Diving Deep Into Marketing in Financial Services (My Takeawa…

🔥 FLAMING HOT TAKE ALERT: Marketing can drive business goals, but it can’t save a bad product.

One financial company that understands this well is Wise, an international money transfer service I use.

According to Nilan Peiris, Chief Product Officer at Wise, the company aimed to build a product that “blows user’s socks off.”

That intended feat has come to fruition because a whopping 70% of Wise’s user growth comes through word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM). Even I discovered Wise through word of mouth.

In this article, I will share five inspirational examples of effective marketing for financial services. I also share four marketing ideas you can deploy to market your brilliant product.

Before delving into the strategies and examples, let’s discuss tips for solving your most fundamental marketing challenge — building a product customers love.

Table of Contents

A Case Study of Wise: How to Solve Your #1 Marketing Challenge as a Financial Services Provider

Businesses in financial services deal with a slew of challenges, including regulatory marketing restrictions, lack of consumer trust, and commoditization.

Marketing for financial services doesn’t have to be boring.

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.

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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.

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And they receive a ton of audience praise.

Besides their blog, Stripe regularly publishes in-depth guides that address common issues developers and founders face.

Plus, they painstakingly ensure every product, guide, and documentation is not only functional but elegant.

My Takeaway: Be obsessed with your customers.

Many companies say they care about their customers. But, as Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos once remarked, they’re not genuinely customer-centric. “They focus on the competitor rather than the customer,” said Bezos.

I can imagine that for Stripe, most of what they do doesn’t even feel like strategies. It’s just the natural outcome of really, really, really caring about their customers.

My point? If you become obsessed with knowing your customer and satisfying their needs. You may not need a marketing rule book. You’ll develop one for yourself.

5. Wise (again!)

Wise didn’t just build a product that their users love. They took several strategic steps to strengthen their word-of-mouth marketing and reach new customers.

For instance, after I complete a transaction, Wise emails me to emphasize the transfer speed and what I saved. Here’s one email I received recently:

Prior to sending these emails, Wise conducted customer interviews that uncovered useful insight.

“Customers believed they saved money, but they didn’t believe the number,” Nilan narrates. This caused the Wise team to ask, “What would it take to get them to believe the number?”

After several iterations, they found the perfect solution — a graph that compared Wise transfer fees vs. what customers would have lost in hidden fees by transferring using traditional banks.

They perfected the graph such that it got people to think, “Oh my God! I’m never using my bank again,” said Nilan.

To top it all off, they placed the graph on their success page and put a Share and Invite Your Friend button. This tweak tripled their referrals, according to Nilan.

My Takeaway: Equip your customers to talk about your brand.

Donald Miller was right when he said, “If you‘re not equipping your customers to share about your products after they buy, you’re leaving a ton of money on the table.”

Wise made it easy for customers to talk about their services. Not only did they build an outstanding user experience, but they also engineered their product flow to create conversations about their brand.

As Jay Baer points out, word-of-mouth recommendations happen when customers have a positive but totally unexpected experience.

But sometimes, as in Wise’s case, even your satisfied customers may not fully recognize the value they get from using your services.

To trigger recommendations in such cases, you must highlight your outstanding features. Then, make it easy for customers to share this message, just as Wise did.

Donald Miller recommends creating sound bites that highlight your service’s uniqueness. Ensure the message is easy to repeat and share.

Then, constantly emphasize this message in your marketing assets until it sticks in your customers’ minds.

Financial Services Marketing Ideas

There are many ways to grow a financial services business. Below, I share four marketing ideas for promoting your financial services.

1. SEO Content Marketing

According to the LSA, 90% of loan and mortgage consumers, 85% of check cashing consumers, and 76% of tax return preparation consumers start their buying journey with an online search.