Check if your company overpays for an invisibility cloak

Boring enough to pass compliance

Almost Every fintech, insurer, and wealth manager in your category runs a risk-based compliance framework. Most of them run a risk-based marketing framework too — never say anything, never spend anything, never stand out.

Or aggressive enough to create problems

The ads overpromise.
The targeting gets messy.
The landing page makes claims legal hates.

The campaign gets blocked, diluted, or quietly becomes a lead-gen machine for people who were never going to buy.

That is not performance marketing.

That is a risk department waiting for a new case. Good financial services marketing sits in the harder middle: clear, specific, credible, differentiated and commercially useful.

For serious financial services companies

Being serious is not a positioning statement in itself - that's just where we begin with effective marketing

Good Fit
Bad fit
Niche
You are a financial services, fintech, insurance, lending, payments, wealth, investment, crypto, banking, or B2B financial software company.
Budget
You spend €10k+/month on marketing, or you are preparing to.
Culture
You care about performance, but you also understand that trust, reputation, brand memory and compliance matter.
Goals
You want your marketing to generate better opportunities, not just cheaper form fills.

What we do for financial services companies

360° Marketing Strategy

We help you solve complex business problems through honest, big-picture marketing strategies that lead to fame and revenue.

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Creative & Production

Ads people skip cost more than the ads people remember. We make the kind that gets remembered. Including Creative strategy,  Campaigns, Copywriting and Art direction.

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heavy metal artwear cover by based.marketing

Media & Automation

Great creative no one sees is just expensive art. Fame requires reach - real reach, at the frequency where memory gets built.

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Measurement & Analytics

Everything important will be measured. We give you proof your CFO can't argue with—and insights your competitors don't have.

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Start with the audit

If your marketing feels busy but growth still feels stuck, the fastest useful move is not another campaign. It is diagnosis. Our Marketing Effectiveness Audit shows where your marketing is leaking value across brand, creative, media, measurement, and conversion. We look for the things dashboards usually miss:

Category and market standing

Where you sit in the category, who you're actually up against, how identical everyone sounds, and whether your position gives a buyer any reason to remember you.

Output:
Category read
Main competitors
Market position
Category conventions
Differentiation gaps
Visibility opportunities

Share of voice and attention

We estimate whether your brand is loud enough in the right places or just present in dashboards.

Output:
Paid visibility read
Competitor media presence
Search demand signals
Social visibility
Retargeting vs acquisition balance
Underused channels

Mental availability & Distinctive brand assets utilization

We map whether your brand is likely to come to mind in the buying situations that matter. We also check whether your ads are built to be remembered or just clicked and whether your brand has assets people can recognize before they read the logo.

Output:
Category entry point review
Buying triggers
Message-market fit
Brand recall risks
Demand creation gaps

Media wastage & performance drains

We check whether your budget is creating new demand or just harvesting the easiest conversions.

Output:
Channel mix review
Prospecting vs retargeting balance
Brand vs non-brand search split
Warm audience dependency
Duplicated attribution
Budget leakage points

Tracking and commercial truth

We check whether your reporting is helping you make decisions or just making everyone feel busy.

Output:
GA4 review
Platform conversion setup
CRM / HubSpot / Shopify / Klaviyo connections
Attribution inflation risks
Blended performance view
Decision-ready metric recommendations

What you get

Written audit report

A structured report covering market standing, competitors, share of voice, creative memorability, distinctive assets, media wastage, tracking issues and priority recommendations.

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Live 30-minute reporting call

We walk you through the findings, explain what matters, what is noise and what should be fixed first.

Prioritized recommendations

You get a clear list of what to fix first, what to stop doing and what needs proper strategy instead of another campaign tweak.

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Why us? We do the hard bit

A child who, for mysterious reasons, has access to Linkedin can quote the laws of marketing effectiveness. Mental availability. Double jeopardy. Distinctive brand assets. Emotion over information. Brand fame. Share of search. Long-term effects.

Achieving all of that - a completely different conversation.
vs
Strategy that gives buyers a reason to choose you
Creative, people actually notice and remember
Media planned around human media day
Brand and performance working together
Work built to create demand, not just drain it
Most agencies
Familiar strategy decks everyone politely ignores
Creative that looks fine and disappears instantly
Media bought around platform metrics
Brand and performance fighting over budget
Reporting that mistakes attribution for truth

Don't just take our word for it

We were facing a challenge to modernise our  marketing systems and improve the efficacy & effectiveness of our digital marketing investment at Kensa I immediately thought of based.
Caroline Kopsey, CMO
To break through the plateu we were facing globally, the team built and saved our lead gen setup many times. Trust their recommendations and optimizations without reservations.
Polianna Slatery, Marketer
Always professional and giving valuable feedback on how campaigns and setups can be improved based on previous experience.
Philip Ekman, HoM

...before you click "submit"

"We've been burned by agencies before."

So has everyone you compare yourself to. Most agencies over-promise, under-explain, and hide behind reporting. We would rather lose the brief than bullshit you. If fame, brand, creative, paid media, or just our style are not the right fit, we will say so.

"You don't have a bank logo on this page yet."

Yes, and we're not going to invent one. What we do have is the same operating model — audit, build on the 60/40 split, prove against revenue — already run for named clients in other regulated-adjacent, trust-driven B2B categories: Kongsberg, AMADA, Kensa. If you're the first financial services logo on this page, you get the founding-client version of this process.

Our ongoing agency work starts from €2,000/month or 10% of media spend, whichever is higher.

If that feels insane, we are not the right agency.

If it feels reasonable because your current marketing waste is probably higher than that, the audit is a good place to start.

Got questions? 
We got answers

Do you only work with regulated financial services companies?

No. We can work with regulated financial services companies, fintechs, financial software companies, payments businesses, insurance companies, lending companies, wealth and investment brands, and serious crypto or digital asset businesses.

The common thread is simple: you sell something where trust matters.

Can you work with our compliance or legal team?

Yes.

We do not treat compliance as the enemy. We treat it as a constraint that needs to be built into the marketing process early. The goal is not to sneak risky claims through review. The goal is to create marketing that is specific, persuasive and easier to approve because it is grounded properly.

Do you guarantee ad approvals?

No. Nobody serious should guarantee that. Platforms and financial advertising rules can change, and final responsibility sits with the advertiser and its legal/compliance process. We help build better marketing systems and reduce obvious risks. We do not replace your legal, regulatory or compliance advice.

Can you help with Google Ads verification issues?

We can help you understand how verification affects campaign planning and where it may block execution. But we cannot make an unqualified advertiser qualified. If the business is not allowed to advertise a product in a market, the answer is not “better PPC.”

Do you work with crypto companies?

Only serious ones. If you are regulated, transparent, properly structured and trying to build trust, we can talk. If the business model depends on vague promises, hype, affiliate funnels, Telegram nonsense or pretending risk does not exist, no.

Can you lower our CPA?

Maybe.But lowering CPA is not always the correct goal.

Sometimes the real issue is weak conversion paths. Sometimes it is bad lead quality. Sometimes it is poor trust signals. Sometimes it is over-reliance on bottom-funnel search. Sometimes the cheapest leads are the worst leads. We care about commercial performance, not making one metric look prettier.

Which markets do you work in?

We can support international campaigns, especially across Europe, the UK and the US.For regulated categories, local rules matter. You remain responsible for legal and compliance review in every market you target.

Is the audit really free?

Yes, for qualified companies.We use it to identify businesses where our work can make a real commercial difference.You get the findings either way. If there is a fit, we will explain what working together could look like.No hostage situation.

Find out if your financial services marketing actually works

Do not trust the platform dashboard. Do not trust cheap leads. Do not trust vague brand awareness. Do not trust a landing page just because compliance approved every sentence into a coma.

Find out whether your marketing is making your financial services company more trusted, more remembered, easier to choose and more commercially effective.

If you are spending €10k+/month and growth still feels heavier than it should, get the audit.

based.marketing is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we’ll only use your personal information to provide the services you requested from us. If you consent to us contacting you for this purpose, please tick below:

Thanks. We’ll review your answers and let you know if the audit is a fit.

If it is, we’ll ask for read-only access to the relevant accounts and reports. Then we’ll deliver the audit within 5 business days and walk you through it on a 30-minute call.
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