Clicks, views, impressions, traffic — the core KPIs (key points of interest) of modern marketing are universally accepted across all industries, including fintech. Even so, brand awareness, demand generation, sales performance, and customer retention — all true signposts for market success — don’t rise and fall congruously with these metrics.
In fact, fintech marketers may be missing out on a treasure trove of strong indicators and insights beyond what’s possible with traditional measurements alone. This especially applies when it comes to existing customers, whose experiences, actions, and suggestions are invaluable but often overlooked.
Missing out may have long-term implications for fintech companies. “Without proper long-term planning, your firm and your team will not be relevant — and that will happen sooner than you think,” says Forbes magazine in a recent article about fintech leadership. Its authors suggest “including key medium and long-term metrics or indicators, rather than short-term operational KPIs on current performance.”
Here we’ll discuss what traditional KPIs often fail to measure for fintech brands, especially in terms of long-term success with customers. We’ll identify additional points of interest and best practices fintech marketers can adopt to improve how they measure brand, competition, and sales success.
What Your Fintech Marketing Metrics Aren’t Measuring
Countless fintech marketers continue to rely on KPIs that were first adopted for quick-transaction focused industries, such as online retail — website traffic, social advertising clicks, and email opens to name a few. These aren’t meaningful for fintech marketers’ real purpose of driving solid, lasting relationships with customers. Here we consider some of the important factors that have real implications for the success of their brands, but often go unnoticed.
Dark Social
An abundance of clicks may not suggest an abundance of new customers, but a lack of clicks may not indicate a lack of market demand either. Consider “dark social” — unmeasured social sharing and messaging activity that takes place outside of advertising and other heavily measured environments. In other words, dark social activity can still happen in abundance while measured KPIs remain low.
These interactions are often of greater value than measured interactions such as clicks and impressions. That’s because shares and direct messages outside of measured channels suggest genuine and expressed interest in a fintech brand. Traditional KPIs simply cannot capture how thoroughly a prospect is engaging a fintech brand or absorbing a brand message; taking a closer look at dark social activity could bring clarity.
The Long Game of Content
Top content performance doesn’t necessarily mean top brand performance. A single piece of high-performing content, such as an interesting blog post or relevant social ad, doesn’t necessarily translate into real sales. In the best cases, a single piece of high-performing content is a small but positive contributor to the long game of getting customers over the purchasing threshold.
It takes time for customers to absorb content, internalize a brand message, then develop positive sentiments about that brand. Marketers should still measure clicks and impressions, but they need more sophisticated techniques for measuring overall brand performance and attributing sales.
Demand Generation
Demand generation is about establishing your brand as a trusted authority and thought leader, thereby generating broad market demand. Building your brand in this way drives market value, even if members of your target audience don’t invest in you outright.
Demand generation is a critical outcome, but it’s not readily measured via views or clicks. Instead of focusing on individual interactions, marketers must create a strategy for developing trust and credibility in the broader market. This is especially critical in the fintech space. New, unproven entrants into the financial services space must prove their “staying power” to prospects before they consider requesting a demonstration, let alone investing.
Like content, demand generation in the fintech space is a long game. It often requires delivering value upfront — valuable research or insights, for example — before establishing transactional relationships. Certainly, marketers must measure views, clicks, and visits. Demand generation does not factor as part of an individual campaign, but rather over the lifetime of your brand.
Performance Indicators for Fintech Growth
Marketers who intend to build a relevant, desirable fintech brand should focus on performance indicators that truly assess customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty. Measurements indicative of true growth are critical as well. Ultimately, marketers should be able to answer strategic-level questions, such as:
• What is the market’s general perception of our brand?
• What methods are successful for acquiring new customers?
• How often do new customers make additional transactions?
• What constitutes a “successful customer relationship”?
• What makes loyal customers stay with our brand for longer periods?
• How do customers discuss our brand with their contacts?
• How do customers rate our brand on third-party websites?
• Which marketing activities drive the greatest ROI?
Driving and measuring results in these areas require more than the traditional fintech KPIs. To that end, fintech companies should look to additional measurement practices and technologies, such as:
• Customer profiling to visualize customer types, retention, upselling, cross-selling, and more
• Customer interviews and surveys that uncover customer sentiment and suggestions
• Social media listening to understand how customers are talking about one’s brand
• Customer service experience analysis to assess satisfaction and improvement areas
• In-depth analytics that visualizes real customer journeys and behaviors
Marketers can use what they discover to drive marketing and sales beyond what’s possible with traditional metrics alone. In time, fintech brands can quickly translate marketing investments into increased sales, brand loyalty, and customer value.
Do More to Keep Score
Just as a person’s credit score is only one indicator of that person’s financial health, your traditional KPIs are only one dimension of your brand and sales performance. By taking a holistic approach to measuring brand success, your marketers can ensure they’re connecting with prospects and building meaningful, lasting, and lucrative relationships.
Contact Liger today if your business needs help building stronger brand awareness and creating a solid demand-gen strategy.
