Shameer talked about how fintechs can scale into new territories and create successful go-to-market strategies at the FS Podcast hosted by Deborah Boyland.

The FS Podcast is sponsored by Exadel and includes interviews with leading experts, introductions to the latest technologies, and discussions of emerging global financial trends.

Here are 8 topics they touched on:

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1. Effective influencer marketing strategies we rely on
2. How to find the right influencers to partner with
3. How to create your first influencer marketing campaign
4. Regulation and compliance with influencer marketing
5. Common FinTech mistakes when scaling into new territories
6. Shameer’s 7-point checklist for entering new territories
7. Creating an effective ongoing marketing strategy 
8. Shameer’s best advice for fintechs looking to grow

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1. Effective influencer marketing strategies we rely on

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The key is picking the right influencer for your product and your target audience. The best strategy is to pick out the influencers with most of their followers as your audience. It’s also important that they can talk about your product in an organic, natural way. 

Influencer marketing misconceptions to stay away from:

1. If you're a FinTech, you must only use a Fin-influencer (an influencer from the FinTech space)
2. You need to go with a big influencer to make it work
3. Thinking of influencer marketing as another performance channel, like paid like affiliate marketing, instead of a brand awareness piece
   
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Check out what our Head Of Influencer Marketing, Julia Lucas, had to say at our latest event on maximising the impact of influencer for fintech.

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2. How to find the right influencers to partner with

There are a lot of agencies out there charging both the brand and the influencer. But the real trouble is they have a book of influences they work with, and many times, you end up marrying up a brand with the wrong influencer.

At Growth Gorilla, we take a tailored approach based on the client brief. We manually hunt down the influences who are a good fit by looking at topics of interest, and keywords, searching bios, and then drawing a list of potential influences we curate and putting it in front of the client.

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3. How to create your first influencer marketing campaign

As Shameer says, “You need a structured campaign rather than a silver bullet.” 

Start with a face of campaign for authority and reach, using two to four smaller supporting influencers who can give you relevant content you can licence and use on your own channels, for your paid activity as well. That’s how you get mileage from previous spending.

Then you can test out different creative types. You have to keep testing the influencers, the channels they're distributing the content on and the type of content they're producing. 

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4. Regulation and compliance with influencer marketing

This is a bit of a grey area. But the best practice would be to make sure that your financial promotions via the influencer are in line with the requirements set by your local regulator.

Whenever you create an influencer marketing brief, ensure you're looping in your compliance department from day one and get them to sign it off, while looping in the influencer. Work on that script together, and make sure they're all happy with the storyboard. 

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5. Common FinTech mistakes when scaling into new territories

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Shameer’s advice when launching into new territories:

1. Set up your testing infrastructure

Before we start talking about new territories, make sure you've got a solid reporting and tracking infrastructure set up.

2. Decide which territory you want to go into

Know the reasoning behind it—is it because you've saturated the audience in your current territory? Is it a tactical move to block out another competitor from expanding?

3. Make sure you're localised for that territory

Let’s take Europe, for example — a place with over 30 spoken languages, different cultures, approaches, and localizations you must consider. 

4. Think about what activity you will run

Depending on your budget, you'll probably start with a mix of paid, influencer, paid social, and search ads and then add OOH and TV.

5. Know your budget

Be really clear and honest with yourself as to what budgets you have available.

6. Tye everything together

Make sure all of your ads are in the local language, your landing pages and the app pages you're driving traffic to are being translated, your CRM activity is localised, as well as the customer support.

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6.  Shameer’s 7-point checklist for entering new territories

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#1. Make sure you have the budget to launch in a new territory

#2. Identify the best territory to conquer

#3. Find out qhat customer groups you want to acquire

#4. Know your competitors in each target market

#5. Understand the local regulations in each territory

#6. Understand how locals consume media

#7. Have a strong value proposition

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7. Creating an effective ongoing marketing strategy

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With the Fintech climate constantly changing, so should your marketing strategy. You can’t just have a single strategy, and then expect it to work in a changing environment. What you should have is a baseline strategy that you review quarterly, to make sure it's still in line with your product roadmap and your target audience.

You should focus on building strong fundamentals, such as having a solid value proposition, knowing your target audiences, making sure you've got continuous feedback, and testing new channels. But you should also be aware when something stops working and understand why. 

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8. Shameer’s best advice for fintechs looking to grow

“Make sure you've got solid infrastructure in place, constantly look at data, and make decisions based on it.”

Ready to take your influencer marketing to the next step or just want to learn a little more about it? Check out our latest guide.