4 Things I Learned About Marketing in FinTech
(Photo Credit: Courtnie Lewis)
This week's podcast I spoke with Arielle Kimbarovsky. Arielle is a marketing and social media strategist at M1 Finance:
Here are some of my takeaways from the episode:
Wear Many Hats
Arielle works at a startup. Like most employees, at a startup, you need to wear many hats. Arielle's marketing team consists of nine people. Arielle is responsible for organic social, creative, blogging and the newsletter. What makes her job even more difficult is M1 Finance works in a regulated industry.
She needs to work with the compliance team to make sure the content abides by FINRA laws. For example, if content is distributed to over 20 people, she needs to have it reviewed by compliance. Arielle has spent a lot of time keeping up with FINRA rules. One of the benefits of this is her compliance team trusts her knowing that she is very aware when posting content.
Batching the Creative Process
Arielle spends a lot of time working on creative content on both design and writing. When she does this she batches her content creation. She will block off time just to work on creative. She doesn't mix different deliverables. If she is in design mode, she'll focus on design. If she is writing mode, she focuses on writing. This also helps her with inspiration. If she is struggling to write, she looks at mediums such as poetry or old ad copy.
Differentiate from the Competition
Lets face it. Most banks suck at branding. They are century old institutions. It's hard to tell the difference between Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase. If you have had customer experiences like me, they both suck at customer service.
The next generation of Neobanks are focusing on differentiated brand strategy. Companies like M1 don't want to look like a corporation. They need to be human-like. You have to show empathy with your brand. Figure out how to turn followers into customers. Then turn customers into super fans.
Most of the brand strategy relies on social. Many customers go to social when they are complaining about their experiences. If you have empathy on social, show that you have emotion and aren't responding like a robot that will yield positive results. Ultimately, your company is in the people business.
Buy-In from Employees
Many companies and employees don't understand the role of marketing. They think a good product sells itself. Now, more than ever, that belief is not true. Many companies are building audiences before they even launch a product. Matt Kobach and the Fast team are an example of this right now.
Arielle's team does a weekly demo-day to share what is going on in the company. As part of the demo-day, they share social and brand updates. This is a great way to get brand buy-in from people. Engineers, who are focused on product, won't be aware of a marketing win such as an influencer sharing the product. That assists in getting buy-in from an employee, but also makes them more likely to share their social updates.
This has been helpful to Arielle and the team. Furthermore, she realized that the power of social isn’t just for brands, but for herself. Arielle has been active on Twitter and now has over a 1,000 followers (go follow her @ariellekimbar). If it wasn’t for Twitter, I never would’ve met Arielle and we never would’ve done this podcast.