marketing) experience:

Monitor and measure your site’s performance.

Before you make any changes to the site, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. Then, once you start optimizing the experience for lead generation, you need to be able to track how those adjustments have been performing.

What’s nice about using Sitefinity to build your fintech solution’s landing page is that it comes with Sitefinity Insight.

Now, this is more than just an analytics tracking platform.

With Insight, you gain access to lead and user data from across a wide variety of marketing channels. This way, you learn much more about them: their pains, their motivations, their triggers.

In addition, it’s equipped with machine learning, so there’s no need to guess at what it all means. You can refine your audience segmentation and update your messaging accordingly. And because you receive data-based recommendations on how to improve their experience, deploying the right updates to your site is much less stressful.

Personalize the experience as you gather more data on leads.

As your knowledge about your target users improves, you can do more than just clean up the look, layout, and messaging of your site. You can personalize the experience for them.

Considering 90% of U.S. consumers find personalization appealing in marketing, this is something every fintech company should be doing more of.

Personalization is especially useful in lead generation since the only data you usually get from leads is a name and email address. However, by gathering data as they interact with your digital experiences—and then combining that data with what you’ve gathered from existing users—you’ll know much better how to reshape the experience for them.

When you unlock that formula, you can use the Sitefinity customer journey personalization tool to optimize their experiences across all your channels.

Test alternative designs, layouts, and content.

Once you start forming hypotheses about your landing page, the omnichannel marketing experience, and how leads respond to it all, you need to safely test those theories before implementing them.

The key to this is A/B testing, another feature included within the Sitefinity platform.

A/B testing is one of the most powerful tools a marketing team has at its disposal. Not only can you definitively determine what will lead to more conversions, but it’s something anyone on your team can use to optimize the experience.

Marketers can test emails and ads. Designers can test everything from the fintech landing page to the product itself. Copywriters can test their messaging. And every element can be testing:

• Design
• Copy
• Colors
• Placement
• Layout
• Size
• Typography
• Timing
• Interactivity
• And much more

If you want to generate as many leads as possible and get them to convert quickly, the combination of these three tools is a necessity.

Wrap-Up

Needless to say, it can take a lot of work to gain a fintech lead’s trust (let alone someone considering making a purchase). But with a carefully measured approach that prioritizes your leads’ comfort throughout the experience, you can push more of the right kinds of leads into and through your pipeline.