Bart Burggraaf, Managing Partner at MediaGroup Worldwide takes an interesting look at the pros and cons of social media marketing channels for Forex brokers.
It wasn’t too long ago I made the point that Social Media is the wrong channel to do advertising.
Bart Burggraaf, MediaGroup
The idea being that people are in content mode on social media, and not in buying mode like on Google search for certain queries. Users want to get entertained and not sold and we saw performance for our broker clients accordingly. I stand by that theory, but I think the large Social Media platforms have changed enough to make some exceptions to the ‘no social media advertising’ rule.
Let’s take a look at Facebook, by far the biggest platform in which to find your target audience (in the western world, at least). First, targeting has progressed to such an extent, that targeting only traders in your target country with the desired wealth and experience level is very possible. With this level of targeting, brokers can afford to pay above and beyond advertisers in other industries and make a large impact. On mobile, pushing app installs has never been more targeted and impactful and if you have a good conversion path within your app, this could be an excellent way to get new traders.
Using video advertising on Facebook, it has never been easier to activate your TVCs or to push thought leadership content. Besides Facebook, Youtube has made some serious inroads in terms of targeting, and should be considered for video ads in addition to using programmatic platforms. Another platform worth considering is Linkedin. While some of their ad products are not appropriate for direct marketing organisations (such as sponsored inmails) the self-serve advertising platform is an excellent way to target both B2C and especially B2B audiences.
That leaves me to talk about Social Media Content (as opposed to Advertising). When discussing social media, a lot of companies think about posting content that then goes viral and they could get an influx of free business that way. And that’s what initially attracted companies to Facebook and other social media platforms; that it was ‘free’. If you posted the right content in the right way, you could get enormous reach among your target audience. But, with the death of organic reach on many social media channels, those days are over, and brokers need to spend some cash to get their content out there, even towards people that liked their pages already. That should be a no-brainer, and be given budgets separate from any advertising campaigns you do for direct marketing purposes.