B2B Marketing techniques that are scaring off your customers

These might not be the words you’re using to promote your brokerage, but they may still  be the words that your clients are hearing. Way too many financial brokerages are breaking all the rules in the 1.01 digital marketing guidebook.

Doing this on a regular bases so that it eventually kills their business. Without a strategized approach, marketing teams are taking all the digital marketing resources available to them, just tying a bow on and throwing them out there, without giving much thought as to whether their approach is really the most effective. In this article we take a look at what NOT to do, so that you don’t end up scaring away profitable clients.

Untargeted email marketing

Nothing makes me feel less valued as a customer than getting email campaigns that are entirely generic and irrelevant to my interests. Use the CRM data that you have on each client or prospect and target them accordingly.

Don’t tell me about new services that you are offering in Kiev, when I don’t live or work in Kiev and for that matter don’t tell me about new apps for apple devices, when I don’t own an apple phone and don’t ever intend to. Put simply, I don’t care and it’s actually quite irritating.

But don’t get tailored marketing emails wrong either. The purpose of personalized emails is to give your traders the feel that they can expect top class customer service and will be taken care of when doing business with your brokerage.

However if you haphazardly allocate your email recipients into poorly defined segments or make your automation techniques too obvious and market products that are entirely inappropriate to their interests, it will give the impression that you don’t care at all about their individual business.  

Avoid drama on social media

Left, right, pro-abortion, republican or neo-capitalist, when it comes to the political opinions of the social media manager at my financial brokerage company, I just don’t care.

While responding to current events is a technique that has been demonstrated to drive engagement, if you are going to do this along political lines, you risk the possibility of alienating 50% of your customers who are bound to disagree with you. Along with the likelihood of corrupting your brand image by entering into political driven conversations.

Social media is an incredibly value tool, that despite its light hearted character needs to be taken seriously. One example where it all went terribly wrong was at the Huffington Post where a group of all female editors decided to take a selfie that promoted the female representation at their offices. The outcome however, was far from what was intended, as the group was perceived as being highly homogeneous and not representative of the wider society’s interests on which they report. The takeaway message here is avoid controversy like the plague. We’re following you on social media because we like your brand, not your opinions.

Bad mobile UI

We’re quickly approaching a financial trading arena where almost all activities are going to be done on a mobile device. From following charts, executing trades as well as shopping around for a brokerage service that is best going to suit a trader’s interests.

In order to stay in the game you need to make sure that your site is optimized for a wide variety of mobile devices so that your customer’s user experience is not going to be compromised.

Poor customer service

If you are going to get one thing right, it needs to be this one: Customer Service is Critical. If you disappoint the expectations of a customer, they can open a new browser and replace you in a matter of seconds.

But it is in your interest too, because the cost involved in attracting new customers, always heavily outweighs the cost involved in retaining existing customers. My advice is to do what you can to go beyond their expectations. Build their sense of customer loyalty by providing a bespoke service that directly addresses their needs.

SEO that delivers more pain than gain

If your financial trading service is all about forex and only forex, than don’t use keyword marketing that promotes your brokerage as offering a wide sweep of trading instruments.  People who may want to trade binary options or commodities, may stumble into your “store” only to look around and realize that they don’t want anything on offer.

With SEO, the consequence of this is going to backfire and badly. Every time a customer goes onto your site and then clicks the “back” button, contributes to a higher bounce back rate. As part of its algorithms, search engines consider the bounce back rate and will provide a higher ranking to sites with a low bounce back.

For your PPC the situation is even worse, you could end up paying a hefty sum every month to Google Adwords for all the visitors that clicked on your page and then clicked out without doing anything. Be honest in your SEO and only talk about the services that you are actually equipped to provide.