Whether you're a scrappy fintech startup or a household name looking to grow your market share, we help you craft stories that bring in more customers and attract investment – while keeping regulators (and your compliance people) on side.
Connect us to your subject matter experts, and we'll take it from there.
With over two decades' experience working with accountants, bankers, financiers, and pension providers, you can be confident we'll get you right away – no crash courses needed.
Get customers and investors fired up about your unique value without falling back on hyperbole and other tactics that could backfire.
Banking should be boring. We help you showcase your continued relevance in an Amazonified world, while staying true to who you are.
Speak to your ideal customers using language they understand, and enhance your reputation as a safe pair of hands.
Showcase your benefits to the best advantage and position your firm as the obvious choice, including as a partner for accountants and IFAs to recommend to their clients.
Benefit-led messaging and compliance don't have to be mutually exclusive. We help you communicate clearly without overpromising.
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Thank you so much for our copywriting training day yesterday – you did a brilliant job. In fact, several team members have told me it’s the best training they’ve ever had. This is in no small part due to your thorough preparation – using examples of content from our own website and social channels. The pace was perfect, the tools you provided for the team were really practical, and I’m looking forward to seeing some great copy from them in the coming weeks and months.
Working with Anna and the team have made my life so much easier. They were able to interpret, understand and feel the Tola brand. They helped with the copy creation for our new site, basically starting from scratch. I fully recommend Anna and Gunning Marketing, and I will continue to work with her as an extension of my team.
Sharp on proposition development, creative and very astute with technical writing, Gunning Marketing covers all bases with great copywriting. Content is a real strength, and many times they've weaved a great article from a technical aspect or interesting angle – always directly positioned for the relevant persona. They're a true pleasure to work with.
Compliant copy and compelling copy aren’t mutually exclusive, but most financial services marketing sacrifices the second to the first unnecessarily. Compliance constraints govern specific claim types around efficacy, performance projections, and anything construable as a personal recommendation. They don’t govern tone, storytelling, or structure. The discipline is knowing precisely where the constraints apply – and then applying the full force of persuasive writing.
Specific, accurate claims are more compelling and easier to defend than vague ones. If the product or service reduces admin burden for accountants, say that – as specifically as possible. If the lending terms are structured for SME property developers underserved by high-street banks, say that. Compliance risk rarely sits in the specific descriptions of service structure, customer experience, and operational benefit, and that’s where the most effective marketing copy lives.
Working with a copywriter who understands the regulatory environment – FCA principles, Consumer Duty obligations, the difference between a financial promotion and a brand communication – removes marketing compliance anxiety without hindering creativity or your ability to cut through.
The sector has spent a decade promising to "revolutionise", "disrupt", and "transform" financial services. Buyers have become correspondingly sceptical. Fintech differentiation isn’t a better version of the same hype, it’s about being specific where competitors are vague. What precisely does the platform do that a competitor’s can’t? What have existing customers saved or gained – and can those outcomes be quantified? If the claim could apply to any fintech, it’s not a differentiating claim.
The other dimension is audience clarity. Fintech companies often try to speak to too many buyers simultaneously – investors, enterprise clients, SMEs, regulators – with the same messaging. The result is copy optimised for nobody. The firms that market themselves most effectively are clear about who they’re primarily speaking to and what that specific audience needs to hear to act.
Tone is also worth considering deliberately. A fintech with a recognisable voice that’s clear about what it does and how it helps tends to stand out in a market full of hyperbole and tech-speak.
Differentiation in accountancy is almost never in the service description – every firm claims quality, reliability, and sector knowledge. Rather, it comes from being specific about who you serve and what you know about their world. An accountancy firm that speaks to SME business owners in a specific sector about their specific pressures – R&D tax credits, VAT structuring, succession planning, cash flow timing – speaks in a way no generalist can credibly replicate. That specificity becomes the differentiator.
The second element is proof. In a profession where trust is the primary purchasing criterion, marketing that surfaces evidence – specific client outcomes, named expertise, testimonials from recognisable situations – does the work that brand claims can’t. A sentence from a satisfied client describing what changed for their business is worth more than 3 paragraphs about the firm's commitment to client service.
One example of Gunning Marketing’s work in this area is Salhan Accountants – a multi-award-winning Birmingham firm with a fintech spin-out (read the case study here). We supported them with content and collateral across multiple service lines and product launches where the brief was consistently the same: cut through competitive noise and communicate clearly to a specific audience.
In financial services, trust isn’t a marketing outcome, it’s a prerequisite for every other outcome. The content that builds it is specific, substantive, and consistent. Thought leadership must engage with the real questions your target audience is wrestling with (regulatory changes, tax implications, investment conditions) – not be generic market commentary. Case studies must describe a specific client situation with enough detail to be recognisable to a prospect in a similar position. The website must answer the questions a prospective client actually asks before picking up the phone or submitting a contact form.
Lead generation in financial services can be slower and more relationship-dependent than other sectors. Content rarely converts on first contact, so its job is to build familiarity, credibility, and visibility over time. That way, when a trigger event happens (a business restructure, a compliance deadline, a funding requirement), the firm is already in the prospective client's mind.
The discipline is making a clear distinction between what the reader needs to understand to make a decision and what they need to understand to operate the product. Marketing copy is almost always about the former. Its job is to answer "is this right for me and do I trust the people providing it?" – not to explain every mechanism in the product structure. Start with the problem the product solves, not the product itself.
Gunning Marketing produced content for Hilltop Credit Partners – a specialist property development finance firm – covering mezzanine finance, capital stack structures, stress-testing property deals, and planning policy implications for residential development lending (read the case study here). The approach was to lead with questions a developer would actually be asking, answer them directly, and layer in the technical context that gave the answer credibility.
For Husky Finance, a workplace pension platform, the challenge was structurally similar: auto-enrolment legislation is complex, and the audience – accountants managing compliance for SME clients – needed content that engaged credibly with that complexity without becoming impenetrable. The answer was content organised around the accountant's actual workflow and decision points, not around the legislation itself. (Read the Husky Finance case study here.)
Lead with the reader's specific situation and what changes for them practically if they engage – not with the importance of the product. Whatever the product – pension, insurance, loan/mortgage, investment platform – specific, timely, and directly useful content always outperforms content that leans on importance or abstraction. Where the audience is an intermediary rather than an end client, the same principle applies: show that you understand both the regulatory environment and the intermediary's relationship with their own client.
When the audience is intermediaries – accountants or IFAs recommending pension products to their clients – the frame shifts. Content needs to demonstrate that the firm understands both the regulatory environment and the intermediary’s own relationship with their client. What makes a provider worth recommending isn’t just product quality, it can also be the quality of support the intermediary gets and the confidence that the recommendation will reflect well on them.
For example, Gunning Marketing worked with Husky Finance – a workplace pension platform targeting accountants with SME employer clients – on web copy, content strategy, and collateral designed to reach both audiences. The approach was to organise every piece of content around the specific decision or concern the reader was facing – not around the product features. (Read the Husky Finance case study here.)
SME decision-makers are time-poor, risk-aware, and deeply sceptical of financial services marketing that doesn’t speak their language. Content that cuts through is specific about their situation – growth stage, sector, financial challenge – and specific about what changes as a result of engaging. Generic positioning ("we support ambitious businesses") doesn’t convert. "We work with founder-led SaaS businesses between £1m and £10m turnover who are planning their first external funding round" does.
SMEs also tend to trust peer experience more than firm credentials. Testimonials and case studies from recognisable businesses in similar situations carry significant weight. A prospective SME client isn’t really asking "How experienced is this firm?", they’re asking "Have they worked with businesses like mine, and did it work?"
Distribution matters as much as content quality for this audience. SME owners find content through search, through accountant and adviser referrals, and through networks. Content structured to answer specific questions they’re actively searching for – rather than general market commentary – usually outperforms.
Generic financial services thought leadership describes a trend, acknowledges the challenges, notes the situation is complex and evolving, and concludes by suggesting the reader might benefit from professional advice. The reader learns nothing new and has no reason to remember who wrote it. The fix is specificity. Consider what the reader already knows and what they need to know. Effective thought leadership then closes that gap, taking a clear position and providing analysis relevant to the exact target audience.
Thought leadership that earns its name does one of a small number of things:
When drafting thought leadership, ask yourself: "What does someone know or think differently after reading this?" If the honest answer is "nothing", it’s not thought leadership. In financial services, the thought leadership opportunity exists because the bar is low. A firm willing to take a considered position, back it with specific evidence, and write in language that respects the reader's intelligence will stand out.
