Project Details

Client

Thornfield Financial

Location

Edinburgh, UK

Engagement

Content + SEO + Email

Duration

10 months

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Finance

Content + SEO + Email

How a UK fintech SMB built a content engine that worked within compliance and generated 6× more organic leads

Client names are fictional. An anonymity clause applies to all engagements on request.

The Situation

Thornfield Financial, a cash flow management platform for UK SMEs, had a compliance team that had become an inadvertent bottleneck on their marketing. Every piece of content required multiple review rounds, often came back with significant redlines, and frequently stalled for weeks before publication. The result: a blog that published four articles in the previous 12 months, an email list of 6,200 prospects that received one campaign per quarter, and an organic search presence that returned virtually no traffic for any of their target terms. Meanwhile, their competitors were publishing weekly.

What We Did

We ran a compliance mapping session with their legal and compliance team before writing a word of content, understanding exactly what claims were permissible, what language was restricted, and what the approval process looked like. We then built a content brief template designed to pre-clear compliance concerns before drafting began, which reduced review iterations from an average of 3.8 rounds to 1.1. We shifted the content strategy from product-led to education-led. Articles built around the financial questions Thornfield's customers were asking Google, not articles about Thornfield's product features. That approach both ranked better and sailed through compliance more easily. The email program moved from quarterly campaigns to a fortnightly CFO briefing. Short, useful, and positioned as a thought leadership product rather than a sales channel. Open rates climbed from 22% to 39%.

Compliance mapping session, then brief template with pre-cleared compliance concerns
Content strategy shift from product-led to education-led
Fortnightly CFO briefing email replacing the previous quarterly campaign cadence
Publishing velocity increased from 4 articles per year to 3 per month

Results

Thornfield went from four articles a year to three a month, and compliance review rounds dropped from nearly four to just one. Organic leads increased sixfold.

6.2x

organic lead growth over 10 months

1.1

average compliance review rounds (down from 3.8)

39%

email open rate (up from 22%)

The Outcome

Thornfield's Head of Marketing described the compliance review improvement as the single most impactful operational change the marketing team had made. With content publishing velocity up from four articles per year to three per month, their domain authority grew significantly and organic search became their second-largest lead source for the first time.

“

Every content partner we'd tried before had either ignored our compliance requirements or been slowed to a crawl by them. Adah came in, actually understood the constraints, built a process around them, and then produced better content faster than we'd ever managed internally. The review rounds went from a nightmare to almost nothing.

— Head of Marketing, Thornfield Financial

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