Retail FX Marketing Masterclass, Part 1

Monday, 22/02/2016 | 08:37 GMT by Guest Contributors
  • Nick James analyses the most popular channels for acquiring traders for your brokerage, lists current practices and advises on how to enhance them.
Retail FX Marketing Masterclass, Part 1
Finance Magnates

Trading foreign Exchange is performed online, hence establishing superior online marketing activities should be every broker’s goal. This is a simple fact, all of us get it. However, many marketers working in FX are still lagging behind and are investing in outdated practices.

In this series of articles I am going to analyse the most popular channels for getting more traders into your brokerage, list the current practices and advise on how to enhance those.

Today we have the ins and outs of content marketing on our agenda, let’s dive in!

Content marketing

Everyone knows that content is king, yet most brokers fail to supply interesting and engaging pieces on their websites. Some brokers don’t actually offer any content at all. Others are mostly limiting themselves to analytical content only. Even though such activities can be seen as a value added from the client’s perspective, simply supplying daily analyses on majors won’t get you traders.

How to do content marketing in 2016?

Here are 3 actionable tips to take home.

#1 Make content with SEO in mind

Organic search has always been one of the most effective channels of acquisition. Hence, when designing content, you should always focus on making it findable via search engines. To do so, make sure your broker often produces evergreen content, articles that will be as valid 5 years from now as they are today.

Next to this, focus on the wordcount. It is much easier to rank and bank with articles that are longer than 1000 words. Often you will see that 1000 words of pure content look boring. This is why you should always work on the structure and graphic elements.

Needless to say - keyword research is a must. If you are not focusing on search terms within your content, you might as well just quit the whole idea.

This sounds like a heck of an effort. It is. That’s why you should either establish a great in-house content team or subcontract professionals. Don’t look to cut on costs and subcontract a cheap workforce via freelance websites, you will simply lose both money and time.

Nick_James_FMMarketing1

2nd result for googling “how to trade Forex ” at google.co.uk

When it comes to results, one optimised article can boil down to some 20 hits a day. That’s 140 per week. Or around 7000 a year. Now think about the average CPC your broker pays for display ads and compare its costs to the possible price of an article.

#2 Say NO to poor quality

If you are not new to forex or binary, you most probably remember the type of educational videos that featured stock images and some voice in the background. Doesn’t ring a bell? Here is an example below.

Nick_James_FMMarketing2

White-labeled educational course from one of the major brokers

You will actually be surprised to learn how many brokers have adopted these educational videos. The reason for this was simple - the price.

I honestly believe that any broker would be much better off without such content. The rule of thumb should be rather simple: prefer no content to poor content.

Investing in engaging video content may be very pricey. This is why the best tip is to actually focus on the webinars and use webinar recordings as a basis for a standalone educational course.

#3 Make NATURAL signing up offers

So you have some high quality content that ranks quite well on the search engines and brings great value for the reader. Great job! Now the task is to actually use this content for further conversion of your visitors. This is why we are going to fill it with sign up links for live and demo accounts... not!

Converting website traffic into signups is certainly a challenge, and with content marketing it is actually harder than anywhere else. The main takeaway here is to actually offer natural ways for signing up within an article.

One of the ideas could be, for example, to request only an email from the visitors instead of signing them up for an account straight away. The best practice here would be to actually offer a certain piece of advanced content related to the one which the visitor is consuming at the moment.

Summing it all up

Content marketing in FX is rather undeveloped and this can certainly be a competitive edge for your brokerage. Preparing your content in an interesting way with SEO in mind can result in a very high ROI over the long run. Yet you still have to consider content marketing as an investment that does not come cheap. It is better to avoid content marketing completely than supply pieces of poor quality. Add natural ways for obtaining the lead data within your content and once it is ranked, liked and shared - the results will be massive.

Let me know what you think about this article in the comments and come back to Finance Magnates next week to learn more about display advertising in retail FX.

Trading foreign Exchange is performed online, hence establishing superior online marketing activities should be every broker’s goal. This is a simple fact, all of us get it. However, many marketers working in FX are still lagging behind and are investing in outdated practices.

In this series of articles I am going to analyse the most popular channels for getting more traders into your brokerage, list the current practices and advise on how to enhance those.

Today we have the ins and outs of content marketing on our agenda, let’s dive in!

Content marketing

Everyone knows that content is king, yet most brokers fail to supply interesting and engaging pieces on their websites. Some brokers don’t actually offer any content at all. Others are mostly limiting themselves to analytical content only. Even though such activities can be seen as a value added from the client’s perspective, simply supplying daily analyses on majors won’t get you traders.

How to do content marketing in 2016?

Here are 3 actionable tips to take home.

#1 Make content with SEO in mind

Organic search has always been one of the most effective channels of acquisition. Hence, when designing content, you should always focus on making it findable via search engines. To do so, make sure your broker often produces evergreen content, articles that will be as valid 5 years from now as they are today.

Next to this, focus on the wordcount. It is much easier to rank and bank with articles that are longer than 1000 words. Often you will see that 1000 words of pure content look boring. This is why you should always work on the structure and graphic elements.

Needless to say - keyword research is a must. If you are not focusing on search terms within your content, you might as well just quit the whole idea.

This sounds like a heck of an effort. It is. That’s why you should either establish a great in-house content team or subcontract professionals. Don’t look to cut on costs and subcontract a cheap workforce via freelance websites, you will simply lose both money and time.

Nick_James_FMMarketing1

2nd result for googling “how to trade Forex ” at google.co.uk

When it comes to results, one optimised article can boil down to some 20 hits a day. That’s 140 per week. Or around 7000 a year. Now think about the average CPC your broker pays for display ads and compare its costs to the possible price of an article.

#2 Say NO to poor quality

If you are not new to forex or binary, you most probably remember the type of educational videos that featured stock images and some voice in the background. Doesn’t ring a bell? Here is an example below.

Nick_James_FMMarketing2

White-labeled educational course from one of the major brokers

You will actually be surprised to learn how many brokers have adopted these educational videos. The reason for this was simple - the price.

I honestly believe that any broker would be much better off without such content. The rule of thumb should be rather simple: prefer no content to poor content.

Investing in engaging video content may be very pricey. This is why the best tip is to actually focus on the webinars and use webinar recordings as a basis for a standalone educational course.

#3 Make NATURAL signing up offers

So you have some high quality content that ranks quite well on the search engines and brings great value for the reader. Great job! Now the task is to actually use this content for further conversion of your visitors. This is why we are going to fill it with sign up links for live and demo accounts... not!

Converting website traffic into signups is certainly a challenge, and with content marketing it is actually harder than anywhere else. The main takeaway here is to actually offer natural ways for signing up within an article.

One of the ideas could be, for example, to request only an email from the visitors instead of signing them up for an account straight away. The best practice here would be to actually offer a certain piece of advanced content related to the one which the visitor is consuming at the moment.

Summing it all up

Content marketing in FX is rather undeveloped and this can certainly be a competitive edge for your brokerage. Preparing your content in an interesting way with SEO in mind can result in a very high ROI over the long run. Yet you still have to consider content marketing as an investment that does not come cheap. It is better to avoid content marketing completely than supply pieces of poor quality. Add natural ways for obtaining the lead data within your content and once it is ranked, liked and shared - the results will be massive.

Let me know what you think about this article in the comments and come back to Finance Magnates next week to learn more about display advertising in retail FX.

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