It’s safe to say that content marketing has matured over the last five years. Blog articles are now more than just vessels for uncannily stuffed SEO keywords — writing well is now an indispensable component of any aspiring company’s online presence, whether your business is in healthcare or finance.

And while content marketing has gone a long way to where it is today, the craft will most definitely evolve and become more sophisticated in the years to come.

In this article, we’re going to look into the current trends in content marketing that fintech startups should look out for. Putting them to work will ensure a more efficient overall marketing strategy and a more reliable online presence.

Transparency and Authenticity

These are the two qualities that separate the best from the rest. Most of the companies that are near and dear to you have a distinct, authentic tone of voice, which they implement in their writing, which is an essential part of their content strategy.

We have come to associate the world of traditional and digital finance with cold numbers behind the curtains. However, today building trust is among the crucial components of a successful business. Incidentally, both transparency and authenticity are the two central ingredients to building a meaningful, trustworthy relationship with your clientele. This trend comes from society’s distrust for corporations and marketers in the current business ecosystem.

Here a few suggestions on achieving transparency in content:

  1. Be open about how you price your services.
  2. Be open about your other clients’ experiences with your service.
  3. Generate content is in sync with your mission.
  4. Generate content that makes it satisfying to do business with you.

Writing for People

In the introduction, we’ve touched on how widespread unnatural content used to be. Many businesses didn’t write blog entries and articles for their customers. Instead, they were focusing all of their efforts into “pleasing” Google’s taste for keywords.

Things have changed a lot these days. Google’s algorithms now favor the user’s experience over keyword density, which means that your content needs to satisfy your audience’s needs, entice them, and retain them on your website’s pages.

Writing for humans, however, does imply taking care of some technicalities in your writing — structure, semantics, formatting, and the readability score, generally measured on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. There are now many writing agencies and even academic writing websites that take the Flesch-Kincaid score into account when generating content, so it’s great to have some insight into the topic when inquiring for services.

Well, Writing for Machines Too

Voice tech has considerably changed content marketing. Interestingly, there are quite a few fintech and banking companies that have embraced this technology quite successfully — from voice biometrics in banking apps to making payments via apps using voice only.

However, there are some important changes voice has had on content as such. Starting with early 2018, we send around a billion voice queries monthly, and naturally, the number of voice searches will increase considerably in 2019.

This suggests that companies will have to make slight changes to the way they structure their content — more bullet points, more condensed information. Content must aim to deliver its point quickly in a more straightforward language accessible to anyone, from layman to expert.

Here are a few basic tips to optimize your content for voice search:

  • Give your content some conversational characteristics.
  • Make sure your articles have FAQ’s and bullet-point lists (like this one)
  • Consider long-tail queries
  • Ensure that your content is actually valuable to the reader

While this list is by no means exhaustive, it should provide you with the general direction you should take your content optimization.

Content Beyond Text

The last two years have seen a dramatic increase in multimedia content, and the trend continues to grow and expand. At some point, the vast majority of social media users have been overwhelmed by the sudden proliferation of auto-playing videos on Facebook, which gave video content a considerable bump on the internet in general. Almost 25% of the United States’ population consumes video content daily, and it is expected that 4/5 of the Internet’s traffic will be video in just a few years.

Similarly, podcasts have become a very rich medium. Even though it’s not as explosive in growth, podcasting has been growing steadily.

Why Should Fintech Adopt Video?

Video content, is, above anything, more accessible. It allows people to understand complex topics much easier, compared to text form.

Video content can address a broad spectrum of complex issues that your customers may be confronting. This, in effect, will increase customer satisfaction, customer engagement, and more importantly, sales.

Implementing Storytelling

People are naturally attracted to plots, this attraction stems from the way people have evolved over millions of years. We are able to create strong emotional bonds and root for people we barely know. We care about plots and stories because they have a lot of things we can associate with and relate to.

And these aren’t just speculations. Focusing on another individual’s accounts has an impressive effect on our brains. An intriguing and relatable plot will skyrocket our oxytocin levels, a remarkable fact suggested in Paul J. Zak’s research, that was released in 2013.

Given that companies that operate in fintech do a great deal of financial advising and often assist people to multiply their funds, investing time and effort into content that stimulates and builds trust is absolutely imperative.

Furthermore, somewhat amusing, yet alarming research suggests that 70% of millennials would instead visit the dentist than their bank branch, which is indicative of the lack of trust and interest this generation has for financial advisors.

Conclusion

Content marketing has changed directions towards more meaningful interaction with the end-user. It favors helpful and valuable articles and other forms of media.

By implementing the practices mentioned above, your fintech startup will succeed at building a trustworthy relationship with your existing and potential customers.