Forex Brokers are Wasting Their Marketing Budget on These 5 Things – Guest Editorial

Charlotte Day

Charlotte Day of Contentworks gives clear examples of where marketing mistakes are being made, and how to get it right

By Charlotte Day, Contentworks

Forex Brokers are Wasting Their Marketing Budget on These 5 Things

Regardless of your company size, your marketing budget is a precious commodity. While many marketing departments acknowledge the importance of marketing, 40% of them think their marketing is ineffective and up to 60% of marketing budgets are wasted. If you are one of those forex brokers whose marketing ROI is unsatisfactory, here are five things that you may be needlessly wasting your marketing budget on.

  1. Ineffective Social Media Marketing

90.4% of millennials are active on social media. This is highly significant for brokers considering close to 45% of traders are millennials – that’s almost half.

If your social media results aren’t great, you may not be targeting the right platforms or consumers. To revamp your strategy, you must firstly know your audience. Once you’ve worked out the demographics, you can then identify where they hangout online.

59% of US millennials are Instagram users, for instance. 71% of Instagram users around the world are also under 35 and 80% of millennial users follow at least one business too. So, if millennials are your target, Instagram is a vital channel to utilise.

As an increasingly millennial-focused brand, Morgan Stanley has already introduced a robo-advisor to target fintech’s darling demographic and recently acquired stock plans administrator Solium to help target millennial millionaires. But they’ve also tweaked their Instagram presence to be as appealing as possible to this group.

They take corporate responsibility very seriously, for example and showcase this to their 152k Insta followers. This is of great importance considering 73% of millennials prefer to work with socially responsible companies and 81% expect brands to make a public commitment to corporate efforts which help the community.

Marketing Strategy for Social Media

To avoid wasting your marketing budget on social media, use the platforms that will get you the most growth and interaction with your clients.
Points to consider:

  • Think about engagement to see what posts work well and what needs to be improved. Use tools to help you keep track of the analytics. AgoraPulse, for instance, allows you to monitor social media interactions.
  • Tailor content to suit your demographics. Remember content shouldn’t be overly pushy or salesy. Instead it should tell a story in order to make your brand relatable.
  • Millennials have trust issues with banking institutions and financial services, still remembering the effects of the recession. In order to make your brand more approachable, it’s essential to create authentic content and build trust on social channels. A great way to do this is to feature key team members throughout your campaigns as this puts a face to your brand.

  • 54% of consumers expect video content from brands and 77% of viewers watch explainer videos more than general videos. Your brand can bank on the power of educational YouTube video content to get more out of your marketing budget. And why not use features such as Instagram Stories for smooth communication?

2. Your Social Media Promotions and Post Boosts are Wrong

Social media boosting has grown as a marketing tactic because of its ability to increase exposure. It’s also essential thanks to Facebook’s new algorithm which saw organic page reach drop to as low as 1% of page fans. However, simply boosting your posts is inadequate and you may be wasting your marketing budget.

For instance, when you elect to boost a Facebook post, you have the option to either push the post to “People who like your page and their friends” or “People you choose through targeting.” The option you choose will depend on your goals. If you want to extend outreach, appealing to friends of your followers can work. But if you’re running a targeted campaign about CFD trading, for instance, then segmenting your audience through targeted marketing can appeal directly to consumer needs. Avoid wasting budget by knowing what you want to achieve.

You may also be wasting your money boosting the wrong content. Facebook has toughened up on financial services and political ads and if you’re talking about dubious asset classes and some of the digital currencies you really will struggle to boost your posts. Other problems include too much text in your ads or images that don’t comply with the platform’s rules.

Marketing Strategy for Social Media Boosting

Boosting your social media posts successfully comes down to you knowing how to do it. So how do you ensure that you get the most out of boosting?

  • Have a clear goal. Are you looking to increase your web traffic, get more clicks to your landing page, or get engagement on the post? Having one goal will help you create a clear call-to-action and make it easier to measure your ROI and effectiveness of the boosted post.
  • Remember the rules: Want to boost or promote a post? Then remember the rules. Whether you’re looking to improve acquisition or promote a new product, don’t try to offer trading advice. This is a big no-no and could land you in hot water. Also, be sure to include any necessary disclosures as stipulated by industry regulators. Gold star to Blackwell Global for keeping their social media to a high standard.

  • Get the finer details right. Facebook has determined that images with less than 20% text perform better and there’s a tool to check if the amount of text you have is acceptable. Perfecting the image/text ratio will improve performance.

3. Ad Copy without the Right Keywords

49% of product searches are made via search engines. So, it’s no surprise that PPC is a top marketing strategy for many companies trying to be seen amid a host of competitors. That said; many brokers are wasting their marketing budgets on AdWords campaigns that don’t include the right keywords.

The term ‘forex trading’ brings back 220 million results. It’s not enough to end up appearing on search pages if your brand is going to be stuck on page 15 of the search. It’s a tough market and while it may be tempting to just add ‘forex trading’ into AdWords, that’s not the way to go.

Ideally, you want low to medium competition keywords with good monthly volume and you should avoid highly competitive and expensive words. For instance, the word ‘trading’ is one of the top 20 most expensive AdWords keywords.

London-based keywords also tend to be pricey because London has dominated the forex market for nearly 50 years and it’s where nearly 40% of all trades are handled.

That said, to work out which keywords are right for you, it’s important to think about your marketing strategy and budget spend as a whole. One of the most important factors to consider is the lifetime value of a client. If acquisition marketing and retention is costly, the lifetime value of each client must be worth it, with London retention often being higher than other destinations.

You can use the following formula to take a closer eye at retention.

Customer Retention Rate = ((E-N/S)) X 100, where:

E = the number of clients you have at the end of a specific period (e.g., week, month, year)

N = the number of new clients your business acquired during the given period

S = the number of clients you had at the beginning of the period.

Marketing Strategy for Your Ad Copy

Keep in mind that people are more inclined to click on ads that match the search query and keywords they want. Considering 91% of digital ads are viewed for less than a second, you need to make everything count.

Constant monitoring and optimisation help to successfully drive traffic. It can feel like a full-time job, but there are tools to help you out such as Google Ads Keyword Tool.

Include negative keywords in your PPC campaigns to minimise clicks from searchers who are not looking for what you are offering. For example, most of the 5.5 million search results that come up for the word ‘future’ are probably related to the rapper rather than trading.

Don’t ignore keywords in organic content. It’s possible for clients to hold number 1 spots through organic content alone.

4. Ignoring Other Forms of Media

Many brands think that traditional marketing methods are irrelevant but this is untrue. When television arrived, many people thought that it signalled the end of radio but even now over 85% of the US adult population still tunes in. This concept of relevance also applies to marketing. You don’t have to ignore other forms of media because they are ‘old’ but you can use them to get more out of your marketing budget. An omnichannel approach can greatly extend your outreach.

Marketing Strategy for Other Forms of Media

80% of consumers rank magazine media as their most trusted news source and so magazine adverts can still be used to market forex effectively. Using the omnichannel approach, you should pair the magazine ads with other marketing platforms. Aurasma, for example, is an extended virtual reality platform from HP which allows you to add value to printed content through visual interactivity. Find out more about the app here.

Webinars and podcasts are also a great way to show genuine interest in educating your traders and improving their chances of success. Up to 40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads and podcast listeners spend an average of 397 minutes listening to podcasts weekly.

Your educational marketing strategy needs to cover everything from the basics to advanced trading strategies like CMC Markets do. This broker has increased interaction and reach by providing regular webinars that cover news and events affecting the market, trends, and global market opportunities among other topics.

You can also add a fun experience to your marketing strategy by gamifying trading using mobile apps. TradeHero piques trader interest using its gamified mobile app that lets people trade forex and stocks and rewards them as if they had a real account.

High quality content is essential.

Speak to Contentworks Agency for intelligent financial services content marketing.

5. Failing to Humanise Your Brand

Before you can sign up new traders or grow your blog and social media presence, you need to build trust. To build trust you need to be transparent about your brand and the people behind it. This is especially important in an industry that desperately needs a reputation makeover. Close to 95% of brokers are unregulated and almost $33 million was lost to crypto and forex investment scams in 2018/19.

Marketing Strategy for ‘Going Human’

In addition to sharing valuable content and engaging your audience, you can humanise your brand by showing that you know what the trading industry is about. Also by connecting your brand and the people behind it in a genuine way. You can share visuals and experiences that highlight how your brand is working to provide the best experiences for your traders.

Interviews and conference attendance are excellent ways to show off your brand, expertise, and knowledge in the public domain. eToro is one broker that continues to leverage the power of transparency and expertise to build brand loyalty and authority. Its founder and CEO, Yoni Assia, was one of the top speakers at the recent Barcelona Trading Conference.

Besides conferences, expos are also a great platform for the people behind your brand to interact directly with clients. Scammers normally divert any queries and promise huge bonuses and quick returns without much education.

By attending expos to interact with clients and show your genuine interest in their education and success, you will build credibility and trust. Don’t forget to plan ahead and promote your participation in advance.

Contentworks Agency offers solutions that are specifically tailored for the forex, fintech and banking sectors. Speak to our team if you’re ready to step up your financial services marketing.

The subject matter and the content of this article are solely the views of the author. FinanceFeeds does not bear any legal responsibility for the content of this article and they do not reflect the viewpoint of FinanceFeeds or its editorial staff.

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