How are marketing leaders differentiating to attract customers and deepen engagement?
Companies have a constant need to manage and move money, and they now have more choices than ever. What B2B payments marketing strategies are helping providers get ahead? And how are marketing needs shifting in the face of new technologies like embedded payments?
Why an outside perspective matters for payments marketing
Over many years of working with banking and fintech clients, we’ve observed a common challenge. Payment providers often lead with product features, and their ideal buyers struggle to understand how solutions address their specific needs or problems.
Tailoring B2B payments marketing through a customer-centric lens can more effectively nurture leads from awareness to closing the deal.
As a strategic marketing partner, agencies see the opportunity to incorporate a very focused customer perspective. This shift increases engagement metrics like clicks and views, and more importantly —helps to advance new relationships from awareness to decision.
Seeing from the outside-in can be difficult for any business. As an extension of the marketing team, a marketing agency brings a holistic external view of the market, including buyer trends and competitors. This helps organizations strengthen product positioning, messaging, content strategies, and a wide range of content for sales engagement.
It’s no surprise to marketers that data-driven insights can make a big difference. Yet many organizations find they don’t have the time or resources to do the digging.
That’s a great launch point for an agency partner that really knows financial services and B2B buyers. An experienced industry partner can conduct market research, client interviews, and competitive analysis. It helps clarify the needs of key audiences, identify niche segments, and address the nuances inherent in industry vertical use cases.
The agency can then leverage those insights to craft a value proposition, key messages, and marketing content that can more effectively fuel the B2B sales cycle.
Creating highly nuanced marketing is now more critical than ever in the payments industry. Banks and non-banks are competing for the same customers, and more technologies keep emerging. Like consumers, B2B audiences are now quite open to switching financial providers, and it’s not just about getting better capabilities. Companies are seeking relationships that understand the unique needs of their business. And that’s where tailored marketing is essential. It builds trust by demonstrating how well the organization knows their audiences.
What does all that look like in action? Here we share some real-world examples of how we’ve worked with clients to build momentum for B2B payments marketing.
Client Success – Revitalizing a bank’s B2B payments marketing
A large national bank serving businesses from startups to large public corporations was well known for banking and lending, yet there was low brand awareness for their payment solutions. In particular, the bank wanted to drive new account acquisition and transaction volumes for business credit cards and merchant services.
Along with growing existing relationships, the bank hoped to acquire new clients using payments and innovative money movement solutions as a magnet to attract deposit business. But in an overly crowded market of bank and non-bank providers competing for cards and payment processing, how could they differentiate?
The bank knew that competing on the basis of fees is a ‘race to the bottom’. Instead, we helped them develop a new marketing strategy centered on solving key payment challenges of fast-growing companies.
20% increase in page engagement and clicks to product lead forms with the new web experience
Our team started by gathering client insights and assessed the competitive landscape as a foundation for a marketing blueprint. We then encapsulated insights into customer personas that helped sharpen perspectives about attitudes and needs at different stages of growth.
This approach formed the genesis of new client-focused value propositions for both payment products, tailored to the bank’s segmentation strategy.
In developing the value prop, we created a framework of strategic positioning themes and key messages that shaped the marketing narratives. With a constant eye on how to differentiate their story, we infused the core themes and messaging into content for multiple marketing channels and tools for the sales team.
As an example, for the bank’s website, we designed a new web experience for payment solutions, including journeys and content that focused first on audience needs, more than product features.
Our team handled everything from journey mapping, copywriting and graphics, to creating page mockups and managing user testing. We also coordinated with the bank’s compliance and web production teams to meet needs for final approvals.
The business impact for our bank client? On-page engagement metrics, particularly clicks to the lead form, saw a boost of 20%. Search engine ranking also improved based on the new pages.
Client Success – Increasing sales engagement for a payments platform
A fintech providing an innovative payments platform enables businesses to optimize how they collect recurring payments. Despite a compelling offering, they face stiff competition for their ideal customer profiles of lenders, billers, and iGaming operators.
Many of those businesses have subsisted for years on legacy technology with limited payment options. It may be a sub-par customer experience, but it has met their basic needs and they’re resistant to change.
That was a great jumping off point for our ongoing collaboration with the fintech firm. Combining our deep expertise in payments and fintech, with a customer-focused mindset, we strategize ideas and write well-researched content focused on critical challenges the platform can solve. We also factor in data on industry trends and new consumer expectations that influence payment behaviors.
Remixing existing content to tackle different pain points or use cases is a powerful way to capture more marketing ROI and extend exposure.
Our payments marketing content has spanned thought leadership blogs, earned media articles, infographics and social media. We’ve also authored comprehensive reports based on the company’s proprietary consumer research. Reports showcased compelling data about top concerns influencing payer behaviors, with a goal to spark a sense of urgency with the platform provider’s B2B audiences.
Along with creating net-new content, we also help the business extend the value of existing marketing content. In some cases, we create ‘remixes’ that leverage key concepts from their blogs, webinars or research into new articles that tackle different pain points for their target buyers.
Other times, we remix our own creations into what we call ‘snackables’. For instance, writing blogs and Linkedin carousels based on a lengthy whitepaper. It’s a powerful way to get more marketing ROI from existing content and expand exposure.
Client Success – Optimizing launch of embedded payment solutions
In B2B embedded finance, big players have emerged, with almost all Top 10 banks getting into the game. Over the years, we’ve worked with three of the largest U.S. banks, most recently helping one of them go to market with embedded payment solutions for corporates and fintechs.
While their marketing team are seasoned experts in banking and payments, embedded solutions are new territory. They wanted to gather the right expertise to more effectively tell their story. That’s where we came in.
Starting with a ‘soft launch’, the bank wanted to generate awareness at Money 20/20, a leading payments industry conference. On an accelerated timeline, we developed copy and design for booth signage, plus product marketing collateral to serve as a conversation starter for the sales team.
The early language we developed helped the bank refine product positioning and key messages. From there, we wrote copy for an embedded payments web page to highlight benefits and use cases, and created storyboards for explainer videos.
Beyond the basics, the bank needs to make the business case with corporate and fintech audiences. Bringing our industry expertise, we created an action plan of strategic topics for thought leadership, and developed the content, infusing product positioning themes, industry data, and insights from executive interviews.
New considerations for embedded payments marketing
One of the standout challenges we’re seeing in the embedded payments space is that marketing needs to be very tailored. It needs to speak to the unique complexities of payment operations in different industries, while also balancing both product and compliance requirements. And, since payment capabilities can be embedded into many types of business systems and software, there are many different use cases.
To engage decision-makers, marketers need to meet prospective customers where they are — with content directly relevant to their vertical and the problems they need to solve.
That means seeing through the customer lens, and focusing content on how to achieve tangible business wins, in a variety of contexts. That’s a pivotal way we add value as a marketing partner. Beyond our payments and fintech expertise, our work with a diverse range of industries gives us insight into what different buyers may need.
Compliance is another factor complicating embedded payments marketing. Embedded finance for B2B is new terrain, and as more capabilities are ramping up, so are regulatory concerns. For over a decade, our agency has been tracking fintech innovation, including compliance issues that often arise with new technologies. This perspective enables us to better understand some of the challenges our banking clients face, and considerations that impact marketing.
We’ve also learned how to partner successfully with compliance teams to help speed content approvals. Along with quick turnaround for updates, we help ensure compliance-approved messaging and disclosures are used consistently as new content gets developed.
Powering B2B payments marketing with Beyond the Arc
For banks and fintech companies focused on B2B payments, marketing is often a whirlwind of strategic priorities. As an outside partner, our marketing agency can collaborate as a seamless extension of your marketing team.
It’s about more than just copywriting and design services. Our clients gain a trusted go-to partner who really understands their business models, industry verticals, and compliance needs – which is especially important as organizations evolve.
We’re well equipped to jump in as you launch new capabilities, such as a spend management platform alongside card programs, or embedded instant payments. Or if you need simpler ways to explain complex offerings like payment facilitation or treasury services. Or if you’re transitioning systems to the new ISO 20022 financial messaging standard. We’ve done all that and much more.
Whether you’re a financial institution or fintech, we can help you save time, bridge gaps, and get to market faster by hitting the mark sooner.
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