Hosted by Araminta Robertson, 'Market like a fintech' is the new podcast for fintech marketing professionals and enthusiasts who want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry, and level up their marketing knowledge. Subscribe here to never miss an episode.
Talk to the customer. Be customer-centric. Do your customer research.
These are words we hear a lot in the marketing world. Especially, in the fintech one where customer-centricity is one of the unique selling points of fintechs when compared to incumbents.
So - how well do you know your customer? The truth is, we often overestimate how well we understand our customers. “A 30-year-old male software engineer with 2 kids who lives in the suburbs and his challenge is figuring out the best way to save for retirement”, doesn’t mean knowing your customer. You know you understand your customer well when you can predict what their next move is.
And often to reach that point, you need to do research. That means doing qualitative and quantitive research. You need to send out surveys, get on calls with them and talk to your sales or support team. Then you start to understand your pain points.
In this episode of Market Like a Fintech, Araminta is chatting with the Head of Content at Attest, Sarah Hollinshead. Attest is a consumer research platform that aims to make consumer research fast, simple and affordable. They’ve worked with big companies like Klarna, Wise and others mentioned on this podcast.
The continuous nature of the insight is really how this whole industry [fintech] is going to evolve.
Podcast summary:
The benefit of consumer research is that it reduces the guesswork. Being able to test marketing theories or validate, and look for important perceptions that consumers have about brands and their products and services, helps avoid any marketing 'failures' and campaigns that don't resonate with the target audience.
When we're talking about gathering customer insight and doing market research, the two key ways are qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative is when you're going to gather a smaller group or a focus group, and you're getting more like original content from the people you're speaking to. So you get to hear things in their voice, but you haven't got so much scale in terms of feedback. And then quantitative is going to be your standard surveys that you're sending out. You'll be then getting responses from hundreds of 1000s of people, and be able to quantify attitudes, needs, behaviours, all of that information that you need. So both work quite well in harmony, depending on the application.
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It's never been more competitive than it is now [in fintech]. And I think the only way to get above your competitors and to be tapping into - "okay, the customers definitely want this" - is research. So, I think the pace of change matched with how increasingly competitive the [fintech] industry comes, makes it really unique.
People feel very differently about their money and their finances than they do about other things that they purchase or other relationships they have with brands. And that always needs to be tapped into.
It can be a real bonus for companies that get it right - Understanding the relationship between trust and money is really important.
The distinguishing factor that brands have to play with is customer experience.
The long and short of the brand-building activity is the long term strategy that's going to build your business over time. So, brand tracking is a fantastic way to get that insight and be able to act upon it.
Once you understand where the appetite is, and who your audience is, you can then do far more work to cater to them. If you're trying to cater to everyone in the first place, you may not get the success that you want. And when you're working with relatively low budgets, and relatively low resources, being able to focus is really critical. That is probably one that I'd say it's fantastic for more startup stage businesses.
No matter how big or a small decision you need to make, let the customers help you inform that decision. Make sure that this is informed by customers, and you're not just sort of sat in a boardroom making it up.
For more interesting insights, listen to Sarah's complete interview below.