Can fintech startups lower conversion costs with content marketing?

Abstract: This thesis explores the viability of a content marketing strategy as a means of lowering conversion costs for digital startups prior to commercial launch. It does so by first giving a background into the subject of content marketing by covering types of content, content distribution channels and content strategies. Psychology and marketing theory is used as a framework for an experiment with an actual startup. A field experiment is conducted where an e-book is marketed using Facebook ads, and measured against a benchmark campaign. The benchmark campaign does not have a content focus but instead promotes a newsletter. Comparing generated leads and the cost per conversion between the campaigns, the e-book-based ad showed significantly better performance than the benchmark ad, when measured as cost per conversion. However, the benchmark ad performed better as measured by total reach, cost per click, cost per 1000 impressions, and click-through rate. In the discussion we present some potential explanations and implications of these results using in depth data points and performance statistics on the two campaigns. Present authors generally find supporting evidence for the viability of using content marketing and especially e-books as a way to help struggling fintech startups get leads at lower costs.