These challenges are mitigated if you build a great product and provide a great user experience. That’s what Wise did.

Wise aimed to give customers “an experience they didn’t know was previously possible,” says Nilan. As they succeeded, their customers became their brand evangelists.

Below are three steps Wise took to build a product that won users.

Listening to Customers

They conducted customer satisfaction surveys to uncover the needs of their users. Over time, Wise narrowed customers’ most important demands into three features: Price, speed, and ease of use.

Delivering on Users’ Demands

Making cross-border money transfers fast and inexpensive was difficult. It took years to solve these problems. But solving them gave Wise a huge competitive advantage and a more defensible position in the market.

Understanding Customer Sentiment

They regularly use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to assess customer sentiment. NPS is a metric that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty based on how likely customers would recommend a company’s products or services.

The score can range from -100% to +100%. In the early days, Wise’s NPS was in the positive 20s and 30s. As they improved the product and user experience, their NPS score rose to 70%.

Many teams stop iterating once their product works and shift their focus to other marketing activities. This is a mistake.

According to Nilan, the ROI for NPS increase is much larger and more enduring than the ROI increase you’d get from improving your conversion rate.

The bottom line? Just because people are buying your product doesn’t get your job done. Collect customer feedback to uncover your customers’ needs.

With this data, you can iterate on your product and experience until you have something customers love, not just like. When customers love your product, marketing becomes much easier.

Financial Services Marketing Strategies

Despite the regulatory burdens, you can create compelling marketing messages and campaigns and deliver them with style.

Below are five FSPs that have broken out of the regulatory box and found creative and effective ways to market their brand.

1. Curve

Curve is a payment card that lets you link multiple debit/credit cards to a single card. That way, you can carry one card and still access all your cards.

A few years ago, Curve partnered with wearable smart technology brands like Twinn, Tap 2, and Tapster. This collaboration empowered users to make payments using their smart rings, wrist bracelets, and key rings.

Recently, Curve launched another wearables campaign.

How? They leveraged a viral moment where a BBC reporter gave the middle finger at the start of a program.

Though she was joking with her colleagues, the BBC caught the moment live. After the story went viral, Curve made the reporter a “hand model.” They placed a payment ring on the reporter’s middle finger and shared it across social media.

Afterward, they published a new campaign image with a payment ring worn on the middle finger. They pushed this campaign using social media, digital billboards, and tube station billboards.

Making the middle finger the face of the financial services campaign was a bold and risky decision. But it paid off. Their social media audience loved the post, garnering a combined 350+ reactions on their LinkedIn and Instagram pages.

Also, passers-by paused to record Curve’s digital billboards across the UK. To top it all off, the campaign brought in record web traffic and new customers across Europe, according to a LinkedIn post by Curve.

My Takeaway: Make your marketing less boring.

I believe Curve’s entire goal is to make its marketing less formal and more fun. Besides its bold wearables campaign, its TikTok account is full of humorous posts with subtle references to pop culture and everyday life.

I like that they’ve adopted a playful approach to their social media content rather than the formal tone ‌associated with traditional financial services marketing. It’s clear their content resonates with their audience, too.

For instance, the post below got 1,933 likes, 54 shares, and 55 saves.

Image Source

To make your marketing less boring, you may have to take a few risks. But don’t be afraid to take those risks if you think your content might resonate with the audience.

2. Cowrywise

Cowrywise is a Nigerian-based Y Combinator-backed startup that helps customers save and invest regularly. It provides users with access to an array of investment assets and lets them automate their savings and investment process.

Cowrywise has built a thriving online community around its brand using a combination of email and social media marketing. For context, below is an example of an email from Cowrywise.

Notice how personable and relatable the language is?

These emails and their anonymous sender, Ope, are extremely popular among Nigerian Gen Zs and younger millennials.

Ope‘s regular organic social media mentions have significantly boosted Cowrywise’s brand awareness. For instance, one X user joked that Ope would call him out for not sticking to his savings plan for January.

Besides the free brand publicity, this post got 112 reposts, 156 likes, and five saves.

My Takeaway: Personable content is a game changer.

Cowrywise’s X-factor is its personable (and sometimes humorous) educational content. This shines a lot in Ope’s emails and the company’s informational blog.

But the best part is their relevance, which lets them engage their audience on a deeper level.

Ope once joked that if Ope had a face, there’d be a bounty on Ope’s head. The post got 359 reposts, proving that the audience agreed.

This level of fame is remarkable for an anonymous character. It shows that Cowrywise’s content regularly hits home with the readers.

3. Monzo

Monzo is a digital, mobile-only bank based in the UK. Although founded in 2015, it quickly established itself as one of the UK’s most admired and trusted challenger banks.

In 2019, Monzo partnered with The Big Issue, a popular magazine brand, to launch the “world’s first resellable magazine.”

The product, aptly called Pay it Forward, lets magazine vendors earn more money by selling one magazine issue multiple times.

They printed QR codes on the magazines. So, after reading it, you can pass it along to a friend who can scan the code to pay the original vendor again.

Since you never know how far each magazine will go, this significantly increases potential earnings for each vendor. A vendor reported people had paid for one of his magazines over 20 times.

The audience loved this campaign, and it led to huge brand awareness for Monzo. Even celebrity British influencers love the campaign.

Below is a picture of Football Legend Gary Linker (middle) and Music Star Roger Daltrey (far right) posing with a copy of The Big Issue.

My Takeaway: Let your marketing reflect your values.

I believe one reason this campaign was effective is it fits Monzo’s aspirational and people-first brand image.

That caused people to perceive it as a genuine act of goodwill, not a trick to win the audience’s admiration. This leads me to my favorite thing about this campaign — its mission-driven undertone.

On the surface, Pay it Forward seems like a random innovation. However, according to Monzo, it’s driven by their commitment to improving financial inclusion.

The Big Issue vendors tend to be excluded from the UK‘s financial system. This is because most banks in the UK require people to have a fixed address, which many vendors don’t have.

By launching Pay it Forward, they’re able to open accounts for the vendors and include them in the financial system.

Also, Monzo recognized cash payments had halved from 2009 to 2019, which made it challenging for The Big Issue vendors to sell the magazine.

So not only does Pay it Forward help the vendors make more money, it helps them stay in business, too.

For many FSPs, their mission is just a statement on a wall, not an ethos to live by. I believe FSPs can be more effective in their marketing if they adopt a similar mission-driven approach to running their businesses.

As Simon Sinek perfectly summarizes, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

4. Stripe

Stripe is an online payment processing company.

Though founded in 2010, it’s currently one of the world’s most valuable startups, with a $50 billion valuation.

This is impressive considering that Stripe’s primary target audience is developers — a group notoriously difficult to sell to because of their ability to build their own solutions.

According to Stripe co-founder Patrick Collision, the company’s initial success was due to word-of-mouth marketing, which they unintentionally triggered by building a great product.

Initially, Stripe was spread through a word-of-mouth process, says Collision.

“That was surprising to us because it‘s a payment system, not a social network, so it’s not something you’d think would have any virality whatsoever. But it became clear that everything else was so bad and so painful to work with that people actually were selling this to their friends,” he adds.

One of Stripe’s operating principles is “Really, really, really care.” This obsession with customer satisfaction is clear in all of Stripe’s marketing initiatives, and I believe it’s the reason for their marketing success.

Paul Graham describes Stripe’s technical documentation as “famously good.” Several developers say it’s best in class. The result? Their documentation page gets over 100,000 visits.

That’s why investing in search engine marketing content material advertising needs to be a should.

For example, should you search “forex converter” on Google, Smart comes up within the fifth place.

The search engine marketing crew at Smart created this instrument as an experiment. Right now, it drives 48.3 million natural visits from Google Search, in line with Ubersuggest.

Nilan says they’ve efficiently captured a few of these guests and transformed them into prospects.

To drive outcomes with search engine marketing content material, you want a method. Unsure the place to start out together with your search engine marketing content material advertising efforts? The beneficial assets beneath will assist.

Advocate Assets:

2. Social Media Advertising

4.9 billion individuals used social media in 2023. Specialists estimate this quantity will attain a whopping 5.85 billion customers by 2027.

Additionally, every of these customers spends a mean of 151 minutes per day on social media. As a monetary companies supplier, social media permits you to join together with your audience the place they already are.

With an efficient social media technique, you may construct model consciousness, generate leads, convert prospects, and supply ongoing buyer assist.

For example, your data of what makes your viewers tick may also help you discover methods to have interaction them.

instance is how Piggyvest, a financial savings and funding platform, makes use of comics to discover on a regular basis monetary conditions in a relatable and lighthearted method.

One important on-line advertising tip for each monetary advisor is that this: personality-infused content material is the important thing to standing out on social media. With out it, your content material will get misplaced within the noise.

For extra social media suggestions, together with creating a social media coverage, discovering content material pillars, and extra, dig into these assets:

Advocate Assets:

3. E-mail Advertising

E-mail is without doubt one of the highest ROI advertising channels.

Latest stats reveal you earn $36 for each $1 spent. What’s extra, 86% of customers need to hear from companies they patronize continuously, and 60% say e mail is their most popular communication channel.

With e mail advertising, you attain your prospects instantly, present well timed updates, share instructional content material, and promote related services or products.

This allows you to construct lasting relationships with prospects by focused and personalised communication.

You may set a good portion of the method on autopilot utilizing advertising automation software program.

The assets beneath include finest practices for executing an efficient e mail technique.

Advocate Assets:

4. Influencer Advertising

Influencer advertising helps you attain new audiences by leveraging the belief between widespread on-line personalities and their audiences.

Word that you do not have to work with celebrities with tens of millions of followers. You may work with micro-influencers with a following of 1,000 – 10,000 individuals.

instance is the long-term partnership between U.S. FinTech firm Present and widespread YouTube creator MrBeast.

MrBeast is legendary for making viral, high-production YouTube movies and gifting away tens of millions of {dollars} to his followers. The collaboration includes him utilizing Present to ship cash to his followers.

The primary video MrBeast made (after the partnership) grew to become YouTube’s primary trending video in beneath 24 hours, producing over 58 million views, 2.4 million likes, and 120,000 feedback.

This publicity helped Present to report a 700% enhance in each day cash requests on the app. It additionally pushed them as much as quantity 5 within the finance app class on the app retailer, in line with Shorty Awards.

Dive into these assets beneath to get a greater grasp of make affect advertising work in your online business:

Advocate Assets:

What I Discovered: My General Evaluation of Advertising in Monetary Providers

All of the monetary service suppliers I explored had two qualities in widespread:

• They’re obsessive about buyer satisfaction.
• They’re genuinely mission-driven.

These qualities, combined with a bit of selling know-how, are the supply of their revolutionary advertising approaches.

This conclusion is instructive as a result of it is a reminder that the identical advertising channels and ways out there to you can be found to your rivals. So, should you’re targeted in your rivals, you’ll hardly ever provide you with revolutionary advertising concepts.

Nonetheless, should you focus in your prospects and your mission, you’ll provide you with novel advertising concepts that your rivals would need to copy.