Genuine

Content Marketing Metrics in Fintech: What to Watch For

We marketers can sometimes spend too much time on the words and not enough on the marketing metrics that let us know what is and isn’t working. 

Content marketing metrics in particular need special attention. That’s because they help marketing leaders at B2B fintechs to measure the ROI of their content budget, to see where audiences are tuning in and out, and to identify new topics and formats to publish. 

What are Fintech Content Marketing Metrics?

As Semrush explains, content marketing metrics can help you measure content performance across multiple areas in the marketing funnel. Some examples of content marketing metrics for fintechs include email signups, leads generated, conversions, and social media follower growth.

What Content Marketing Metrics Tell B2B Fintechs

Content marketing metrics fall into different categories, each measuring your progress towards a different goal. For fitches, these broadly fall into the following categories: 

  • Awareness: Metrics in this category measure how well you’re known in your industry and how often people talk about you. The number of searches for a piece of content or your company’s brand name or product names point to audience awareness levels.

  • Customer Knowledge: These metrics help you establish trust and get to know your prospects better. Engagement rates are a good example of metrics in this category. Callback requests or demo requests are examples of deep-in-the-funnel metrics that tell you how well your content addresses prospect issues.

  • Digital Positioning: Your positioning is a combination of your website design, financial copywriting, and user experience (UX). Metrics such as time spent on a page and user heatmaps can help you see if your positioning is effective. 

  • Reputation: Brand strength is all-important given the degree of competition fintech companies face. Media mentions, quality of referrals, and the number of backlinks from ghostwritten thought leadership for trade journals will help you measure your influence. 

Download Genuine’s eBook, Fintech Content Secrets, to get more guidance about fintech content marketing and copywriting best practises.

Top Content Marketing Metrics for Fintechs

While there are several content marketing metrics you can track, these seven metrics are important for fintech marketing managers to watch. Some apply throughout the funnel, while others focus on bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) audiences. 

1. Top Performing Content

Which piece of content attracts the most visits from your prospects? These pages tell you a lot about what’s working and what needs tweaking. If your goal is to increase sales and convert more leads, having your blog pages as top-performing content points to a disconnect between your content strategy and marketing goals.

Ideally, blog pages funnel visitors towards content that positions your product as the ideal solution for your prospects’ issues. Given your goals, you would like to see product pages attract the most traffic. Blog posts that rank far ahead of product pages point to a high degree of awareness and a lack of product curiosity.

2. Click-Through Rates (CTRs)

CTRs are important throughout your funnel. While bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) CTRs receive the most attention, top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) CTRs need to be tracked as well. For instance, if your blog pages link to BOFU content, tracking CTRs will help you understand which content appeals the most to your audience.

Take a blog post analyzing industry regulations, for example. If that receives higher CTRs than a product enhancement announcement, the direction your content ought to take is clear. Here are a few examples of CTRs throughout the funnel:

  • TOFU CTRs: Blog post link clicks, email newsletter signups

  • Mid-funnel CTRs: Newsletter link clicks, clicks from non-gated guides, and content

  • BOFU CTRs: Landing page URL clicks, outreach email links, and nurture campaigns.

Click quality matters more than volume or conversion rates. If you record increasing demo requests despite low CTRs, your content might actually be doing a good job of appealing to a narrow ideal customer profile.  Like top-performing content, CTRs can provide you with a springboard for more analysis.

Backlinks help you discover the quality of your industry relationships. Who mentioned you, and in what context were they talking about you?

Clearly, you want to aim only for the highest-quality backlinks. However, securing top-quality links is tough if your company isn’t well-known yet. Pursuing backlinks from influencers and publications of slightly higher authority than you is a much more realistic short-term strategy. 

Over time, search engines will note your growing authority, and your SEO results will improve. This is where Domain Authority (DA) is important because: 

  • It’s a snapshot of a website’s authority (a DA of one is worst, 100 is the best)

  • Google and other search engines do not explicitly calculate DR but account for it alternatively, by evaluating the quality of a website’s backlinks

  • The lower the quality of your backlinks, the worse your DR and your online reputation. 

Tracking lost backlinks is as important as tracking existing ones. Often, losing a backlink points to an issue with your product’s positioning or your stance on a subject. For instance, if a well-respected trade journal decides to stop linking to you, examining the linking article and figuring out why the link doesn’t exist anymore could point to changing trends in the industry.

4. Social Media Activity

Social media engagement in B2B fintech social media isn’t just about likes, comments, mentions and tags. Instead, track how many times someone tags your company’s thought leaders. Are their names mentioned when important industry issues are raised by observers?

  • Check for leadership mentions in groups and forums, on LinkedIn, Quora and Reddit.

  • Examine the quality of discussions about your posts and the number of shares they receive. Looking at trends in social media company page visits and visitor profiles will point to who is engaging with your posts.

  • If you’re receiving visits from a declining number of target industry-specific visits, your social media strategy may need a revamp.

5. SERP Rankings 

Everything from your choice of topic (keyword research, prospect interviews, etc,) to promotion strategy (backlink quality, number of visitors, etc,) and social media buzz (engagement and content reach) come together over time to push your content higher in search results. 

Your SERP position neatly sums up how well your choices have paid off. It’s important to note that the SERP position is not everything. There is some awful content on the first SERP for many keywords and some excellent content buried far behind on page eight or nine.

If your content’s quality is high, but isn’t ranking as well as you’d like in SERPs, ask:

  • Are we addressing a topic that is relevant to our audience? A highly searched keyword isn’t the same as one that’s relevant.

  • How well are we promoting content? Aside from sharing it on social media, are we promoting it via other channels? Are audiences responding to this with good CTRs?

  • How often is our content being linked to by high DR websites?

  • Is our content truly better than the top-ranking posts for a keyword or topic?

View your SERP positions in the context of your marketing goals. For instance, you can create content and rank #1 for a keyword that is tangentially relevant to your BOFU audience. But this approach is unsuitable if your goal is to increase leads. 

You should create highly-relevant content that tackles pressing issues, irrespective of search volumes, to appeal to BOFU prospects and generate sales. Low SERP positions in tangential content won’t matter as much here because your focus is establishing authority.

6. Webinar Conversions

And there are webinars, a format where you can really craft the subject matter and format to the problems and priorities of BOFU audiences. Webinar setups are highly technical and lend themselves well to metric measurement. Here are some important metrics you can track when hosting webinars or online events.

  • Comments by timestamp:  For instance, when did total comments rise or fall? You can correlate these trends to the content you were presenting at the time.

  • Mid- and post-event questions. These metrics point to your audience’s curiosity. The nature of post-event questions also illuminates whether you answered their questions.

  • Average time attended: Check this per attendee, or per audience segment. Analyzing trends in drop-offs helps you design more engaging content in the future.

Webinar conversions can point to funnel-specific engagement, which is invaluable for follow-up content. If your webinar addressed how your product solves deep-rooted issues in your industry — and received several demo requests — be assured you’ve generated good leads.

Similarly, several post-event email subscriptions point to increased awareness. Attendees probably liked your analysis and are eager to learn more. Sending them deeper funnel content, or switching them to nurture campaigns, will help you generate more leads down the road.

7. Gated Content and Website Forms

CTRs measure how many people clicked a button. They’re a great metric but fail to provide the full picture when deep in the funnel. 

  • BOFU content aims to convert leads and CTRs only provide half the picture. 

  • They tell you only how many leads clicked a button. 

  • They don’t tell you how many requested a callback or bought your product afterward.

B2B fintech companies must dive deeper and enhance lead quality. One way of pursuing this goal is to selectively gate only your highest value content. Measuring the number of form signups, sales callback requests, call-to-action (CTA) clicks, email newsletter signups (depending on the type of CTA you have used,) and the number of prospect touchpoints is essential. 

This can help your sales team, and marketing, understand each other more. Prioritize the type of content you gate and then measure its success. It just might help both your lead quality and sales volumes.

Content Marketing Metrics Point the Way to Success

What gets measured matters, as the old saying goes. The trick, as we’ve explained here, is to make sure you’re measuring the right things. Be sure to regularly check your metrics against your broader content marketing goals, and you’ll stay on the right path. 

<span style="color:#000; font-size:16px;">Written by</span><br> Luke O'Neill
Written by
Luke O'Neill

Luke O’Neill is Genuine's founder. He is a writer and content strategist, who spends his days advising B2B fintech and financial services businesses. Luke's writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and The Irish Times.

You may also like