A collaboration between Fintech District and financeAds has started. What are the reasons for which this news can affect those who belong to the Italian fintech ecosystem? Let’s find out with the help of Alvise Perissinotto, Managing Director of financeAds.

financeAds is a marketing agency that helps banks, insurances, and Fintech to acquire clients for their online products through its network of relevant online publishers across Europe. It operates with top-tier clients in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Poland, Benelux and the UK working on performance, a highly ROI oriented marketing channel, promoting desktop / mobile / app products on behalf of their clients. They also help up-and-coming Fintech to carry out/develop/organize specific branding-oriented campaigns.

The collaboration with financeAds has two basic strands: a mentorship service and an agreement, both aimed at the startups of the Fintech District community.

Alvise Perissinotto, Managing Director of financeAds explains: “We think that FD is the perfect breeding ground for the next Fintech unicorns. We want to work with these realities right from day one, helping them understand what the most effective marketing channel for them is and how to maximize the ROI on the budget spent. We offer the community our knowledge and insights on how to be effective and relevant. This translates into efficient spending that avoids a ‘waste’ of budget and allows, on the other hand, a full focus on growth. We also agreed on a special preferential fee rate for those clients who, after the initial free consultation, decide to work with us”.

financeAds agreed on providing group seminars which are opened up to all startups that are part of the FD community, plus one-to-one sessions with individual companies to suggest the best marketing mix to consider when starting, scaling or on reaching maturity, free of charge. During the first group meeting, last February, Perissinotto talked about how to use marketing channels effectively for a Fintech. “We then had already 5 one-to-one sessions with individual startups” he reveals.

What results can the activity put forward by financeAds give the fintech sector? Is it always appropriate? This is Perissinotto’s answer:

“If done correctly, this can help to scale a client very fast. It depends on a lot of parameters which are, most of the time, outside our control (online funnel, on-boarding process, available budget attractiveness of the commission model paid to online publishers for bringing a client and so on). We can deliver tens of thousands of new clients per month to our clients thanks to/if we have an attractive product, a commission model that is aggressive versus its main competitors, with a good online funnel that converts well and, most importantly, together with the right mix of technology and human resources, to efficiently get on board all those new users. At times, it is more an internal limit concerning/regarding processing the leads that come in rather than the volume of leads we can deliver”.

Want to learn more about financeAds? Read the interview with Alvise Perissinotto

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“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:

1. 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.
2. Try understanding the channel you are about to engage with before starting to avoid wasting budget unnecessarily.

Donts:

1. 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.
2. 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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