As much as trust matters for all brands—more than almost any other factor across the board—for finance brands, trust is everything.
Consider one of the best-known stock and crypto trading apps, Robinhood. When the app launched, it was lauded as a way to make stock trading accessible for “regular” people who didn’t have massive amounts of capital to invest. Then in 2021, Robinhood quickly fell from grace through a series of moves that belied its stated values and angered its users.
When your clients are trusting you with their financial information, they naturally expect a higher level of transparency. So how do you craft digital marketing campaigns designed to highlight and expand that transparency, boosting trust along the way?
This post will guide you through some of the key principles finance brands should follow for effective, trust-building marketing.
Put transparency at the center.
If you haven’t already built transparency into your business model, now’s the time to do it.
Make sure your values and mission statement are easy to find on your website, as well as the regulatory and compliance rules you follow.
Once that transparency is in place, you’ll need to showcase it in your marketing.
One way to do this is to incorporate regular compliance and regulatory posts in your social media. Aside from simply posting the information itself—which is very important, given your industry, but also very boring—you can get more creative.
For instance, you can translate those complex financial rules into regular language that’s easy to understand and offer real-life examples of how those rules apply.
Share information about your business model, how you make a profit, and what users are actually getting with your product or service. By being as open and honest as possible, transparency will become an integral part of your brand story. And that’s exactly what you want.
Work with influencers
Influencer marketing, when done correctly, is an indispensable tool for building trust with your audience.
That’s because clients, whether you’re in the B2B or B2C space, are far more likely to trust messaging that comes from an outside expert.
Because the finance industry has so many different niches, it’s important to vet any potential influencers carefully to make sure they align with your audience. From personal finance to cryptocurrency to fintech—there are many types of finance influencers out there, and each has their own specific messaging and audience.
Related Reading:10 Things You Should Look at When Identifying Influencers for B2B
When you’re searching for influencers to connect with, it pays to either work directly with a digital marketing agency that knows the influencer marketing space, or to use an influencer marketing platform to help you identify and connect with the right influencers.
In general, these are some of the criteria you should use when looking for influencers:
- Determine your end goal before you start your search. Do you want to grow awareness, push a new product or service, expand into a new geographical market?
- Always keep an eye on the trends in your industry, and make sure the influencer you’re considering can speak to those trends.
- Ensure the influencer has real expertise in your specific niche.
- Pay more attention to the quality of the influencer’s followers, not quantity. A smaller number of followers who are highly engaged is much more valuable than a huge number of followers who don’t engage.
- Dive deep into the influencer’s background and online presence before partnering.
- Evaluate potential influencers based on Reach, Resonance, and Relevance:
- Reach: How much overlap is there between your audience and their followers? How well-known are they across the industry? Are they engaging with their followers and vice versa?
- Resonance: Do they tend to lead and shape industry conversation?
- Relevance: How relevant are the influencer’s areas of expertise and interest to the topics you want to discuss with your audience?
Once you’ve found the right influencer, coordinate your B2B influencer marketing efforts with the rest of your marketing strategy. This will keep the momentum going and ensure you’re not marketing in a silo. You can write blog posts about the topics your influencers are discussing, share their social posts, and discuss similar topics in any PR opportunities you get.
Showcase your social proof on your website and social channels.
Social proof—good things that other users or clients say about you online—should be incorporated on an ongoing basis into your marketing and PR efforts.
Social proof can take several forms, including:
- Positive comments about your brand on your social posts
- Testimonials from current and past clients
- Reviews on product review sites or your own website
So how do you find and highlight this social proof?
Social listening is one way. This means identifying and responding to comments and mentions of your brand from customers. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer are a couple of options to help with social listening, although your social team should also be regularly checking for mentions and conversations that are relevant to your brand.
As for testimonials, you should request them from your most satisfied customers. Once those testimonials come in, spotlight them on your website and share them on social media.
Finally, if you have a financial or fintech product that gets featured on review sites (and if your product isn’t getting featured, talk to our PR team to change that), make sure you’re sharing that listing with your customers and gently asking them to review your product.
Invest in creating a robust content library, including thought leadership.
Educational financial content is always in demand, and as a company in the finance space, your brand is perfectly positioned to offer it.
If you outsource your B2B content marketing, you’ll need someone on staff who’s able to vet each piece of content for accuracy and compliance issues. You’ll also need to ensure that the writers you work with understand your industry and are able to speak to it in an informed, educated way.
Make sure you’re creating content for each stage of the buyer journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
Thought leadership is also a huge part of building trust in the financial industry. Your executives are all experts in their fields and are some of the best suited to speak to your audience.
You can always get started simply by writing blogs or articles on your own channels, like your website, LinkedIn, and/or Medium account. PR outreach can also help secure you additional outlets for your B2B thought leadership, like columns in industry publications and interviews on podcasts or in feature articles.
Marketing in the finance industry has everything to do with showcasing your trustworthiness. Need a bit of help? Give us a call!
