After years leading marketing at fintechs and banks, I’ve learned a few hard truths. Chief among them: marketing in financial services isn’t just hard - it’s uniquely suffocating.
Regulators limit what you can say. Platforms limit how you can say it. Compliance adds more people to every meeting. Meanwhile, your product? Looks nearly identical to everyone else’s. Your app is smart. Your rates are competitive. But so are theirs. Not to mention everyone in the organization thinks they know marketing better than the marketing team…but perhaps that’s not just an industry issue.
So, you do what I did.
You chase the 5% of the market who are already shopping. You over-invest in bottom-funnel performance; because that’s what gets the board nodding. You pump more into paid search. You lean on CAC and ROAS. You hit your numbers, sometimes. But you ignore the other 95% of your potential customers because they’re too hard to reach, too hard to measure, and - frankly - too hard to justify.
And most painfully of all, you shelve content. You sideline storytelling. You avoid creators - not because you don’t believe in them, but because you can’t prove they work.
That’s where most marketers stop.
That’s where I changed course.
That’s where I leveraged creator content across the entire funnel to change the outcome.
Let’s call it out: the content industry has made itself untrustworthy. Publishers, influencer agencies, production shops - they sell “output.” Posts. Videos. Impressions. If you’re lucky, engagement. But when you ask how that actually moved the business? They vanish - like my favourite GIF of Homer backing into that hedge.
That doesn’t work in financial services. It certainly didn’t work for me going into quarterly budget planning meetings or reporting on results.
I knew I needed to rebuild the model and show content as a performance channel rather than just a cost centre.
Every asset needed to be measured. Every dollar spent was tracked. And every story had to equate to actual KPIs - leads, conversions, revenue.
This is storytelling my CFO would thank you for.
The turning point wasn’t realizing content mattered. I’d known that for years. The turning point was deciding it had to perform- or it was out.
I didn’t want content as garnish. I wanted it as a growth engine. Something measurable. Scalable. Something a CFO could nod at without a forced smile.
I had a vision: real stories for the top of the funnel, clarity and credibility in the middle, and high-converting creator assets at the bottom. All stitched together. All accountable.
But vision’s the easy part. I didn’t have the team. Or the infrastructure. Or the hours.
That’s where Props came in.
They weren’t just another vendor. They were the machine I needed to make the vision real. To move fast. To test at scale. To turn creative into conversion signals - and into insights we could act on. We went from “making content” to running a system. From reporting outputs to reporting outcomes.
They also drove home the importance of driving traffic to our destination (contrary to what we’ve mostly been told by the social networks) in order to capture first party data and build retargeting pools.
Top-funnel stories built trust and reach. Mid-funnel narratives deepened engagement, drove traffic and built our retreating pool. Bottom-funnel endorsements closed the loop. And we tracked it all.
Creative became a performance lever. And Props helped us pull it.
Rather than try and run the entire creator content program ourselves with a lack of resource, expertise and the engine required - we decided to partner with Props after vetting around 10 agencies and platforms in the space. Here’s what we did differently to everyone else:
1. We stopped paying for followers.
Clout didn’t move the needle. Credibility did.
We hired creators with real experience, not inflated numbers. Why? Because Props puts the content in front of the right people anyway. You’re not renting someone’s audience - you’re hiring someone who can move yours.
2. We turned creators into media channels.
When our ads show up, they don’t look like ads.
They look like posts from a real person - because they are. Props runs the content through the creator’s own handle. It bypasses platform restrictions, builds trust, and performs like hell.
3. We owned the clicks.
Every story lived on our site - not buried behind a link in bio.
That meant we controlled the journey. We got the data. We built the retargeting pools. Every click became an asset, not just a view.
4. We covered the full funnel.
No more random content drops.
All stitched into one system. One story. Tracked. Measured. Built to convert.
The partnership with Props was highly effective and alleviated some of those painful management meetings and reporting periods in relation to the value of content, brand and top of funnel investment.
Since leaving my marketing role in the finance industry, I’ve been working closely with Props across other clients in finance and other verticals. I’ve seen what happens when the Props model is applied in the right way.
In one campaign, we halved acquisition costs for a bank by leading with a kitchen renovation story - not a rate, not a term sheet. Just a human story that connected. Then we retargeted. Then we converted.
I’ve watched Props lift internal paid media results too. When run side-by-side, Props traffic made in-house campaigns more efficient. Lower CPAs. Better time on site. Higher intent.
This wasn’t fluff. This was value creation through content - across all paid digital activities.
You know the game is rigged. Google gets the credit. Performance eats the budget. Content gets cut.
But you also know that real growth - the kind that scales - comes from brand. From trust. From owning the full funnel.
This is your chance to do both. To tell better stories. And to prove they work.
Because if you can show up in your next board meeting and say, “Here’s how I dropped our CAC by 30%,” you’ll stop defending marketing - and start defining growth.
Start building content your CFO will love.
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