Have you ever wondered what makes a successful fintech marketing strategy? In our "How they did it" series, we look at how some of the most successful and exciting fintechs in the world have approached marketing in their early days. Here's the go-to-market story of one of Canada's leading investment management fintechs, Wealthsimple.
Wealthsimple provides a whole new perspective on finance with their 'Money Diaries' series. Featuring unique money stories of well-known celebrities as well as ordinary individuals, the series aim to build a deeper emotional connection with the audience.
Create a brand image and voice that resonate with your target audience
Similar to the majority of fintech challengers out there, Wealthsimple have shaped their marketing and branding around the concept of ‘human’; "trying to build the most human financial services company in the world".
The first step in Wealthsimple’s marketing strategy was to form a content team of 10 full-time employees and appoint former GQ editorial director Devin Friedman as the team’s head. Besides experienced creative and editorial staff, the team also included a couple of professional ex-Wieden+Kennedy designers. By bringing in professional creative and design talent in-house, the company was seeking to add a human touch to their customers’ experience with their brand and differentiate among competitors. Its key objective was to create engaging, people-oriented and highly narrative content with powerful visuals, and essentially build a lifestyle brand around financial services that is resonating with the mass millennials market.
Nowadays, the industry is saturated by ‘tips and tricks’ and ‘five things you need to know about’ type of content, so people are looking for more solid, in-depth pieces of real-life examples and use cases of things that worked and things that didn’t. Following this trend, Wealthsimple focused on producing targeted and edgy editorials that have little to do with its technology, but more with its targeted audience, and go way beyond just advice. Its Money Diaries series, for example, feature interviews with popular personalities such as Anthony Bourdain and Kevin Bacon as well as ordinary people that aim to identify how individuals from different backgrounds tackle their personal financial problems in the broader context of their life, career, or their personal goals and aspirations.
Another important aspect of Wealthsimple’s content marketing strategy was also its strong focus on design. As visuals are proven to be much more powerful and catchy than text, the company decided to create a unique, coherent look for all its branded channels (incl. website, app, blog, etc.) that is in unison with its human concept. So, they opted for warmer tones and a more subtle colour palette, as opposed to electric blues and gradients traditionally used by most financial brands, along with custom illustrations instead of stock imagery or photos.
Using illustration style graphics is a great and very cost effective way to create consistency, especially when you need to include a wide variety of people and objects in your content.
Wealthsimple is a leading Canadian investment management start-up founded in 2014 by Michael Katchen. The company offers a hybrid investment solution for millennials, combining an online roboadviser platform with access to live advisers.
Wealthsimple is based in Toronto and currently serves about 175k customers. So far, the company has raised a total of CA $266.9mn in funding over 7 rounds.