From local digital wallets like GCash, Maya, and PayMongo to cryptocurrency exchanges like Coins.ph and PDAX, the Philippines has gone a long way in the financial technology (fintech) industry. This blog post provides digital marketing tips for fintech owners or executives like you, to optimize your channels to boost your brand’s online presence, web traffic, and conversions.
Rise of Digital Wallets and Fintech Apps in the Philippines
The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a digital shift in the Philippine economy. The lockdowns forced Filipinos to transact money online. As a result, the Philippine e-commerce landscape started to boom.
This crisis also paved the way for the massive use of mobile wallets, digital banks, and other cashless payment solutions powered by technology. To gain a foothold, fintech companies need robust digital marketing strategies.
According to the Fintech Map Philippines 2023 report, the sector soared more than 38%. From 216 companies, it grew to 299 in August 2023. And it shows no signs of stopping.
As the fintech industry thrives, the competition gets stiffer and stiffer. Moreover, players in this industry face various challenges in promoting digital payment, lending, and other products.
As such, the Philippine fintech companies should step up their marketing campaigns to reach their target audiences. Cutting through the noise and reaching your target audience requires an intelligent and effective digital marketing strategy.
How Digital Channels Help Fintech Marketing
As a financial technology startup owner or executive, most of your marketing efforts should hinge on utilizing digital channels to promote your brand. Here’s a peek at some of the ones that the Philippine market is currently using:
Social Media Marketing
Filipinos were the second most active social media users worldwide in 2023. Tapping your target market on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms is a must-have for fintech companies. Your brand can benefit from this channel by:
Boosting Brand Awareness and Market Reach
Social media allows fintech companies to reach a wider audience by building their online presence in groups and platforms where potential customers and investors drop by. Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook also offer advanced targeting options, enabling you to reach specific demographics and interests with their message.
Building Trust and Credibility
Social media allows you to foster transparency and open communication with customers. Through this marketing medium, you can address concerns, answer questions, and showcase your expertise. You can also feature positive customer testimonials and reviews to help build trust and credibility.
Educating Your Target Audience
These platforms offer a stage for sharing valuable content and insights to educate audiences about financial topics that can establish your company as a thought leader and an influencer. They can take the form of:
- Facebook, LinkedIn, or Medium articles,
- YouTube explainer videos,
- Instagram or X carousels or reels
- TikTok videos
User Acquisition and Customer Engagement
This medium is a powerful tool for showcasing products, services, and special offers. It can also create a positive and engaging online community that fosters brand loyalty and encourages users to stay informed about company updates and new products.
Customer Support and Feedback
Social media is a direct communication channel for users to reach customer support and resolve issues. You can also use this as a tool to get valuable customer comments and feedback. Through these valuable sources of customer insight, you can learn more about the sentiments of your customers or audience, and identify areas for improvement.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Most Filipinos still rely heavily on Google for information. Hence, you need SEO to ensure your website is optimized to appear in searches relevant to your fintech products and services. SEO also factors in the load speed of apps or web pages and others.
Increased Organic Traffic and Brand Awareness
Getting a high ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords means more people will see your website, driving organic traffic and increasing brand awareness. By optimizing your website for specific keywords, you can attract targeted traffic who are actively searching for what you offer, leading to higher conversion rates.
Building Trust and Credibility
Ranking highly in search results shows the authority and expertise in this sector. Having this reputation can help build trust and credibility with potential customers. To achieve this goal, you should implement a strong SEO strategy involving valuable and informative content creation. This strategy will help position your company as a reliable source of information.
Improved Lead Generation and Conversions
SEO attracts qualified leads already interested in financial products and services, increasing the likelihood of converting them into paying customers.
You can do this by optimizing your landing pages with relevant keywords to ensure a seamless user experience and encourage desired actions, like signing up for a free trial or requesting a quote.
Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy
While SEO may require considerable investment in the initial stages, it is a cost-effective strategy in the long run. If done right, you can attract considerable organic traffic that can generate conversions even without paid advertising costs.
Content Marketing
Content remains gold in digital marketing. It is a powerful way to build trust, educate their audience, and drive growth in fintech companies. Through informative blog posts, infographics, or videos, you can address how fintech can solve the financial problems of Filipinos. These include cashless payments, money transfers, and introducing additional venues for investments and savings.
One example of this strategy is publishing a series of content about how customers should spend, save, and invest their money wisely. While many Pinoys are tech-savvy, our country is still at the bottom 30 out of 144 in financial literacy.
You can position yourself as a thought leader who gives relevant and timely advice on this and other virtual money topics. You can publish blog posts, e-books, white papers, and other content types across digital marketing channels, such as on your blog and social media accounts.
Influencer Marketing
Leveraging notable personalities and social media celebrities provides an attractive venue to showcase your brand. As our previous blog post stated, influencer marketing is one of the hottest channels brands should tap. It helps fintech companies:
- Build trust from the loyal and engaged audience of your chosen influencer.
- Help introduce complex concepts of your industry to laypeople or non-techy audiences.
- Establish an emotional connection to your target audience by adding a personal touch and showcasing your fintech solution in real-world scenarios.
You can also partner with micro-influencers to target a specific niche or demographic, such as farmers who need fast and reliable money transfer solutions in a remote area.
Paid Advertising
The power to target the right audience with speed and efficiency is paid advertising’s main advantage. If managed correctly, this channel will help fintech companies:
Overcoming the trust barrier
Trust is crucial for fintech companies. Paid allows you to highlight social proof through testimonials, ratings, or partnerships where it matters to your target audience.
Reach the right people at the right time
Paid gives you power to zero in on search intent, reach out to your target audience at different stages of the customer journey, and re-engage users who showed interest but did not take action through remarketing. This channel is crucial for new fintech companies trying to establish themselves in a highly competitive market.
Improve the speed and agility of your marketing performance
Deliver immediate visibility and traffic while making campaigns flexible through quick budget adjustments, targeting, or creatives based on real-time performance data. It also allows testing and optimization, enabling you to test different ad formats and messages to find what resonates most with your audience.
Learn from and optimize the strategies of your campaigns
Working on data-driven insights from key performance indicators and metrics like clicks, impressions, conversions, and leads allows you to calculate returns accurately while understanding your audience through valuable data.
Complement paid with organic channels
If partnered with organic channels like SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads will help boost your overall digital marketing efforts.
Email Marketing
Nurturing leads and building loyalty are crucial for your digital marketing efforts. And no other channel that can deliver these results better than email marketing. It allows your brand to segment the audience and provide personalized offers, news updates, and educational content.
Email marketing offers these amazing benefits to the fintech industry:
- Lead Capture: You can include email opt-in forms directly into paid ad landing pages and other sections in your website.
- Segmented Campaigns: Tailor your emails based on user behavior, where they are in the customer journey, and data collected from ads.
- Personalized Content: Address your pain points, offer resources aligned with search terms they used, or tailor offers based on past interactions.
- Retargeting: You can email users who abandoned their cart, visited specific product pages, or engaged with your ads but didn’t convert.
How LeapOut Can Help the Fintech Industry
As one of the leading digital marketing agencies in the Philippines, LeapOut is here to help optimize the digital marketing efforts of your fintech business. The digital marketing agency has years of experience in social media marketing, SEO, graphic design, paid advertising and e-commerce development. Contact us now to find out the best strategy for fintech digital marketing.
Tony Chua is an adept Web Content Specialist and HubSpot-certified professional, with an Economics degree from the University of Santo Tomas and over ten years in content creation. Specializing in SEO articles, blog posts, and social media content, Tony has a diverse background encompassing news writing, press releases, and editorial work.
His multifaceted expertise also covers desktop publishing, graphic design, web development, and video editing. At LeapOut Digital, Tony applies his versatile skills to enhance digital narratives and engage a global audience through compelling content.
Tony Chua
Tony Chua is an adept Web Content Specialist and HubSpot-certified professional, with an Economics degree from the University of Santo Tomas and over ten years in content creation. Specializing in SEO articles, blog posts, and social media content, Tony has a diverse background encompassing news writing, press releases, and editorial work.
His multifaceted expertise also covers desktop publishing, graphic design, web development, and video editing. At LeapOut Digital, Tony applies his versatile skills to enhance digital narratives and engage a global audience through compelling content.
