A lot of brokers stop spending on marketing when volatility is down. Less people are interested in trading when the market is quiet, so spending money at a time like that is bound to give lower ROIs, right? The second consideration is that when earnings are lower a company needs to cut cost to avoid being in the red. With all other cost not as variable as advertising cost, something has to give.
While both are fair points, there are some marketing strategies that will allow you to increase ROI even when volumes are down. This will allow a broker to keep on generating clients at a low cost and not feel the pain as much. Bart Burggraaf, Managing Director of Media Group London hereby presents 10 tips to get there, in random order:
1. Renegotiate advertising contracts with publishers to lower the cost of advertising.
2. Remove those placements from your advertising plan with medium and low ROI and consolidate spend on top performers.
3. Do the same for top performing keywords for PPC advertising and lower bids for expensive keywords.
4. Run only your historically best performing creative, ad text and landing pages, regardless of what product managers want to promote at this time.
5. Related to the point above; focus on Direct Marketing messages over brand building.
6. Explore seminars/events, email marketing, real Time bidding and mobile marketing for increased ROI over other channels.
7. Think of viral or PR wins that can give you earned media coverage.
8. Use your existing lead and client database for referrals and business.
9. Give your sales team the tools to close business more effectively; ‘Bonus’ incentives for prospective clients could work well depending on your brand.
10. Cross promote different asset classes to leads and clients that are dormant; if they don’t trade FX perhaps another idea will get them started again.
These are mostly common sense approaches to increasing ROI and to some extent you could be doing these even if volatility and volumes are up. Regardless, with a laser like focus on results and budgets at the moment, it’s a good idea to think about these things more than usual.
This article was written as a guest editorial by Bart Burggraaf, Managing Director & Partner at MediaGroup London, which is a specialist marketing agency focused on financial services companies. For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.