How to differentiate your brand and win traders
In cooperation with Bart Burggraaf, Partner, MediaGroup Worldwide There are hundreds of brokerages using MetaTrader or other off-the-shelf trading platforms. The commercial advantages are lower start-up cost, a faster route to market and a fully formed marketplace with a great number of traders familiar with the platform. So many brokers go this route and find […]
In cooperation with Bart Burggraaf, Partner, MediaGroup Worldwide
There are hundreds of brokerages using MetaTrader or other off-the-shelf trading platforms. The commercial advantages are lower start-up cost, a faster route to market and a fully formed marketplace with a great number of traders familiar with the platform. So many brokers go this route and find themselves with the issue of differentiation.
In other words; how do we effectively acquire customers with many competitors offering the exact same ‘product’?
Doing a lot of good advertising is one way to gain market share, but not all brokers have the budgets to compete on that level alone, plus going at it by brute force certainly is probably not the most effective way to grow your brokerage. Don’t get me wrong, advertising IS required, but with a differentiated brand and product offering things get a lot easier.
So, research has shown that the main broker selection criteria for traders are Price (spreads), Platform, Service, Trust and Product (trading products/markets).
In addition to physical location and language, those are all items that brokers can use to gain a unique selling point over the competition.
The best advice is not to be all things to all people. You can be the number 1 broker focussing on EM equities with a high priced, high service proposition on the German Market, or you can be the 263rd broker that focusses on low spreads globally and offers all trading products on MT4. Once you have cornered a niche market, it is much easier to grow out from there.
Once you have chosen a niche differentiated brand position, become a thought leader in that space and have traders recognize you as such. That means content marketing and PR in addition to good, differentiated advertising. And nothing stops you from using the FMCG approach of having many differentiated brands at the same time. In the age of the internet and technology, it has never been easier to launch and test a differentiated brokerage brand.