In an exclusive discussion with Finance Magnates, TMGM’s Head of Global Marketing, Andrea Faleburle highlighted the essentials of a successful marketing campaign in the FX and CFD industry. Faleburle recently joined TMGM from IC Markets where he worked for nearly 4 years.
In his new role, Faleburle is planning to facilitate the global expansion of TMGM through innovative marketing campaigns. Additionally, the newly appointed Head of Global Marketing aims to enhance the brand awareness of TMGM with result-oriented sports sponsorships.
Faleburle has extensive experience in the financial services industry. According to him, the right dose of creativity and daring attitude is necessary for the success of marketing and branding campaigns. Commenting on the USP of TMGM, Faleburle said that a core group of passionate like-minded people differentiates TMGM from its peers.
We are glad to have you Mr Faleburle, In your opinion, how has marketing evolved in the global financial services industry during the last few years?
In past years, we witnessed the rise of a stronger dependency on technology for every one of us; initially, for marketers like me, this was an endless horizon of opportunity and experimentation, but, over time, this relationship with modern technology has been exploited and misused too many times leading to a loss of trust and to a natural tendency of the people to be suspicious and 'defend' themselves from marketing/sales messages and practices. The Global Financial Industry is among some of the more susceptible industries to this trend of loss of trust since it involves money and people that are understandably sensitive to the topic.
With this in mind, marketers in our industry have to re-invent themselves a bit, from fully performance-driven to 'patience driven': the relationship with potential clients needs to be nurtured and built at the pace set by the client, not by the marketers. There is a need for a more holistic approach to marketing. For example, on one side we do have super-advanced algorithms for programmatic online advertising, and we tend to think that the most important thing is to feed data to the algorithm, but paradoxically, nowadays, the data we have might be unreliable, blurred on the edges or showing us only a part of the truth.
So, marketers need to have a strong investigative mind when it comes to numbers, and they need to retro-engineer numbers to behaviour in order to remove misleading inputs to the algorithm that could destroy a very intelligent marketing campaign. At the same time, marketers in our industry need to be more creative, more entertaining and generate more value at every interaction with people to generate a progressive exchange of information with them and build trust.
What’s the role of sports sponsorships in today’s financial marketing ecosystem?
Some of the big players in our space played the card of sports sponsorship a long time ago with great results, since then a lot of brokers put their brands on a sports team or tied their name to a sports event, some with better success than others. The main difference comes down to how well you can leverage the assets you are offered in the sponsorship deal while deploying a properly integrated activation of the sponsorship itself.
For a marketing team, a big sponsorship is one of the most demanding activities to execute properly, but it can be extremely fun if you have the right dose of creativity and a daring attitude.
At the bare minimum, sports sponsorships are key for brand awareness, and a lot of the time they act as a badge of trust. However, when activated properly they allow the financial institution to show a more human face to their core audience (reinforcing brand loyalty) and explore extended audiences using different types of content that could be otherwise odd in the context of the financial industry, or at least compared to its expected type of serious communication.
How does TMGM differentiate itself from other brokers in the industry?
Being in marketing, I could use some of our USPs and try to 'sell' the brand or talk about our distinctive positioning in the mind of the clients. But, in all honesty, my work experience so far taught me that what makes the difference in a company is always a core group of like-minded people that are aligned and passionate about what they are doing.
TMGM is relatively new when you compare it with some direct competitors in the industry. But, in this case, new is synonymous with a 'fresh approach'. There are many veterans of the industry working for TMGM now that understand the final focus must always be the client experience. This applies to every level of client interaction with TMGM: trading conditions, ease of sign up, upfront transparency and honesty in communicating with clients along with caring and responsive support with the ability to help but also listen to their feedback. So, to go back to the question, what’s the main differentiation for TMGM? From my point of view the mentality of people working in it.
In terms of TMGM’s marketing campaign, is there any specific region you are targeting?
As you have probably already guessed from the Australian Open multi-year Sponsorship that TMGM signed up in 2019, Australia is a very important market for us. However, our strategy is to focus on 'hubs' where people interested in trading online at any level (beginner or seasoned CFDs traders) connect, rather than obsessing too much with a specific region. Obviously, we then aim to provide great multilingual support and tools for trading online to whoever may decide to trade with us. By doing so, we can connect with a more responsive audience and engage on what matters the most to them.
