4 Key Considerations to Differentiate Your PR Marketing Strategies for Your Startup or Established Fintech Firm
If you’re looking for extensive opportunities, and the potential to usurp financial industry barons, you’re going to need a public relations marketing strategy for your fintech firm: a strategy that will make your prospects take notice and give your product or service the edge in an extremely competitive and dynamic market. According to Statista, the fintech industry is anticipated to grow over 17.9% annually through 2021, with the promise to redefine the finance and banking industries over the next decade.
1. Determining Your Core Competencies and Unique Value Proposition as a Fintech Firm
What is it that will give your Fintech firm the advantage in the market place? How will it reinvent or re-envision the way consumers and firms interact and conduct business?
These are fundamental questions that will guide the development and promotion of your offerings. Evaluate your firm and team members to identify areas of cumulative strength, as well as functional areas where your firm may need additional advisement and consulting. Your core competencies may include organizational efficiently, ability to compete on price, innovative technology, access to financing, and possessing a team of creative thinkers and expert marketers.
Clear core competencies are the basis for the development of your unique value proposition (UVP). Your UVP is a brief statement that express exactly how your fintech product or service will precisely meet the needs of your evolving target market. The UVP will also generally be the foundation of your mission and vision statements.
An example UVP for a startup personal-finance fintech app might be: “…provides innovative personal finance management with the greatest convenience, value, and accuracy, while providing the accountability you need to meet your financial objectives.”
2. Isolating Your Target Market
Which comes first: developing your product or service, or identifying your target market?
In the most ideal scenario, you should determine your core competencies before moving forward with market research and focusing on a target market. Once you know where you can gain leverage over competitors, you can proceed with identifying and studying your ideal prospects. Developing a strategy, before developing your service, will allow you to create the highest-quality offering by utilizing the unique strengths of your firm and knowledge of the financial marketplace in designing your offering.
By considering your potential client’s needs, desires, and aversions, you can create a product and marketing message that will be enthusiastically accepted by your target market. Your public relations reach and effectiveness will be enhanced when your product design, positioning, branding, and messaging are in alignment with the preferences of a distinct and quantifiable set of fintech consumers or businesses.
Segment your market by factors such as geography, age range, income level, lifestyle, and other relevant demographic characteristics of your ideal prospect. Your public relations strategy will incorporate these data points to formulate a distribution plan that effectively communicates according to media and consumer preferences and expectations.
3. Positioning Your Fintech Product or Service
How do you want your fintech offering to be perceived in the marketplace? The way consumers and competitors view your product will have a tremendous impact on the likelihood that your solution will be adopted, and provide the returns you’re anticipating.
Do you want to differentiate, and lead the market, by offering the lowest prices? Or, by offering the most technically-advanced solutions? Your differentiation strategy will consider the core competencies you previously identified. Where will your efforts be most effective?
If your strength lies in economy of scale and efficient production, you may consider leading on price as you may be able to achieve the same, or better, margins than competitors that strive to position themselves as ‘high-end’ solutions. Conversely, if your primary core competency is quality and customization, a position of technological leadership and elite solutions is more appropriate.
4. Selecting Effective Marketing Channels to Reach the Public
If you know who you’re serving, you have an enticing UVP prepared, and you’ve developed a positioning strategy that will appeal to your target market, you’re prepared to select marketing channels that will give you the greatest reach and allow you to communicate most effectively with ideal prospects.
How do your prospects prefer to communicate? What are their buying habits? How does their age and income level influence their choice of financial products and services? If you’re providing business to business services in the fintech field, you’ll also want to consider what channels will give you the greatest access to qualified decision makers, and leave a lasting image of professionalism, value, and expertise (tip: the best methods are free, and mobile).
Consumer and business prospects alike respond best to a combination of marketing channels that enhance your credibility, market penetration, and yields the revenue generation results you’re seeking. Fortunately, modern digital marketing approaches allow extensive reach at much lower costs than conventional media and print strategies.
Putting it Together
Putting your public relations marketing strategy into action is the next step in your journey toward connecting deeply with your target market. A refined image that expresses the value and solutions that your ideal clients will respond to, will improve your credibility, increase your sales, and earn you a larger share of the competitive fintech industry. The rapid growth of the financial technologies sector, and the shift in consumer and business trends toward online, mobile, and non-traditional financial solutions ensures abundant opportunities despite fair competition.