Case 6.1 Opening Case  Mint.com Uses Search Technology to Rank Above Established Competitors Company Overview

Mint is a popular, Web-based personal finance service that makes it easy for users to keep track of bank, credit card, and other financial accounts using a computer or mobile device. Customers can also use the service to create budgets and monitor progress toward financial goals. Since it began in 2006, the company has grown rapidly despite competition from more established companies. In 2009, Mint was acquired by Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and Quicken financial software. Today, over 20 million people use Mint’s free financial management service ( Table 6.1 ).

TABLE 6.1  Opening Case Overview

  

Company	Mint
History	Mint was launched in 2006 as a free, Web-based personal finance app by founder Aaron Patzer. In 2009, the company was acquired by the financial software company Intuit.
Growth	Within two years of launch, Mint claimed over 1.5 million users. By 2012, the company claimed 10 million users and by 2016, the number of users rose to over 20 million.
Product lines	Mint’s original service allowed users to track balances and transactions on credit card, investment, and bank accounts as well as to create budgets and establish financial goals. In addition, Mint now offers users a bill pay service and credit score monitoring.
Social technology	Prior to the release of its flagship personal finance app, Mint created a large following of prospective users with MintLife , a blog that offered valuable advice targeted to young professionals.
Search technology	Mint utilized an aggressive SEO strategy to rank highly on search results pages. Specific actions included the following: Creation of useful personal finance content on its blog, MintLife Use of targeted keywords in website content Established audiences on popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter Used various strategies, including sponsorship of third-party blogs, to generate links (or “backlinks”) to Mint.com from other websites
Website	Mint.com

  The Business Challenge

In the months leading up to the 2006 launch of Mint.com, a personal finance service, the leadership team faced a formidable challenge: How to establish name awareness and brand equity in a market filled with established competitors, without spending a lot of money? Mint knew it would be competing in a market space already populated by familiar brands like Quicken Online and Microsoft Money Online. Since online platforms and communication channels tend to favor existing companies with established audiences and reputations, the team knew they had to come up with a powerful strategy for overcoming the established brands.

 Mint’s Content Marketing Strategy

As a Web-based service, it was critical for Mint.com to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) when consumers used sites like Google or Bing to find information about personal finance services and related topics. Consumers are more likely to visit websites that appear at the top of SERPs. While the service was still in the beta (trial) stage of development, workers at Mint developed an aggressive strategy to optimize the brand’s ranking on popular search engines. Their strategy involved building the company’s Web presence on criteria used by search engines to determine SERP ranking. The strategy focused on the following:

• Increasing the number of other websites that linked back to Mint’s website (called “backlinks”)
• Creating interesting and useful content about personal finance topics that prospective customers would find helpful
• Identifying keywords and phrases used by prospective customers when searching for personal financial services, and creatively inserting these words and phrases into website content
• Regularly updating and adding to their collection of personal finance content
• Establishing a presence on popular social media sites, expanding their audience on those sites, and encouraging the audience to share links to Mint’s website content

Months prior to the launch of its personal finance service, Mint rolled out a personal finance blog called MintLife and quickly developed a reputation for providing helpful financial advice targeted to young professionals. Blog posts on MintLife were creatively seeded with keywords and phrases the team had identified as likely to be used by prospective customers when conducting Internet searches for financial services. Mint also created landing pages on their website containing content optimized for keywords and phrases related to financial services. As search engines tracked this content, Mint began to lay a foundation for eventually being viewed by search engines as a credible authority for personal finance topics. New posts were regularly added to the blog, which further enhanced Mint’s ranking since search engines favor websites with lots of content (content depth) and regular updates. To further establish its position as a useful and authoritative site, Mint sponsored several third-party blogs and cultivated relationships with authors of established finance and money management blogs. Mint’s founder, Aaron Patzer, gave hundreds of interviews, resulting in print media and online articles about the start-up company. These and other actions resulted in more third-party websites posting links back to Mint.com . These “backlinks” were tracked by search engines and resulted in additional increases to the site’s ranking on SERPs. Popular search engines also track a company’s presence on social media and the extent to which users share information about the company and its products. Mint’s blog featured content in a variety of interesting formats: videos, podcasts, infographics, and so on. Users on social news sites like Reddit.com frequently shared and “upvoted” interesting infographics from Mint’s blog. Links to other types of blog content were shared by users on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. As a result, Mint’s expanding audiences on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms further enhanced the new company’s SERP ranking.

 Results

In 2007, Mint launched its new financial services website into a market where it already enjoyed considerable name recognition and awareness. Within 2 years, the service acquired 1.5 million users and was purchased by Intuit for $170 million. The company continued its successful content marketing strategy, climbing to 10 million users in 2012 and over 20 million users today.

Questions

1. Why did Mint invest the time and effort to publish a financial services blog almost two years before the launch of its service?
2. How did Mint use social media sites to increase its ranking on the search results pages of popular search engines?
3. Why did Mint use keywords and phrases associated with personal finance when creating content for its blog?
4. Why did Mint put so much emphasis on improving the rank of its website on SERPs?
5. Why did Mint use infographics, videos, and other types of rich media in its financial services blog?