An early stage fintech needs to demonstrate that its technology solves a problem someone is willing to pay to address. Marketing should contribute from the outset by helping the company understand its customers, define its value proposition and turn interest into business opportunities.
This article focuses on B2B fintech companies, including payments providers and financial infrastructure businesses. For these companies, growth depends on several people understanding the product, trusting the provider and finding a compelling reason to change how they work.
Choose a customer segment before trying to reach the whole market
A payments platform might serve merchants, marketplaces and remittance businesses. Yet each segment has different needs, buying processes and alternatives. A broad message makes it harder to explain why a particular customer should pay attention.
Marketing’s first task is to develop and test a hypothesis about the ideal customer. Which businesses experience the problem? Who deals with it every day? Who approves a purchase? What makes solving it a priority now?
For a cross-border payments fintech, the starting point might be a specific type of business that needs to reduce manual reconciliation work. This is a hypothetical example: the choice should reflect customer conversations and commercial evidence, rather than market size alone.
Customer interviews and reviews of won and lost opportunities help refine this focus. The findings should also inform the product team. Y Combinator recommends maintaining direct contact with users and avoiding premature scaling before finding product-market fit.[1]
Translate the technology into a reason to buy
A flexible API or a new integration may be important product capabilities. Commercial messaging needs to explain what they enable and why that matters to the customer.
Instead of relying on a description such as “innovative financial infrastructure”, a fintech can identify the workflow it supports, the problem it addresses and the conditions under which it works. Claims about cost or time savings need supporting evidence.
The same solution also needs different levels of explanation. A finance leader will want to understand the economic and operational implications. A technical team will need integration and maintenance documentation. Other stakeholders may examine service terms, security or dependence on the provider.
Marketing can organise these answers into a clear website, a sales presentation and materials for different stages of evaluation. This gives prospective customers the information they need to move forward and discuss the proposal internally.
Build trust through specific information
Choosing a new fintech provider can affect sensitive business processes. Communication should therefore help buyers evaluate the company and understand exactly what they are purchasing.
Explain who delivers each service, how implementation works, what support is available and where the solution’s capabilities begin and end. References to authorisation, security and coverage should accurately distinguish the company’s own position from that of its partners.
Product demonstrations, accessible documentation and approved customer stories provide useful context. Before published case studies are available, clearly labelled hypothetical examples and detailed product explanations can help. The team’s previous experience can also contribute, provided it is distinguished from results achieved by the startup itself.
Select channels around the buying process
A startup has limited resources. Before opening several channels, it needs to understand where customers look for information and what would make them start a conversation.
A company selling infrastructure to a small group of businesses could begin with specialist content, founder-led outreach and partnerships with complementary providers. Where customers already search for a specific solution, targeted SEO content and small paid search experiments may be worth testing.
Each experiment needs a hypothesis, an owner and a decision criterion. For example, the team could test whether a guide to a particular operational problem creates conversations with companies in its target segment. The aim is to learn which messages and channels reach suitable buyers before increasing investment.
Measure what happens after the first interaction
Website visits and engagement help reveal how people respond to content. They also need to be connected to commercial progress and product usage.
An initial B2B fintech dashboard could track:
- Qualified opportunities: companies with a relevant problem, a fit with the solution and an agreed next commercial step.
- Stage conversion: how many conversations progress to evaluation, proposal and contract.
- Time to activation: how long a signed customer takes to complete an action that represents meaningful value, defined for that product.
- Usage and retention: whether customers continue using the solution after implementation.
- Customer acquisition cost: the marketing and sales costs associated with acquiring customers, using a consistent calculation method.
With only a few customers, these figures can fluctuate substantially. Interpret them alongside sales conversations and across comparable customer groups. A payments business should also distinguish payment volume from the revenue and margin that volume generates.
Structure the first 90 days of marketing
A 90-day plan can give the work structure without assuming that every sales cycle will finish within that period.
Month one: diagnosis and focus. Interview customers and prospects, review positioning, choose a priority segment and define the messaging. Agree with sales on what qualifies as an opportunity and set up measurement.
Month two: execution. Launch one or two acquisition programmes, produce the necessary content and sales materials, and capture the commercial response. Channel selection should reflect the segment and available resources.
Month three: optimisation. Review opportunity quality, identify objections and improve messaging, content or processes. Decide what to continue, what to stop and where to invest next. In longer sales cycles, progress may take the form of evaluations or pilots even when contracts have not yet been signed.
The intended outcome is a clearer basis for growth decisions and a learning process the team can sustain.
Match marketing leadership to the company’s stage
When a fintech needs someone to coordinate these decisions but does not yet have a senior marketing leader, a Fractional Head of Marketing model may be worth considering. The scope should define priorities, time commitment and responsibilities, alongside the resources required for execution.
At Impulse ROI, we help fintechs, SaaS companies and online businesses define their positioning, generate business opportunities and align marketing with sales. We combine strategy and execution with a level of involvement suited to each company’s stage of growth.
Planning your fintech’s route to market or its next stage of growth? Let’s talk about your goals.
Reference: [1] Y Combinator, YC’s Essential Startup Advice. Supports the principle of learning from users and avoiding premature scaling; the marketing plan in this article is an editorial proposal from Impulse ROI.