The following article is a guest post, courtesy of Forex broker platform and technology provider Leverate.
Every broker’s marketing budget has a large proportion attributed to lead generation – it’s integral for maintaining revenue and growth that businesses continue to generate new customers. New brokerages need clients, old hands want growth, and both need to retain the clients they have. Once the digital marketing techniques in your arsenal have been depleted, all that remains is the same conversion and retention cycle.
The trading community may be expanding, but existing traders have become jaded with the same old reruns of tired old advertising campaigns. They are far more wary of leaving their details because chances are, they will be hounded to make an investment by the brokers desperate for their custom.
Maya Kenner-Fitoussi
Grabbing and holding a trader’s attention these days is harder than ever.” Says Leverate’s Head of Marketing, Maya Kenner-Fitoussi. “You can’t visit a website with information about trading without being bombarded with banners and ads that take over the page the trader wants to read. The average trader is becoming less tolerant of this advert onslaught, and it has forced us to devise new ways to reach them.
Fortunately, digital marketing has been evolving and now there are new options to engage leads.
Affiliation – effective but under-utilised
Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time, but it is still surprisingly under-utilised in the forex markets to increase exposure to new demographics and reach new leads.
If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing, in its basic format it involves taking a client product and using a third party to market it – the client gets increased exposure to a broader audience, and the affiliate earns a percentage commission based on the clients’ earning from the promotion. The commission percentage can be collected on a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost per Lead (CPL) basis.
Affiliation is vital to business growth.” Says Danny Stevens, Leverate’s Affiliate and MarComm Manager, with many years of experience in affiliation marketing. “We are a service provider, and our clients need high-quality lead generation to save them effort and time, and time is money.
While affiliate marketing can be attractively effective, it is not a simple mechanism”, says Danny.
Brokers need to know their target markets, so that we can begin to target specific demographics through geo locations, languages, and even age ranges.
Creative demographic targeting
It is all very well to target existing traders in the forex markets, but other environments can overlap the trading sphere. An obvious example is the online gaming world.
The gaming and Forex demographics overlap in several areas,” says Maya. “While Forex trading isn’t quite as risky as gaming, there is still the thrill of beating the odds or predicting a positive outcome that is very similar. We have seen it many times – those who utilise betting apps, later turn their attention to forex trading.
One of the ways to bridge the demographic gap is the creation of online trading game apps. The lead generation solution from Leverate is StarGen, a trading game app on Android and iOS. Fully customisable to the client’s brand, it hands the broker a direct link to the gaming crowd and a marketing funnel with which to target them.
It is a highly engaging game app that happens to centre on trading, attracting casual gamers everywhere. It’s an amazing opportunity for clients to gain an exclusive marketing funnel, while leaving the maintenance and technical support to us”, says Maya.
Tapping Future Traders
A vast pool of potential clients is waiting under the category of “traders-yet-to-come”. While forex trading has become much more widespread with retail investors, the average web-surfer with a mild interest or curiosity could find the whole thing rather overwhelming and challenging to navigate. For this reason, trading education websites exist. So why not create your own trading education course to channel these future traders toward your brokerage?
The trading education solution we created was developed with veteran traders, on a mission to make the trading world interesting, accurate and fun for the upcoming generation of traders,” says Danny. “The new user progresses through five tutorials, with videos, platform demonstrations and quizzes – as well as complimentary material in our blog. The elegance of a trading education site is that your leads are hot and ready to go.
The beauty of this method is that brokers get access to their clients’ details as soon as they give their permission, in strict accordance with GDPR of course. The learner can sign up when they finish the course, or they may take the opportunity to sign-up to a demo account, if the broker offers it, to practice the skills they are learning. Sales and conversion teams can work with the student to answer questions, recommend additional material, and encourage them in their learning journey.
When the students are finally ready to start trading, they are already familiar and comfortable with your brand and your people,” says Danny.
To sum up, there is no shortage of methods to engage new leads in the forex industry. New and innovative approaches are developing all the time to gain traction with new and existing forex traders. With the right marketing team, finding your fresh pool of clients is just a matter of time and creativity.