Marketing FX as an Alternative to Volatile Stocks – Bart Burggraaf explains

Bart Burggraaf, Partner at MediaGroup London, is a widely regarded specialist and expert in managing marketing strategies for the FX industry. Here, Mr. Burggraaf takes a close look at how to capitalize on the volatile stock market situation and effectively market FX as a savior during these turbulent times.

With the recent volatility in equities and corresponding losses in the retail market, it might be time to start marketing FX as an alternative asset class if your company isn’t already, especially towards day traders currently trading equities.

There is a good story to tell; some of the advantages that FX has over equities from a trader perspective include gains in both directions and unlimited shorting, better liquidity and price transparency, much greater leverage and extended trading hours. What’s more, the FX market is global and can be traded regardless of individual market meltdowns and the like. So how to tell this story, and where?

First thing is we need to define our audience and buy targeted advertising.  The stock trading audience is of course different from FX traders and can also be further divided into separate audiences from the mom and pop pension investor to the day trader. However, given the nature of FX and regulatory pressures, targeting day traders in equities seems like the most natural fit for FX brokers.

These day traders are medium to high net worth people mostly in metropolitan areas, watch broad financial TV, read financial print and browse financial sites like the rest of us, so your advertising agency or boss might well suggest to place an ad in the WSJ or FT, sponsor a financial program on a general TV channel and place a banner ad on the financial section of a national news site, but you are likely to have wasted a large percentage of your ad buy, because these pubs are too broad and expensive to make the numbers work.

The good news is that a. they also read and watch more specialized trading related publications which are worth buying advertising in for this audience and b. there is a way to buy advertising on broad and premium financial websites at low prices, via real-time bidding. Because the audience needs to be converted from one asset class to another (and that is never an easy job), the price of media is a chief concern and you should be ready for lower KPIs and higher cost per acquisition if not done  in the most savvy way. Targeting these traders to actively convert them to FX is a PUSH effort rather than a PULL one, so we would not recommend employing Google Adwords for this purpose.

Because converting traders from one asset class to another is at its core an educational effort, pushing out thought leadership content and promoting this via native advertising is a tactic worth exploring too. The cost of getting in front of a large audience are low and the content medium is well suited for explaining the advantages of FX compared to regular advertising.

Native advertising can be bought via a few vendors such as Taboola, Outbrain or Yahoo Gemini and is basically the promotion of your content via ad units that look like the editorial part of a site (you might have seen them underneath articles on Bloomberg for instance).

When it comes to your creative, the consideration you need to make is to be serious and educational and attract bigger accounts, or to put out messaging focussing on returns and the like, and attract smaller accounts.

Which door you choose depends on your company strategy but ultimately also has a large influence on media choice because smaller accounts cannot cost as much to generate as larger ones. Besides the ad itself, online it is very important to focus on simple and direct messages and perhaps go into things in more detail on your landingpage or within an ebook which people sign up for by giving their contact information on the landingpage.