Five takeaways from Within Limits, Episode 1: Araminta Robertson
Within Limits is a podcast about what happens when creativity meets regulation. I know a lot of people can’t easily listen to a podcast, so for every episode I’ll also write up the key themes. Episode 1 is with Araminta Robertson, and you can listen to the full conversation here.
Araminta Robertson is Founder & MD of Mint Studios, a content agency working exclusively in the fintech and financial services space, having previously worked in-house and as a freelancer. She is also co-director of the Fintech Marketing Hub, and hosts the Fintech Marketing Lab podcast.
Araminta kindly joined us to discuss what it really takes to build trust through content in a regulated industry: extracting real expertise, proving content works, and knowing exactly where AI should (and shouldn’t) be involved.
Listening back to our chat, I spotted 5 key takeaways, discussed through the lens of working in fintech and financial services but applicable across all regulated spaces.
Takeaway #1: Long-term education
A lot of content marketing advice out there is written for SaaS, but marketers in fintech, finance and regulated industries more generally have to approach things differently because the stakes are a lot higher.
Choosing a bank account or a payments provider isn’t as simple as choosing a social media scheduling tool or a new productivity software. The stakes are higher and the buying cycles are a lot longer (months, often years), so expecting conversion from a single ad is just not realistic. Trust becomes a true non-negotiable.
As Araminta put it:
“People need a lot more education. You’re a lot more likely to do research picking a bank account than a lamp for your desk. And the second part is trust — because when I pick a retirement provider, I need to trust this company with my life savings. That’s why content marketing and financial services work so well together, because every fintech needs content to educate and build that trust.”
This is where things start working really nicely together, because the medium you use to educate (articles or videos, for instance) also contributes significantly towards the trust factor. One piece of content can move the needle on both objectives simultaneously.
And that’s what creates the flywheel. Education earns trust — but existing trust in your brand is also what makes people choose you as the place to go and be educated in the first place. Each turn makes the next one easier.
It’s compounding: maybe a bit slow to start with, but it begins to sustain its own growth once it’s spinning. You just have to keep turning out the informative, educational content.
Takeaway #2: The experts are already in the building
Experts sit inside regulated businesses, and this insight and subject matter expertise needs to be used in your marketing.
Asking an agency to come along and magic something special up out of thin air, without working collaboratively with them beforehand, puts you on a hiding to nothing — even if they have deep, specific expertise in your space, like Mint does in fintech and financial services. They need access to your team.
Araminta is unambiguous about this:
“Especially as a content agency, we are not the experts. We have a pretty strong understanding because we only work in this industry, but the experts are the people in your company who live and breathe this — your product people, your salespeople. If we’re targeting a payment manager or a product person, they can tell immediately when the content’s not written by an expert.”
Without that access, specialist audiences will spot your non-expert content instantly. One thing I love about Mint is that 90% of their output starts from interviews with clients’ own experts, done at the very start of the engagement.
It can be tempting to reverse-engineer it, dropping correct facts into a pre-written piece afterwards. Of course this may be faster, but it diminishes the expertise: you lose the expert’s novel phrasing, their instinct and their sense of what actually matters.
Interestingly, Araminta told me that they tried a self-record tool so experts could ‘upload’ their insight in their own time (experts tend to be busy, which is a bottleneck), but it didn’t work, because there was nobody the other side of the conversation to dig deeper or nudge. In her words, “the inefficient, longer way is what gets the insights that make a piece of content great.”
Which brings us back to the long game. It isn’t only trust that takes time to build — it takes time to extract the raw material in the first place. The long game starts earlier than most people think.
Takeaway #3: Measure, measure, measure
Just because expert-driven content has all the key ingredients for success doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be measured.
Measuring ‘trust’ can be quite hard, but Araminta has a qualitative gut check on everything they publish: “Would you be embarrassed if your target customer read it? That’s always the best question.”
One of the reasons she set up Mint was because she’d repeatedly seen content budgets cut because nobody could evidence their impact.
“What I was seeing, in-house and as a freelancer, was that content was getting cut, or the value wasn’t seen, because there wasn’t tracking and reporting. Marketers would say, ‘we think it works, but we don’t know if it does’ — and then the budget gets cut.”
She takes this seriously enough that it shapes who Mint will work with at all. They position themselves as a growth agency, and you can’t demonstrate growth if you can’t see the numbers, so access to a client’s CRM and marketing platforms is effectively a condition of the engagement. If a client doesn’t want to grant that, it isn’t the right fit.
There’s something quite fitting about this in a regulated context. These are industries built on evidence, where a claim is only as good as the proof behind it, and where “trust us, it works” wouldn’t survive five minutes with a regulator. So it makes sense that the marketing should be held to the same evidentiary standard as the product itself.
Which is why a client’s willingness to open up their data isn’t really an administrative detail. It’s a signal that they share the standard.
Takeaway #4: Pressure and creativity
Regulated industries come with unique pressures. One of the biggest is the regulation itself.
There’s a misconception that regulated work licenses you to be less creative. Araminta’s position is that the audience primarily want information, not a fancy backstory — but making that information engaging is a craft problem that’s down to the skill of the writer rather than the rules themselves.
“What we really care about is: are we giving them the information they need to make a decision? The creative side is making sure it’s not dull, that it’s engaging to read — but that comes down to the skill of the writer, not the rules.”
I took this to mean that compliance gets blamed as a constraint sometimes, when the real constraint is in the marketing approach wrapped around it. I’ve heard the same thing in lots of chats I’ve had for future episodes, too.
I always think of Yonder’s ‘WTF is APR?’ campaign, which featured their Chief Risk Officer doing a PTC in the bath, as an example of how a dry subject can have memorable execution.
Secondly, as is the case with most other industries, there’s AI.
I asked Araminta whether the flood of AI content creates a pull to publish more content at a lower quality. She said it’s actually the opposite:
“It does the opposite. It pulls us to do even higher quality. Marketing ultimately comes down to standing out — you need to be differentiated. If everyone sounds the same, you need to work extra hard to ensure that’s not how you come across.”
The upshot is that whatever is pushing the market towards ‘sameness’ — whether that’s dense compliance requirements or oceans full of AI copy — the answer is normally a greater focus on creativity and differentiation.
Takeaway #5: Put AI in its place
But that’s not to say there isn’t a place, or a set of specific places, for AI. It makes sense to weave it into a human-led process.
Mint have built their own AI writing tool for their ‘AI-assisted’ offering, trained on their method (off-the-shelf tools couldn’t match how they write). A human writes a detailed outline based on the expert interview, the AI then drafts it, and a human edits.
They also build in deliberate variety. Roughly half of the articles will be AI-assisted, whilst half are fully human-written — otherwise AI output gets very repetitive at volume.
But the use case she’s most excited about isn’t using AI to create new content. It’s using it to maintain old content. They’ve recently automated a chain that detects articles losing rankings or LLM citations, proposes a fix, pulls the piece from the CMS and rewrites it, before pinging a human on Slack for approval and pushing it back live. It can run every month.
“Where AI is really great is ensuring all your content stays up to date and the best quality possible. It’s all about staying on top of things. These are the use cases I’m most excited about, because they actually save time, and there’s real performance attached.”
It’s worth noticing where she’s automating. The judgement — what to say, what matters, what’s good — stays with humans. The maintenance, keeping a hundred articles accurate at three in the morning, goes to AI. Rather than replacing the work, it’s protecting its longevity.
One last thing
Right at the start of our conversation, Araminta said something that stuck with me. Finance, she said, has a reputation for being boring. And she thinks that’s a good thing:
“People find it very boring. And I think that attracts the right kind of people — genuinely interested, rather than doing it for optics.”
The boring bits are a filter. The regulation, the compliance, the density — they filter out the people chasing optics, and leave the ones doing it because it matters.
Which, if you’ve read this far, probably includes you.
You can find Araminta on LinkedIn, and Mint Studios at mintcopywritingstudios.com. Within Limits is available wherever you get your podcasts.
