Starting a financial business is thrilling—you’re finally releasing your brainchild out into the world, with a goal to help others while building a legacy for yourself.

At the beginning, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. There’s staffing, overhead, paperwork, and financing. Financial startups, by nature, are volatile businesses that bootstrap much of the heavy lifting early on in their lifecycle.

Because of this, financial startups often forget an important part of their business: investing in digital marketing.

Digital Marketing: A Huge Opportunity for Financial Startups

About 69 million Filipinos are Internet users, and they’re all active users of social media. They spend about nine hours on the Internet through a tablet or personal computer, and 3 hours and 36 minutes via mobile phone.

What do these numbers mean? Opportunities. If your financial startup can tap into the digital landscape, it can mean more gateways to scale your business.

Source: Adobo Magazine

So, how do you get started with your digital marketing? Here’s a checklist of the digital marketing initiatives you need for your financial startup:

• Website

Your website is your digital business card. It’s one of the first things that potential customers will look at when they’re online. It’s a crucial asset for building your digital presence.

A common mistake among startups is thinking they can’t afford a website. The reality is they can’t afford NOT to have one. While the initial expenses for web design may cost you around $500 – $800, you’ll have a platform that you can use for the long-term. Compare to doing traditional marketing ads that are likely to cost you more. The best thing is you can optimize it, which brings us to the next item on this list.

• SEO

Once you’ve setup your site, the next logical step is to optimize it for search engines. This is where SEO comes in.

Today’s customers prefer the convenient way of searching for information, and that’s through search engines. If your financial business is the first thing that pops up in the search results, your site will get more traffic – more traffic means more leads. SEO not only puts you in front of your potential customers, but it can also help you establish your authority and build your reputation.

SEO can get a bit technical, though, so I advise hiring a Philippine digital marketing agency to take away some of the guesswork—this, in turn, will help you focus more on growing your financial startup.

• Social Media

Do you know how many people around the world are expected to be on social media by 2019? 2.72 billion. That’s almost half of the entire population in the world.

With the number of social media users on the rise, the power of social media can be as immense as being on the top positions on search results. While SEO can help you build your online presence, social media can be beneficial to your financial startup in terms of growing your audience engagement and reach. It helps you build connections with other influencers and provides you with the channel to get the right message in front of the right people.

• Paid Ads

As a financial startup, you have to face the reality that your audience might not likely know about your existence. That’s why you need to get your message across the right audience when they’re ready to buy. This is the magic of paid ads.

Unlike SEO that takes time to deliver results, paid ads or PPC allows you to get your business to appear on search results after a day. PPC is also highly targeted, meaning your ads can be designed to target a specific audience – people who are genuinely interested in your service and are ready to buy from you.

• Content Marketing

Why are your customers online? To look for information. Content marketing satisfies this need.

Content marketing is a cost-effective way of branding yourself and differentiating your business from the rest. It’s more than just optimizing your website’s pages and writing blogs, though. If you want content marketing to work for your financial business, you have to provide valuable, unique information.

Here’s a tip for your financial startup: write pieces that you would personally find interesting and would want to read. And don’t just limit yourself to text—go for videos, webinars, infographics, illustrations, and podcasts, to name a few.

Research and create content with users in mind, and you’ll find more success in getting your audience interested in your business.  

Let’s go back to reality: new brands are emerging each day, and the competition is becoming just as fierce. For financial startups to get their share of the market, it’s important to know which digital marketing initiative will be most beneficial. You can focus on SEO and web design, or do a combination of different digital efforts. The important thing is you’re maximizing your resources on strategies that will deliver results.