📈 Case Study: Producing disruptive content for a SaaS financial startup to punch above its weight
About the business
- Startup SaaS brand operating in financial services
- Soft conversions only
- Awareness-driving content
Nature of the work
The challenge
I joined a one-year old fintech startup as Marketing Director and faced a tough challenge — produce standout content driving brand recognition. Normally not too difficult, but the aim was to get on the radar of brands like HSBC and Lloyds. Global giants. With only first-round investment funding, we were competing not just against household names with century-long legacies, but against an entire ecosystem of fintech startups all vying for the same attention.
Creating cut-through with content would have to extend far beyond trying to compete with bland financial service pages and informational content. Add to that the pressure of dwindling first-round investment, rapid turnaround requirements, and the constant need to be both attention-grabbing and completely accurate with financial information.. It wasn’t easy, but after a few failures, and testing a lot of different things, it all came together.
The approach
With it being impossible to out-spend the competition on promotion and amplification, a nimble content strategy focused on being first-to-market with emerging trends and topics in the challenger banking space. Our methodology centred on targeting emerging search terms and creating fresh content around challenger banks, customer reviews, and educational material about new financial products.
The approach balanced dual audiences: consumer-focused content that would drive B2C engagement, while ensuring the material would also capture B2B attention from stakeholders within the financial brands we covered. This required a sophisticated understanding of both search intent and industry concerns.
Our research process combined customer insight with competitive intelligence tools like SEMrush, while maintaining constant market surveillance to identify emerging topics before competitors could establish dominance. The key was speed and accuracy—we needed to be first to publish authoritative content on breaking trends while maintaining the credibility essential in financial services.
Working primarily on content strategy and execution with freelancer support, we established aggressive constraints: same-week turnaround from trend identification to publication, with a rolling 4-week content schedule to ensure consistent market presence.
The work
With the financial world moving especially quickly over the period when the so-called ‘challenger banks’ were setting up shop in the UK, there was never a shortage of financial goings on — that the average customer would also be interested in.
We monitored the news cycle and stayed on top of developments with our target brands, and when news emerged, were quick to turnaround content.
Balancing opinion-led content such as reviews, insight, and perspective satisfied the end reader, as well as engaging the brand itself — all companies are keen to read something that someone has written about them. Being first to market meant we were rewarded in search, and having strong written content meant that engagement with said content was strong. This fuelled strong search engine performance.
This content cycle ran on a weekly basis, enabling a fair volume of high-quality content at a limited budget. I married this up with punchy social content, using similar tactics, aimed directly at brands, again igniting curiosity from brands and consumers. Content was designed to be:
- Aligned with consumer search intent (especially emergent search queries)
- Opinionated enough that brands would sit up and take notice
- Substantial enough to rank well in search
- Had useful and helpful content for end users looking to make decisions on financial products
- Sufficiently backed with E-E-A-T given it was in the YMYL category
We mixed this content in with more conventional content such as guides, how-tos, and FAQs so that once on site, consumers felt like this was a really useful resource for financial information.
Achievements
Attention of brands like Monzo, Starling, and UK Insurance achieved
Traffic acquisition led to knock-on growth in other KPIs such as email subscribers
Traffic to site grew 700% in this year
Key takeaways
- Content should never be bland — it was only that we dared to take some risks and — have an opinion — that opened the door to commercial conversations through content.
- Understanding the customer is key. Without knowing the things that our readers wanted to read about, we couldn’t have gotten them to the site in the first instance.
- Content designed for multi-channel impact, in this instance social and search, delivers better ROI (and can be stretched even further beyond target channels).
- Even within dry, informational topics — content CAN and SHOULD be able to deliver tangible ROI.