As of March 2024, there were a total of 3,168 fintech companies in the UK. The FinTech landscape continues to evolve rapidly, and businesses must navigate through the complexities of the market to ensure their products reach the right audience at the right time.
gigCMO’s Fractional CMO Service have empowered numerous startups and scaleups in the FinTech sector to achieve significant growth. Here, we will discuss how to develop a well-thought-out fintech marketing strategy to gain momentum and stay competitive.
What is Fintech?
Fintech refers to the use of technology to improve the delivery and use of financial services. By using innovative solutions, fintech companies are often able to change how consumers interact with the financial industry. Its goal is to make financial services more accessible, efficient, and equitable for everyone. Some of the sectors in which fintech has found applications include mobile payments, insurance, asset management, and crowdfunding platforms.
Fintech companies are often recognised for their ability to address customer needs more adequately than traditional financial institutions. They leverage technology to provide personalised services, enhanced security, and convenience, which are all crucial in today's digital age.
The Best Go-To-Market Strategy for a B2B FinTech Company
When preparing to launch a GTM (Go-To-Market) strategy for your business, it's essential to plan thoroughly. One crucial aspect is identifying the best product-market fit (PMF). Without a clear PMF, your sales and marketing expenses would be wasted, and your efforts would be misplaced.
To ensure that your B2B fintech is successful in its GTM planning, you need to focus on the following three areas:
- Start by refining your company's product value structure.
- Define the ideal customer profile (ICP) when targeting business prospects.
- Ensure that your company has the capability to handle the product needs and volume of these clients.
Crafting a Robust Product Value Foundation
The same formula that works for startup and growth-stage clients may not be applicable to larger business and financial institutions. Even B2B FinTechs that have secured bigger deals without an enhanced strategy are not exempt from this statement.
Businesses have unique needs, feature requests, and a higher demand for support that may not be covered by the commercials designed for startups. As a result, B2B FinTechs may end up providing more value than they are getting paid for, which can impact the annual contract value (ACV) earned.
Defining your product value structure is crucial for the success of your business. To achieve this, you should ensure that your team:
- Conducts surveys of existing clients and potential prospects to identify all current and future pain points.
- Conduct market research data to obtain a broader perspective.
- Analyses both the survey results and market research data to identify specific areas where your business can provide a solution.
Defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) for Business Prospects
By establishing the product value structure, you can identify the most suitable business buyer for your programme. This will help you find the client that gains the most value from your solution.
Keep the following questions in mind when trying to narrow down your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):
- What are the specific pain points of your target customers?
- How do these pain points connect to specific use cases?
- In what way does your product uniquely solve those pain points better than competitors?
- What are the key benefits that these prospects are looking for, such as higher revenue, lower costs, and increased efficiency?
When it comes to B2B FinTech, the most promising business prospects are those who possess a basic understanding of financial services and software management. They should also be willing to expand their current offerings, address daily operational concerns through automation, and take ownership of the relationship with their end-users instead of referring them to third-party products.
On the other hand, businesses are looking for customised solutions that can help them better manage and collect data, launch new features and services that enhance user experiences, and improve the scale of existing user activities.
Identifying Best Use Cases for Your ICP
Creating value for business and financial institutions depends on solving their critical use cases. Although there may be various options available, there is usually one particular use case that stands out and addresses the most crucial problem(s) faced by these bigger prospects. This mission-critical problem is typically handled by a single team.
Understanding the priorities of this team, their decision-making criteria for picking a solution, and the other stakeholders involved are crucial factors to consider.
When determining the most suitable use case, B2B fintech should pay attention to the following aspects:
- Identify the person responsible for addressing the problem.
- Determine the first and second-level capabilities that the solution should possess.
- Consider the level of support that will be required.
- Find out who will approve the budget to solve the problem and what the budget is.
- Determine if there are other stakeholders involved in the decision-making process.
Dealing with various issues may require the involvement of multiple teams, such as product, operations, legal, finance, risk, and technology. Each team has different requirements and methods of assessing a potential solution. It is up to your fintech's responsibility company to determine which team holds the most power and obtain their approval.
Building a Robust Framework to Support Your B2B Fintech GTM Strategy
Once you have established the foundation and identified your ideal customer profile (ICP) and use cases, it's time to put your strategy into action. At this stage, B2B FinTechs often wonder what they need from product development, operations, and support to win business and ensure business success.
To ensure that your platform meets the needs of your business ICP, you will need to add the necessary capabilities to your product roadmap and sales efforts. It's important to note that not everything can be built at once, so company leaders will need to prioritise capturing early success with large prospects. A single win can provide sufficient social proof that your product solution is business-ready.
To get started, teams should narrow their target within the ICP to identify high-potential prospects who can champion your platform throughout their network of business. Find established prospects who are eager for innovative, new solutions within your sector, and then focus on solving their top 2-3 problems.
Top issues in launching new programmes with businesses usually revolve around the following areas:
- Rich feature/product sets: Businesses often request custom builds that add value to their particular client segment and programme. However, these requests may not be repeatable for B2B FinTechs. To address this issue, identify critical themes in the requests and focus on extending your platform to cover these gaps. Alternatively, provide businesses with self-service tools to build off of your platform themselves.
- Platform stability: B2B FinTechs may fall into the trap of continuously adding new features without considering business readiness. Therefore, it is essential to conduct rigorous testing to confirm performance doesn't lag at a certain scale. Selling a solution that's not ready can have a massive reputational risk.
- Data security and privacy: Higher volumes of transactions and users increase the risk of breaches and non-compliance with privacy laws. Therefore, it is critical to show how securely data is stored, access points and the ability to juggle privacy guidelines across jurisdictions.
It's important to have a clear direction and a specific target when launching a go-to-market strategy. This approach helps to avoid being too broad and wasting valuable time and resources. The sales cycle for active buyers in the enterprise space takes a minimum of six months, which means it may take nearly a year to realise revenue gains, especially if the implementation and testing phase takes three or more months.
Are you part of a B2B fintech organisation looking for help with your marketing efforts? Contact us today for a business consultation! gigCMO Fractional CMO Service has helped startup and scaleups FinTech companies with their marketing, resulting in company growth.
