Strategic ASO Practices for Digital Banking and Fintech Apps

We’ve stated this earlier too, but it's quite crucial to point it out again: the digital banking and fintech app vertical faces unique challenges, such as being legally compliant, highly competitive and riddled with non-banking brands offering financial products.

Additionally, there’s usually a high number of internal stakeholders involved with marketing (from brand to legal), so cross-team collaboration lengthens every process and can also impact a brand’s marketing agility. In our experience, these factors make it all the more important for digital bank and fintech app teams to work very closely with the UA agency and ASO team. ASO is quite a nuanced area that requires technical skill, target audience and industry knowledge - it needs an expert eye to steer ASO through these challenges and to ensure that the ASO strategy stays relevant with the wider marketing strategy and industry movements.

Our team’s strategic approach to ASO helps app brands to overcome these challenges, to achieve positive results.

Safeguarding user data and ensuring privacy are important concerns for fintech and banking apps, so reassuring users about the safety of your app’s digital environment through clear communication goes a long way towards building brand trust.

Moreover, we've seen that integrating social proof within a creative strategy amplifies the app's credibility. Positive testimonials, user reviews, and notable achievements serve as powerful endorsements that resonate with potential users. This social proof not only validates the reliability of your app but also establishes a genuine sense of trust within the audience.

Hence, we strongly advise fintech brands to use transparent communication that reinforces trust and confidence, while leveraging social proof to foster a strong sense of security among users.

Due to the variety of app features, target audiences and competitors, it can be a big task to implement a test strategy for your ASO and app store creative assets. Testing is critical for learning about campaign effectiveness and ultimately delivering ROI, but it is a painstaking and detailed process and one that your ASO and creative teams must be familiar with, from end-to-end. At Redbox, the creative and metadata strategists who build the test material are also the people who analyse it - it’s a key element of our expertise that our teams are embedded in the entire process.

When approaching testing, our teams recommend a timely, iterative process that favours adequate time, investment and analysis to arrive at robust data outcomes; and, although many would say that there is no such thing as bad testing (the worst thing you can do is not to test at all), our team recommend that you avoid drastic or last-minute changes to metadata and assets, as these can negatively impact the whole testing framework.

Adopting a measured approach that comprises small modifications allows you to more deeply understand the impact of iterative changes and fine tune your communication and keyword selections.

Read more about ASO testing in this blog by lead ASO consultant, Anil Ozdemir.

Given the high-intent nature of the app store environments, understanding keyword popularity and how it trends over time is important. Don’t overlook the importance of drilling into keyword rankings and do make sure that your app is very relevant for the keywords you select are high-intent; this is how users search and it’s how the app stores determine your organic performance. For further insights into keyword best-practice, check out this blog by Esther Amosun from our ASO team.

The dynamic nature of user intent, coupled with the fierce competition across the app vertical, means there is a lot of fluctuation in keyword ranks. In order to maintain these rankings, it's a best-practice to have a robust ASO metadata strategy and framework in place; make sure that it’s regularly reviewed and optimised to ensure consistent visibility performance to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

With fintech and digital banks stretching their brand reach globally, we advise app marketers to research and recognise global diversity in financial terminology and understand how local user search behaviour is influenced by this. Of course your brand should have app store listings in the local language, but take note of how product naming conventions change by region, and also look out for the presence of a prominent second language being spoken in some regions.

By localising your app store product pages and metadata strategies to target region-specific keywords, you can ensure your app stays relevant to searches happening on each storefront.

If you are unsure about how to best implement a localisation strategy for your app growth, talk to our team - this is a specialism at Redbox and we’ve delivered significant improvements in performance through localisation transformation.

While crafting your app's long descriptions, emphasise key features to effectively communicate your fintech app's value proposition. Consider pointing out the most impactful features at the beginning of both the long description and in screenshots. This strategic placement can capture users' attention early on and increase the likelihood of conversion.

This is a precious real estate for Fintech App Brands to explain and convey their comprehensive list of features within the app, educate users about the app's functionality and highlight its unique selling proposition.

Our team’s understanding of how user behaviour changes seasonally has proven essential for planning effective fintech and digital bank ASO strategies. Aligning your app store events, keywords and creative investments with the timing of financial activities or periods can elevate your app's relevance to search terms and maximise user conversion.

For instance, January to March is a hot period for financial activities, being tax year-end. Utilising this time to promote relevant features, such as tax-related functionalities, investment top-ups, or financial year budgeting tools can go a long way in attracting new users and re-engaging lapsed. During periods like summer, tailoring messaging to promote say "Travel Money" features, will be something that your competitors will be doing, so make sure you’ve got a strategy for that too. Put time aside to explore keyword popularity in that period and plan your creative product page changes and screenshot features well in advance.

Whether you are driving users to your product page via Apple Search Ads, or from Facebook, you’d be mad not to capitalise on the additional performance benefits of custom product pages. Our custom product page strategies have delivered +30 uplift in conversion rate.

You can have more than 30 different variations of custom product pages, so very little stands in your way when it comes to being able to tailor your user targeting. To capture high value users across different cohorts, it is important to lean in to the different features and and services they might be searching for, such as low exchange rates, no-fee transactions, referral programs, joint accounts, savings accounts, business accounts, family budgeting, and more; you’ve got the scope to create custom product pages for each.

If you’re short on time and creative resources to develop, test and implement effective custom product page strategies, talk to us - we have a large and highly experienced creative team, and our Apple Search Ads campaign management platform Astra, now has A/B testing built-in, with Astra Experiments.