The vital matter of acquiring and maintaining retail clients is one of the largest resource and financial costs in the Forex industry. In this week’s LeapRate Guest Editorial, Mordecai Holtz, Co-CEO and Founder of Blue Thread Marketing, a boutique digital marketing agency working with clients to weave a unique digital narrative, details his perspective.
Bringing extra-industry perspective to digital marketing in electronic trading, Blue Thread’s international clientele includes commercial brands, leading forex portals, hi-tech companies and startups, government agencies and municipalities.
The Forex industry is plagued by one of the highest cost per leads in the digital marketing industry. Spending upwards of $800 to acquire each user means that Forex marketing is effectively burning money to gain new users.
With all this spending in acquiring new users, couldn’t a Forex company revise their digital customer growth strategy without pouring more money into lead gen?
Can Forex companies reduce digital spending while still gaining customers?
Here are 5 ways for Forex companies to increase revenue, grow their user base, while plugging a hole in their marketing budget.
Acquisition vs Retention
Let’s start with the basics. Retaining a customer will ALWAYS be cheaper that acquiring a new one. It sounds rather obvious. In fact, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%. While selling, or acquiring a new customer, is 5-20%! (marketing metrics)
Especially in the Forex industry, the lifetime value of a customer is more significant than the profit of securing a new customer. Why? With a saturation of trading platforms in the market, customers will always prefer trading with an existing one rather than invest more time in researching, testing, and learning a new trading platform. Forex companies should be investing more on customer satisfaction and selling new features.
The cost is lower and the profits are higher. The base of consumers will always yield a better long-term value to the Forex company.
By favoring customer acquisition spending, the Forex industry is fighting the general marketing industry. Focusing on client retention and user satisfaction will net more profit.
Stop Spending, Provide Value
As strange as it may sound, another excellent way to close a financial gap is to stop spending money on digital marketing. Digital marketing is still in its infancy stages and tracking customer acquisitions through the entire sales funnel is difficult. Reducing the marketing spend to the bare minimum will enable a Forex company to adjust its marketing efforts towards providing value for the existing customers.
What does providing value to a customer look like in Forex?
Content
Increasing the quality and quantity of organic content means offering consistently relevant and valuable content (articles, video, white papers) to the existing community of users. Content for customers means finding articles about market trends, timely trading news, and answers to their questions. Satisfying and responding to their needs, will increase brand trust and decrease spending.
By increasing valuable content creation, a Forex brand will succeed in reducing initial marketing costs while gaining relevant traffic, growth of an engaged digital community, and long term overall brand affinity.
Creating quality content will only be as good as the landing page on which the consumers digital navigation begins. Optimizing the landing page (where traffic is directed to) experience is a direct contributor to how the user consumes the high quality content. Too many ads, multiple calls to actions or an extremely busy page means distracted readers and high drop rates. Invest in digital marketing simplicity for the sake of longer term customer satisfaction. It’s benefits and costs still outweigh customer acquisition.
Engage and Collaborate
We’ve stated it already, the competitive Forex landscape means that securing new customers is a highly coveted position. By constantly seeking to control the market, Forex platforms are ignoring the potential of engaging and collaborating with their existing community of user and other market leaders to gain organic (unpaid) exposure.
Social media makes the job of Identifying market leaders, bloggers, and traders relatively easy (read low cost). By engaging in relevant conversations and creating discussions to a targeted audience, a Forex brand gains credibility with the most appropriate brands and individuals.
Engaging an audience on digital channels doesn’t mean spamming users or brands. It means sharing valuable content, creating or contributing to conversations about the Forex market, and respecting the style and norms of each digital channel.
Establishing credibility enables a Forex brand to seek collaborative opportunities with other relevant brands and increase organic exposure. Generally, collaboration means content partnerships but it can also mean designing alternative mutually beneficial solutions.
Data and Personalization
Big data is the term de jour across all industries. Unfortunately, many are still overwhelmed by the concept and are not looking to understand its high earning potential. It is no surprise that a focus on data driven marketing efforts should be one of the top priorities for the Forex market. Each trading platform, regardless of size, is storing the most precious commodity available- user data. Behaviors of usage, navigation patterns, trading preferences, times of trading. Not to mention email account, which offers digital channel usage and social content. All extremely valuable data most of which are currently being ignored by Forex trading platforms.
Why?
Forex companies, along with many industries, approach analytics and data with trepidation. Taking a deeper look into internal marketing analytics is the ideal guide for improving customer engagement, overall navigation experience, and ultimately conversions.
Personalization strategies to find the small, yet the most potentially profitable, subsets of a market and niche offerings can prove to be challenging. Reaching these customers will require data parsing to create multiple one-to-one conversations.
Personalizing content crafted to these micro-targeted segments will enable the Forex company to deliver valuable, high quality content, to the most relevant consumers at a fraction of the cost of front-loading new customer acquisition.
Driving measurable results is much easier once all digital marketing efforts are focused on providing value to the user.
The cost of securing qualified leads in the Forex industry via digital marketing strategies is unnecessarily high. Currently, the marketing capital and secondary resources available to Forex trading companies budgeted for digital acquisition means short-term gains and long-term losses. Strategically adjusting marketing efforts towards optimizing customer satisfaction that is data-driven, personalized and valuable will revolutionize Forex by making it a financially beneficial, consumer driven industry.
This is a Guest Editorial written entirely by Mordecai Holtz, co-CEO and Founder, Blue Thread Marketing.