Leveraging thought leadership to establish authority for your FinTech business

Establishing your FinTech business as an authority is crucial for success. And thought leadership is one of the best ways to do this. By enabling brands to differentiate themselves and build trust with their audience, FinTech thought leadership establishes the brand as a trusted source in the search engines.

Here are six ways you can leverage thought leadership and place your brand as an expert in the FinTech industry:

Understand your target audience

A good thought leadership strategy should always begin with understanding who you are talking to.

Before creating any content, you first need to understand your audience. It’s a good idea to create customer personas so you can better get to know your customers and target audience. By understanding their drivers, challenges, wants and desires, you will create a more effective thought leadership strategy that is full of relevant and useful content.

There are external partners who can do this for you, but if you have the capacity to undertake this in-house, and get input from long-standing employees, that is often the best route.

Understand the FinTech landscape

Just as important as understanding your audience is understanding the FinTech landscape. The FinTech sector is a fast-paced and rapidly evolving industry, with constant updates and ever-changing regulations. But despite the constant changes, FinTech companies are expected to be ahead of the curve. And thought leadership plays a vital role in this.

Quickly responding to changes, such as interest rate rises, energy bill increases, and FinTech innovations is crucial to establishing authority. As such, it’s imperative to keep ahead of the ever-changing landscape and conduct in-depth research on industry developments and regulatory changes, and share insights with peers using social media platforms, such as LinkedIn.

When creating any thought leadership content, it must demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of current trends, challenges, and regulatory shifts.

Identify key thought leaders

It’s a good idea, if your business allows, to have a spokesperson for each vertical or vertical group. While one spokesperson for the business is better than no-one at all, if your business serves different audiences, having one person cited as an ‘expert’ in everything can come across as inauthentic to your consumers.

It also means that one sole person won’t have to become an expert in everything from consumer personal finance to business insurance.

Smaller businesses may not have the capacity to have a different spokesperson assigned to each individual product or topic, so in that case, grouping topics together that the spokesperson is – or can become – an expert on works just as well. For Instance, you could opt to have a ‘business spokesperson’ – who discusses everything business sector-related, and a ‘consumer spokesperson’ – who is an expert on all things personal finance.

Once you have spokespeople assigned, make sure they have time to conduct regular industry research and insight, and are media trained ready for any media opportunities that arise.

Create in-depth, value-driven content

Thought leadership is built on providing in-depth and actionable content that adds value for the audience. This can be across different platforms, and look like data-driven stories and research, white papers, industry trends, tip comments and advice, case studies, and expert analysis.

While SEO should always help inform topics by looking at search trends and online consumer behaviour, it’s important to write for people first in order to showcase Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (EEAT).

Google’s Helpful Content Update, initially released in 2022, aims to ‘ensure that people see more original, helpful content in search results’ and encourages websites to ‘prioritise people over search engines with every piece of content’. This means that thin content that is made up of low-quality content stuffed with keywords, is made with scraped and duplicated content, has little to no content, and created to deliberately manipulate search engines, no longer cuts it for search engines – or for consumers.

Establish topic authority across channels

To establish authority and be seen as a true thought leader in the fintech sector, your content needs to be seen across multiple platforms. Publish thought leadership content on your website, include it in your digital PR strategy to form stories and earn media coverage, mention findings during spokesperson opportunities when talking to the media, include it in your social media plans, and contribute to industry blogs and articles.

FinTech thought leadership is built on consistent messaging and showcasing your expertise. By doing this, you will build topic authority that showcases expertise and credibility amongst consumers and in the search engines.

Include expert bios on your website

While creating content on your website is a great way to build authority through thought leadership, showcasing your spokespeople goes one step further.

Create detailed biographies of your spokespeople and host them on your website. These should include relevant information such as past work experience, specialist topics, recent or top articles, links to external citations, social media profiles (such as LinkedIn), and a headshot. This further builds credibility amongst consumers and journalists, driving authority for your brand.

There is no shortcut when it comes to building trust with target audiences, but following these steps will help to establish both your business as a thought leader, and its people as experts, which then builds trust and authority – inside and outside the search engines.

For more information about how we can help your FinTech business build trust in the search engines and amongst consumers through digital PR, get in touch with us.