Happy Wednesday, Fintech Listeners!

I hope your week is going well!

Quick favor to ask: My family is vacationing in San Diego for a week this summer. We’re staying in the Mission Hills neighborhood and I would LOVE to get your recommendations. It’s a kid-centric trip (we have three between the ages 3 and 8), so obviously we will be visiting the zoo. But what else should we do? What beaches do you recommend? Restaurants? Anything neat or off the beaten path that we just have to see?

I want to make this trip one that my wife and kids will be talking about for a long time, so hit me up with your best recommendations!

Thank you!

— Alex

3 BIG IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST

This week's episode of the Fintech Takes podcast is a little different.

Before the newsletter, before the podcast, my first career was in B2B marketing in financial services. I have a soft spot for the discipline and the people who practice it. It’s also one of the toughest jobs out there, especially these days.

Today’s episode has four guests, three segments, and is built around one provocation: B2B marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to.

I hashed it out with Cokie Hasiotis (Head of Vertical Marketing at Socure and author of the For the Plot newsletter); Julie VerHage Greenberg (founder of Quinnovation and formerly a co-founder and writer of Fintech Today and reporter at Bloomberg); Jessica Kendall (Head of Content and Communications at Spinwheel); and Adam Ryan (co-founder and CEO of Workweek, the B2B media company that Fintech Takes and Fintech Takes Banking are a part of).

Tune in for the full conversation here

And read below for my three big ideas...

#1: Don’t Explain the AcronymCopy anchor linkCopied

Financial services has some of the most technically literate buyers anywhere. The content aimed at them doesn’t always reflect that.

Adam’s explanation for why: when marketing teams are responsible for most of the content in an industry, the content tends to be high-level. The reason for this is that the people writing it aren’t the same ones building the risk models, or negotiating partnerships, or reviewing fraud cases. There is a gap between the people working in the trenches, and the folks writing about what’s happening in the trenches.

A financial services buyer feels this immediately. They know the difference between someone trying to explain the problem from the outside and someone who has lived inside it long enough to have some scar tissue.

Adam's test for fixing this is deceptively simple: don't explain the acronym.

If you work in content marketing, don’t slow down. Don’t write for the lowest common denominator. Don’t worry if your boss doesn’t understand your content when she is reviewing it. She’s not your target audience!

Great content marketers aren’t copywriters. They’re reporters or documentarians. They immerse themselves in their industry, embed themselves in the trenches, and constantly interview the operators they’re embedded with in order to clearly communicate what those people are doing and seeing to a larger audience.

#2: GEO: The New SEOCopy anchor linkCopied

When a human asks ChatGPT or Claude a question about a vendor category, a regulatory shift, or a product decision, how do you show up in the answer?

That shift is larger than it sounds. For most of marketing history, there was one audience: the human buyer. Then search created a second (the search engine crawler), and companies learned to write for both. SEO became a discipline (this was actually my very first job in B2B marketing … one million years ago). The rules were annoying but at least there were rules.

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the same structural shift happening again, except the feedback loop is less reliable, the criteria change without notice, and there's no ranking report to tell you where you stand. The challenge, Jessica says, is that there’s no exact science to where your content and your company appear in AI chatbot responses, and every AI chatbot is different.

Jessica loves research and unique data insights for exactly this reason. No one else has the same data as you. No one else can provide the same insights. AI likes to reference that kind of quantitative evidence because it carries authority and relevance. Which means the best GEO strategy may look suspiciously like the best content strategy: use the data and perspectives only you have to create something a buyer would forward to their team and that a bot would cite.

#3: The Hidden Sales CycleCopy anchor linkCopied

If you ask a B2B marketer in financial services how they know their work is having an impact, some of them might respond with, “I know it works. I can't prove it though."

Adam calls this the hidden sales cycle, and it’s a useful name because it describes exactly what every financial services marketer knows in their bones and has struggled to prove on a slide. The CRM says the sales cycle is 18 months, but everyone in the room knows the decision didn't begin 18 months ago when the RFP showed up. It began in the primordial muck where all B2B buying tends to happen. Someone read something and forwarded it. Someone listened to a podcast that helped them understand a problem they didn't yet have the right language for. Someone went to a conference, had a conversation, came back, and started asking more creative questions. Months later that question shows up in an RFP, and if you're lucky, you may even recognize your own fingerprints in the wording.

The average B2B marketing executive only lasts about 18 months in a job, which in financial services is often shorter than the sales cycle they're supposed to be influencing. They can (and often do) make the right decisions, get fired for not delivering results, and miss the deal that would have vindicated them by just a few months.

Workweek's Partner Platform is an attempt to make some of that invisible activity legible before sales ever enters the official record, sending newsletter engagement to a sponsor's CRM at the account level. The early findings from our beta testing should make every financial services marketer feel simultaneously vindicated and slightly enraged: sales has been taking 3x to 4x more credit than it deserves for a closed deal, compared to marketing.

The hidden sales cycle was always there. We’re just now building the tools to measure it.

WHAT I'M LISTENING TO

#1: Why Susquehanna Is Building a Prediction Markets Business (Odd Lots) 🎧Copy anchor linkCopied

If you want to understand how prediction markets actually work and what their incentives are, study the market makers on the other side of the bets.

#2: Banks Won’t Stop Deposits Leaving for Stablecoins (Tokenized) 🎧Copy anchor linkCopied

Lots of interesting conversation in this episode of Tokenized, including a discussion on the differences between tokenized deposits and stablecoins, which is a topic I have been digging into more lately.

Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email. 

— Alex