Strategic marketing for fintechs, by Alvise Perissinotto
“Online Marketing acquisition techniques for a start-up” is the title of the next meeting of our mentorship program for startups in the Fintech District community. Alvise Perissinotto, Managing Director at financeAds, will give an overview of the main online marketing channels, indicating “Dos and Donts” and some “Strategic marketing’s case studies” from which to take examples.
Why should a fintech take care of strategic marketing and how can it do this in a profitable way? Let’s find out what his opinion is! Let’s start by clarifying what is meant by techniques of Online Marketing acquisition, in the context of a fintech startup?
In online marketing acquisition, there is no such a thing as ‘one size fits all’, so finding the correct channel mix to use is key. This is particularly true for Fintech startups where a new on-boarded user is effectively an upfront cost for the company (think about Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks that must be done to on-board a new user and so on) so choosing the correct channel to on-board only users that are more likely to convert into paying customers from the start, is very important. There are various options to choose from: a more branding-oriented campaign or a performance-based campaign where the startup pays exclusively for those users who turned out to be real “paying” ones.
Can you tell us about your experience in strategic marketing?
I started working in Corporate Communication in London. I worked with top tier banks and insurances but in environments such as those, measuring the return on spending was pretty much impossible as there was not a direct correlation between spending and direct sales. I then started working on the performance channel and it was love at first sight since it is highly measurable with lower risks for companies as the spending is done upfront by the online publishers working on the marketing campaign on behalf of the company and also because companies only pay for clients they have really on-boarded.
“Dos and Donts”: can you outline 2 of the first and 2 of the second?
Dos:
- Define clear & measurable targets at the beginning of each campaign to be able to determine at the end how effective or not it has been and eventually correct mistakes.
- Try understanding the channel you are about to engage with before starting to avoid wasting budget unnecessarily.
Donts:
- Do not think that you need a very high budget to begin. To start with, it is all about testing with small initial budgets to find the correct channel / publisher to figure out what works well with your product and converts well.
- Do not think that marketing campaigns run alone. Support in terms of time and resources is needed by both parties involved (the startup must dedicate some time to the campaign and so must the partner with whom you have chosen to work to make it function, especially as adjustments must be made along the way).
What impact does strategic marketing have on a company that intends to scale?
Significant, if used correctly. We see clients who manage to scale very quickly in a relatively short time frame. At times, the limits are rather internal ones as new users we deliver must be on-boarded and if companies are not ready for the high number of incoming leads, this could be a limit more than an advantage.
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