How Did They Do It? Deep Diving Into the Cleverest FinTech UA Campaigns
The season of spring inspires a variety of emotions across different generations. The same season, however, unites Millennials and GenZ across the globe over a common necessity – finances. The first quarter of a new calendar year is all about the money – tax filings, investment plans, budgeting for the year ahead – the list is long for all of us. And let’s face it – money matters are complicated and no one likes simplification more than our young working population. As we get started to celebrate the season of finances, team MAAS deep dives into some of the cleverest FinTech UA campaigns. Read on to find out how these brands leveraged contemporary trends for their mobile marketing strategy and what we can learn from them.
Monzo – Harnessing the Power of Community
UK based FinTech leader Monzo met the Millennials at a crucial juncture – the mobile first tech savvy generation was desperately looking for alternate solutions to break away from the rigors of traditional banking. The disruptive neobank app offers a bouquet of digital financial services like business banking, loans, credit and debit cards, checking accounts, savings, money management, etc.
What Made Monzo a Household Name?
In line with its mobile first approach, for their FinTech UA campaigns, the brand focused on online community building as the heart of its app marketing strategy. Their efforts eventually paid off with the grand success of their referral campaigns. A community first marketing strategy helped Monzo scale down their user acquisition cost by 50% at one point of time.
Social channels featured on top of their mobile marketing roadmap. Monzo was one of the firsts to take the initiative in the FinTech space, to execute user suggestion loops to improve their app’s usability. Through initiatives like contests, they were able to make users feel as part of the brand. To optimize their campaigns for maximum outcome, Monzo analysed their data in two levels.
Users were segmented on the basis of install sources to understand which campaigns contributed to the most activated user group and long term user segments. This helped the brand understand which channels were working better compared to others, enabling higher ROAS. Monzo also analyzed their campaigns at a creative level to understand how best to present their app to their audience to encourage installs and in-app activities.
The Takeaway
Community building still remains a crucial marketing puzzle to crack. Monzo’s marketing success is testimony to the impact of referral campaigns run on the back of a happy online community. To maximize reach, compelling creatives are a must. An experienced mobile UA partner can provide creative level insights to help optimize your creative strategy – it helps you understand how to exhibit your app to different segments of audience and what kind of ad placements are drawing higher installs.
Wealthsimple – It’s All About the Content
Canadian FinTech leader Wealthsimple simplifies investment and trading for working millennials through their stocks and crypto apps.
What Helped Wealthsimple Reach Unicorn Status?
The brand’s FinTech UA campaigns are guided by empathetic content. The millennial mobile user is in search of quick answers to their questions. Personal finance isn’t taught in schools or colleges, thereby creating a knowledge gap among millennials with high disposable income. Wealthsimple chose to fill up this gap by providing answers to common financial questions of the average millennial.
The brand leveraged video as its preferred medium to communicate and educate their audience on personal wealth management. Their video content explores a wide range of sensitive topics like normalization of financial issues through Money Diaries or importance of investing young.
Wealthsimple has found the right formula to a successful influencer marketing campaign. The brand often features millennial role models talking about their financial struggles and their personal learnings on managing finances. Instead of directly promoting their apps, the brand provides influencers with an additional platform to connect to their audience at a human level.
The Takeaway
Consistency of messaging and relatable plotlines are vital to a great digital content marketing strategy. Wealthsimple’s online content tells a big story about financial sustainability among the youth. Empathy is the keyword of their marketing success. The brand uses content to delve deep into their user’s requirements beyond what the core apps have to offer.
Revolut – Exclusivity is the Dream
UK based Revolut is a neobank app present across 31 countries with about 15 million users. The app provides P2P payments, low cost international transfers, crypto investment, budget and savings management to list a few.
How Did Revolut Get in the Super-app Race?
The attraction of exclusivity is hard to resist. Revolut used user generated content, a special Revolut metal card, and gamification to create an online to offline viral loop pushing the exclusivity factor of its app.
The Revolut app features promote social financial management – for instance, splitting bills among Revolut users or having peer Vaults. Such features encourage existing users to participate in the lucrative referral schemes. The app uses gamification elements to engage the user in completing their referral schemes. On completion, they are awarded with a sleek Revolut metal card. Social posts of users sharing their exclusive cards tagging the brand help them garner free exposure among newer audience segments.
To increase audience engagement, the app partnered with Lokalise to bring in local flavor to their app across different geographies. To continue offering their users more exclusive deals, Revolut has now partnered with several retail brands to create features like Revolut Shopper and Smart Subscriptions. With their offerings starting to go beyond the traditional financial landscape, Revolut has joined in the discussion as the next big super-app from the West.
The Takeaway
If your product fits the bill, pitching exclusivity can attract high quality users to install your FinTech app. An important point to note in Revolut’s marketing strategy is while the brand promoted exclusivity, they also kept the user journey simple and easily accessible. Users love brands who pay attention to them. Including a user generated content plan in your app marketing roadmap will further strengthen your bond to the audience and increase brand advocacy.
Starling Bank – Optimization is Sacred
Recognized as a premier, disruptive neobank, Starling Bank offers a range of current and business account services through its app.
What Earned Starling the Sobriquet of “Challenger Bank”?
Being profitable in the middle of a pandemic is no mean feat. Starling’s story has all the right ingredients for an exciting Hollywood flick – an ambitious founder set to disrupt one of the oldest industries, a growth phase that almost resulted in disastrous failure, followed by a phoenix-like rise and acceptance among users. Between January to March, 2021 Starling had a net gain of over seventeen thousand accounts – one of the highest in the neobank category of UK.
Anne Boden, the CEO, is insistent on promoting Starling as a brand that believes customers deserve better. Starling’s UA strategy focused on a type of audience overlap index to maximize their UA efforts. What does this mean? A key feature in the challenger bank’s UA strategy ensured users with a Starling account are not targeted repeatedly across multiple UA channels. It helped them to bring down their UA cost and also reach out to more prospect users within a given budget. Starling saw noticeable results in their growth phase with a precision targeting strategy with 44% new accounts opened on a 36% lower cost per install.
The Takeaway
Precision targeting and means to check audience overlaps are two key elements in optimizing performance and budget of your mobile marketing campaign. Starling takes into account ad fatigue of consumers. Repeated ads, especially to converted consumers, shows the brand in a negative light and causes users to lose trust.
Affle’s MAAS provides a unified audience platform to all categories of FinTech apps to replicate the success of the star players. With its offer of diverse channels like direct apps inventory, MAAS exchange, programmatic channels, social and influencer channels, OEM recommendations, the platform is capable of delivering quality users based on the app’s core objectives and challenges. The mInsight dashboard provides a holistic overview of channel and creative performances to empower app marketers in optimizing their FinTech UA campaigns to achieve maximum results.
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