Mastering Lead Generation for Financial Service & Product Industry

Imagine losing a million dollars overnight. If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, what will?

But for those who do, this mishap is a tragedy.

This is what the buyers of any fintech have to deal with.

The possibility of losing money through no fault of one’s own. To wake up one day with their secured funds empty.

To say trust drives lead generation for the financial and FinTech industry would be quite an understatement. Without trust, the buyers would use their existing solutions till kingdom come. And maybe even then, they’d stick to what works, because our current systems give rise to uncertainty while simultaneously promising its elimination.

Financial buyers are tired of these paradoxical lies and move to organizations that prove they can be trusted or to traditional banking institutions- deeply embedded in the world economy.

If you want to generate leads for your financial or FinTech org, the question is, how do you disrupt the status quo and be considered the safe choice over traditional ones?

There is a leverage here, and it’s called convenience. And the buyers are all about it.

Why do FinTech and Financial services need lead generation?

Lead generation has been getting some bad rep lately. It’s perceived as a way to farm people’s information for data. There’s a reason buyers have become self-directed and choose to engage way later in their buying cycle.

Lead generation has become synonymous with lead lists, which it is not. While high-performing organizations have their own definitions of a lead, lead generation does have a broad definition.

It is the process of gaining the interest and trust of a potential buyer, and turning them (the people) into paying customers.

By this definition, FinTech and the financial services industry don’t just need lead generation but have to sustain themselves through it. Think of this: your SDRs are on-call (cold) and you try to explain what your organization does, and midway, they stop and say, “But our existing solution does this, too. Why do we switch?”

That is a rhetorical question.

They don’t or can’t switch because of the massive changes involved in using a financial service or tech.

There’s a lot of red tape that will hinder it, even if the buyer is genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Lead generation can bypass this by building trust before your SDRs even reach the prospect.

In fact, the buyer will reach you when their need for your solution eventually arises. Your SDRs will have to act as consultants here.

Strategies to Drive Quality Leads for the Financial Industry

Let’s divide this into two parts.

1. Financial Services
2. Fintech

Between the two, FinTech has an advantage being the new-age tech, especially after ’08. The crash made people realize just how volatile the banking sector can be and that people needed alternatives. Ever since then, financial services, especially banking, have not yet recovered this trust.

People look to private organizations that mitigate these damages. Instead of lining up in a queue to withdraw their savings, they are secure from the economic downturns in privatized solutions.

For example, Revolut, a tool designed to help you spend and save. But their real promise lies in keeping yourmoney safe.

But the real promise lay in its transparency and becoming a champion of underserved markets.

Something traditional services took a long time to position themselves as.

So, let’s talk about financial services first.

Lead Generation Strategies for Financial Services

Trust is a vital tenet for marketing. Ask any marketer, and they’ll tell you that first and foremost, marketing is all about communicating trust and building a relationship with it as the base.

For financial services, this tenet is magnified. It’s gospel.

The involvement of money means that for people investing in your services, you are a high-risk option. Imagine selling that to a client.

“Hey, you don’t know us, but we’d like to replace your current insurance provider, and maybe we’re not malicious. You can trust us with the livelihood and lives of your employees. We won’t cheat you. Promise!”

If only that were so easy.

1.) Building a relationship.

Let’s assume a few things first,

1. You have a client base, because if you don’t, you need customer acquisition, not lead gen. And customer acquisition requires a sales-led approach first.
2. You know what you’re doing marketing-wise, i.e., your end goal- X amount of sales. You must have case studies, whitepapers, blogs, email marketing, advertising, and all the basics that need not be outlined because they come before lead generation.

The above two assumptions are also your first steps. But rarely does a financial service start without a client.

While you must have heard about thought-leadership, building relationships is a bit different. It involves inviting your core buyer to check what you have to offer. Many B2B buyers feel their sales calls are transactional.

Here is the opportunity for your brand and solution to try something different. Through sales or through marketing, build a rapport as a problem-solver.

This involves: –

1. Being active where your buyers are- email, social media, ads, on-calls, etc.
2. Listening to their problems and asking for market feedback (this is a tough one because it means divesting effort from direct sales and also because the market doesn’t have time to answer).
3. Asking your sales teams to listen to the problems and using social and email to craft messaging relevant to real-time buyer problems.

This builds credibility. And it is a strategy that is easier said than done. But as you would know, people in finance are cutthroat. And what do cutthroat people like?

A little bit of ROI, honesty, and genuine interest in solving financial problems.

2.) Understanding your context.

This is a point that might be universal to all lead generation strategies. To: –

1. Understand the market’s history with your services
2. Your context in the current market (which shapes marketing messages).

This step also assumes you have a clear vision of what you’re offering and to whom. If you or the top management don’t know that, then the sharks in finance are going to defeat you.

The reason this step is so important is that it will shape the way your marketing messages sound and your SDRs talk- shaping market perception. For example, let’s say you are a bank selling its salary account to an SME.

The SME has been working with bank XYZ International for a long time. There have been hiccups, yes. But they’re fine with how the bank has helped its employees. But you know the way the SME is growing, the bank XYZ won’t be able to handle the growth.

There aren’t enough insurance plans, and there’s no scope for any 401 (k) or other pension plans beyond government-sanctioned ones.

Your context is this: We safeguard you and your employees while you scale.

This is how context shapes marketing. Won’t you be interested after seeing this message?

3.) Leveraging Loyalty.

Why would a buyer change providers? Even in the above example, the SME, now growing, can push the bank to grow, too. After all, loyalty is a major factor in the finance sector. It is a facet of trust.

And while businesses do switch for convenience and growth, they might not give up their existing vendors because they have built relationships. Penetrating new markets is easier, but when competition is at its peak- which it is for financial services- it isn’t.

The conversations you have with your leads will go nowhere.

There’s just too much. You’d have to understand their process, internal money flow, operations, taxes- everything. And let’s not forget the policies the government has imposed on both entities, which are stringent again, because money is involved.

The business has too much to lose in switching. How would you convince them otherwise?

You turn the playbook- you show them the cost of not switching; of loyalty failing when it matters.

Let’s drive this home with an example that does not paint financial services in a good light but also presents an opportunity.

The PPP Loan Disaster

The PPP Loan Disaster must be fresh in many business owners’ minds. COVID-19 struck, and many businesses feared they would go under, but when the Paycheck Protection Program was set in motion, many large banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America prioritized their bigger clients.

The funding ran out in May, leaving small businesses hanging out to dry.

Tragic.

Loyalty became a cost for SMBs and SMEs who couldn’t survive the harshness of COVID-19 and the apathy of the financial service industry. Many sought refuge in Fintech solutions.

And this is where lead generation transforms from data to a human-human connection. The trick is in loyalty and staying with your customers in turbulent times.

If you make that promise and stand by it, your service would probably dominate the market for years.

For marketing messages, this could take the form of risk-assessment reports, case studies, blogs, outreach, etc. But those are channels and methods of conveying your core message. And the core message for financial services is clear: deliver on the promise of monetary security.

Because FinTech is doing it better.

Lead Generation Strategies for Fintech

For leaders in FinTech, the above section must have made it clear that you have advantages over traditional financial services. So your competition becomes other FinTech solutions, and while you may have trust for the time being, your competition is leveraging something greater: convenience.

Let us preface this part with a little disclaimer: Lead generation is somewhat universal in its methods of omnichannel and multichannel experiences, email marketing, and outreach.

Let’s focus on a real strategy. It has three facets:

1. Design
2. Integration
3. Positioning

a.) Design.

In product, design is vital and attention-grabbing (a crucial component of lead-gen!) But beyond that, design informs one thing: Is it easy to use?

Whether it’s the ease with which your client connects to or opens a bank, or the ease with which their finances improve. That’s why Revolut has become such a hot commodity.

Their website on its own screams good design. And if the website is that good, the product can’t be that bad, is what people usually think. And what do you know? Revolut is a great app for personal and business use alike.

The question for differentiation is: Can you build trust through design?

This is what brings leads in. The workflow looks something like this:

Great Idea→ Great Design→ People like Lenny Rachitsky (product people) talk about how great your product and design philosophy is→ organic leads and traffic.

Yes, that is what it looks like for the product ecosystem to thrive. Aesthetics and function are drivers of inbound lead generation.

b.) Integration.

Which naturally leads to integration. Great design doesn’t mean the UI is fantastic; it means that the APIs integrate seamlessly with other existing stacks and workflows.

This is a major USP for most organizations, and the one with smooth integration will be the final choice. Whether a business’s AI system, banks, and other workflows can integrate your product will decide how viable your solution is for them.

c. Positioning.

This leads to the final strategy in FinTech lead generation. Positioning your product for the context of the buyer.

Here’s an example for this, too. UPI in India.

The Indian market is a bit different; adoption of tech takes time there. But PayTm, a Venmo-esque app, started gaining traction. And then the Indian government launched the UPI, a universal payment interface, and began the greatest FinTech boom in history.

The main point was to make transactions transparent in a country full of corruption.

Did anyone expect Google Pay to become such a dominant force in the market? But it did, and that’s because Google understood the market and its position. They saw people used PayTM and a native app called PhonePe and conquered the Indian transaction market.

Even now, the two FinTech apps are competitors for a large market. And they show all three facets outlined.

1. Intuitive Design- they pick up QR codes faster than any app, show bank balances, payment history, spend, etc.
2. Robust Integration – They are secure and linked to bank accounts.
3. Positioning- Finding and capturing an emerging market.

This made it so that people flocked to these apps and not vice versa.

This went beyond lead generation and directly into market adoption. This is a clear advantage that products have over services- people can use it and experience the product before adopting it completely.

Lead Generation in finance is complex because it’s abstract.

Yes, there are many abstractions in finance because money is abstract and involves many restrictions, government-mandated regulations, and factors of trust.

It’s red tape everywhere. And lead generation needs to reflect that to gain the buyer for the long term. Without this, financial services become too risky, and FinTech becomes noisy and irrelevant.

It is a lot of work, but you don’t have to do it alone. Ciente has served finance and FinTech since our inception and has understood the principles that drive sales, trust, and growth.

And trust us, without these, a business in the finance industry cannot survive.