2017’s Marketing Matrix
“If Nicc Lewis, CMO at Leverate has taught me anything, it is that a business’ marketing efforts have to be multifaceted, varied and comprise a combination of both online and offline projects in order to enhance the overall ROI” says Adinah Brown as she recalls
As 2017 starts to become the year that was, it is worthwhile considering those new developments in marketing and product placement within the online trading sector that took root and blossomed to prominence.
As the content manager at Leverate, a leading brokerage technology and services provider, I was exposed to a great variety of these industry trends of which I’m happy to share some of my insights.
Here are my recommendations for your digital marketing efforts, some of which you may already be doing, some of which may be new.
Make Some Noise
In our 21st century’s media marketing arena, the buck stops at digital marketing. Yes, we all know that, just as we all know that it is fiddly, expensive and has a short-lived impact. But in order to get your name out there, you have to first make some noise.
The critical factor is doing it well, don’t just fill the air time created by social media and Google, do it in a way that will provide your clients with inherent value. The key here is quality over quantity.
Don’t Indoctrinate, Educate
Videos have become a crucial component of the engagement economy. However, meddling in its success is the long held misnomer that videos need to be short.
While social media has indeed made us one highly easily distracted marketing audience, (millennials are said to have an attention span that is shorter than that of a goldfish) this statement is in fact far from the truth.
Your audience will sit and watch a video that is longer than a minute, I would even go as far to say as long as 10 minutes, if the video is found to be informative, useful and interesting.
This is particularly the case in the financial trading sector, where knowledge is crucial to skill development, which in turn is crucial to raising the LTV of your clients.
In your digital campaign include videos that educate your clients on how to trade the market using various tools, indicators and chart formations.
Educate them on how to apply news alerts in a fundamental analysis or better still, on your landing page keep a permanent video on how to use, or maximize the use of your trading platform.
This is all highly useful stuff because most traders don’t know what they don’t know, and so feel reluctant to trade because they know that they don’t know.
If your video is full of faff, than yes, I would keep it short, but better still, save your marketing bucks and just don’t make one.
Make Regulation Profitable
When it comes to regulation, 2017 was the bomb. First, there was the tightening up at CySEC, AMF, BaFin and others, that consultation paper from the FCA, ESMA stating that things were brewing, than before you know it the year is almost over with MiFID II about to come into effect along with its more practical side-kick, MiFIR.
If you’ve made it through, than you’ve earned yourself a massive congratulations. I mean it, there are many who didn’t. Don’t look behind you, you’ll see all the road kill – it ain’t pretty.
What amazes me however, is that most brokers have taken to regulation compliance as a hindrance, rather than as help.
Adjusting your brokerage’s operations to ensure compliance was a hard fight consuming endless time and resources, but on the flip side you can now boast, what your brokerage offers due to those necessary changes that were made.
Much like the pearl that’s to be found amidst the muck of the oyster, If MiFID 2 now requires that brokers reveal their execution rates, than why the hell are you not shouting out about your best execution rate?? This is the sort of quality value that your clients want and that they’ll pick you for, instead of your competition.
Make Some More Noise, But in Different Places
The online nature of the retail trading industry means that many brokers fail to seize opportunities to market their brand in the real world.
If Nicc Lewis, CMO at Leverate has taught me anything, it is that a business’ marketing efforts have to be multifaceted, varied and comprise a combination of both online and offline projects in order to enhance the overall ROI.
Varying up your marketing strategy will not only do wonders for developing awareness around your brand but it will also open up pools of new and interested prospects.
Examples of this may include hosting a luxury car show, stand out from the crowd by giving a lecture at a B2C forex expo or be seen as a thought leader in the emerging market of cryptocurrencies by having your brand name dropped in an article in Forbes or Bloomberg.
2017 saw a growing development of forex brokers who ventured into sports related sponsorships. China based Aetos Capital Group sponsored the main t-shirt for Sydney FC, a major football club in Australia’s Football A-league who are scheduled to play in Shanghai and Tokyo.
Likewise, Russian FX broker Teletrade, will be the Official Forex Trading Sponsor of Burnley FC in an attempt to target EU and UK customers.
The problem with marketing brand awareness activities, is that there are no direct metrics associated with them that can easily justify the cost.
However the impact of brand awareness is realized in an indelible mark on the minds of your audience for the long term. A prospect after seeing your brand multiple times in various contexts, will most likely appear in your metrics months later as a direct audience, rather than as a paid audience.
Nurture those leads
Finally after getting your name out there and working hard to stand out from the crowd with distinct USPs, the next challenge is to nurture those leads so they convert into clients.
Fortunately 2017 had a lot to say about this, with the emphasis being on intelligent marketing automation. An intelligent marketing automation tool should focus your marketing towards targeted objectives through the use of business intelligence and analysis tools.
By analyzing the behavior of your leads, the tool should be able to send the lead information that’s relevant to their interest, at the time that they are most likely to listen.
It’s the equivalent of walking up to a dart board and placing the pin right on the target as opposed to just throwing it in the dark hoping that it just hits the board at all.
Furthermore, as time goes on and the client continues to engage with your brand, increasingly more data is collected, allowing you to refine your client segments further, along with the precise messages that will address their needs and interests.
Clearly there was a lot that happened in 2017 making it an exciting time. But in the financial trading industry that is perpetually evolving, I look forward to what 2018 may bring.
