Irina Bordea, Head of Marketing at Deko, says that successful content marketing strategies yield results, and that as marketeers, it is on us to measure these successes.

The fintech sector is one of the fastest growing in the world. A 2020 study by Research and Markets forecast that it would expand at a CAGR of 23.58 per cent from 2021 to 2025.

Disruptive, innovative products and services are important factors in the sector’s rise, but another key element of many fintech businesses’ success is an effective marketing strategy. Core to these has often been content marketing. For this to achieve the best results, its ROI needs to be measured accurately and consistently.      

There are clear reasons why content marketing is such an important part of many fintech firms’ marketing strategies. Given their disruptive nature, fintechs face challenges around awareness and trust. Typically, the content for financial marketing is complicated and jargon-heavy, but fintech brands often look to challenge the status quo by creating a new, more accessible world, which means they need to build confidence in their products and educate their audiences. According to Demand Metric, on average, content marketing pulls in three times as many leads and costs 62 per cent less than traditional marketing.

Content marketing is particularly effective in very competitive sectors, such as retail finance, where Deko operates. With retailers eager to boost sales, retail finance helps firms offer flexible payment options at the checkout. Initially, the traditional retail providers represented single lenders, but more recently companies, such as Deko, offer multi-product, multi-lender checkout finance solutions, which ensure the best match for the customer, retailer, and lender. This approach increases lenders’ acceptance rates and the basket range covered, with many of the businesses Deko works with benefiting from up to a 24 per cent increase in conversions. Given our complex offering, we rely on content to educate and ensure our value proposition stands out from the crowd.

Set clear and concise goals
To be effective, the content strategy you implement must help outline the value that your business will add to the consumer. There are multiple types of content that should be included in your strategy to ensure success – whether it is educational long-form blog content, short social media posts or email marketing. Setting clear and concise goals will make measuring your ROI simple, as you will know what to look for.

Maintain consistency
Content marketing requires consistent effort. Its unlikely that you will see clear results as soon as you start posting a few blogs or writing an eBook about your products and services. However, if you remain persistent and have a good strategy in place, it will only be a matter of time before you start seeing a return on your investment. Relevant and value-adding content that benefits customers and gets them to repeatedly visit your website is key. Additionally, it is important to ensure that the content strategy and the content itself are SEO-optimised and easily visible on Google, which comes from having a high performing website.

Utilise tracking tools
There are a wide variety of useful tools, such as Google Analytics, that can help you track the ROI of your content marketing. You can track the number of sessions, traffic, and how long people stay on a page – just about anything to do with the piece of content. UTM codes, for example, allow you to examine where users are coming from when they click on a link.

This allows you to evaluate the success of pieces of content based on their ability to drive traffic to the more important parts of your website, such as product pages and checkout areas.

Analyse the results of your efforts
In a perfect scenario, your content marketing efforts will lead to direct sales. Yet, as content marketing occurs at the early stages of the sales funnel, this is not always the case. So, you cannot anticipate a guaranteed increase in sales volumes from a blog post, email or social media post.

What you can do is use a tracking and attribution tool to monitor the interest and understand how your content is influencing your end results. How many sign-ups are you getting from your newsletter? Is your follower count increasing across your social media platforms? How much time are people spending reading your blog posts? Finding the answers to these questions can provide you with a clearer idea about whether your content marketing efforts are yielding a return.

Factors such as sign-ups and increased follower counts might not immediately equate to increased sales, but through this engagement with your customers, you are taking an important step in building the brand and your trustworthiness, which in time will result in more sales.

Ask for feedback
Not all ROI measurements need to be based on quantitative data. Asking for regular feedback from your customers and peers will ultimately help you gain a better understanding of the impact your content marketing strategy is having on its intended targets.

The beginning of your content marketing efforts will look very different to the end result. Thats because as time passes you should use all your gained knowledge to adapt and tweak your strategy to reflect the insights you have gained during your research. This is why feedback is necessary to create an effective content marketing strategy and provide detailed ROI measurement.

Monitor metrics to continuously improve
Content marketing is a great way to boost the efforts of your online or physical stores and build a more extensive base of customers. By tracking your ROI metrics, you can make sure that you are continuously improving how you reach customers and discovering new ways to offer them even better products and services.