When it comes to the marketing budget for brokers, a lot of weight is put on ROI. And rightfully so. In a mostly online business, it is important and entirely possible to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t. In the tradition of direct marketing, we do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Here are some of the things marketers can test to increase conversion and by doing so, the brokers’ bottom line. In no particular order:
1. Make every page on your site a landingpage. Have a clear flow of information, relevant call to actions, a full trial form to be filled out on the same page etc. The goal is to think conversion not just on your landingpages but on every page on your site to get the most out of your traffic.
2. Experiment with different conversion flows on your site. What if you just had one account opening flow for live and trial accounts and the only difference was the funding and KYC? We can make the trial to live an integrated process. Or what if you did away with sign up forms all together and just had the collection of information inside the application? What about using just a Live account signup with low initial funding requirements? Testing different flows will likely add significant %’s in conversion performance.
3. Add more ways to contact support & sales staff. Adding things like site chat, call me back functionality, facebook and other social channels, a forum, email, contact forms and tickets will clutter your support team’s queue but done in the right way will increase the number of prospects reaching out to you. The goal of our marketing should be to engage so we can convert Leads , so adding additional channels for a trader to contact you how they please will increase results.
4. Test new page layouts on an ongoing basis. With Multi-Variate and AB testing tools (like the one from Google) a broker can easily lift their conversion and decrease cost of Acquisition by making pages clearer and easier to use. An example would be to test different images, different content blocks, different color call to action buttons and more things like that.
5. Renegotiate Media Terms. Save money by buying for longer periods or for bigger amounts, renegotiate fees based on results, cut waste by removing placements that don’t add as much to the bottom line as others and generally try to increase value while decreasing cost. Working with a good media agency will help.
6. Frequently update and test your creative material. Having a variety of ad text, emails and display banners to use in your online marketing will not only ensure that your materials will not ‘wear out’ it will also give you the opportunity to constantly optimize to only use your best performing creative. What works well will change over time so we suggest doing ongoing testing and adding of new creative material.
7. Besides Banner and Search Marketing also employ Email Marketing. A lot of brokers do just Display and Search marketing while email is an underused channel. Used right, email has the ability to bring a lot of leads at a good cost; especially when different email messages are tested and refined over time.
8. Employ Real Time Bidding. For additional conversion at low cost, use RTB (even though RTB is more than that, it is sometimes called Retargeting). RTB allows brokers and advertisers in general to buy unsold banner impressions on publisher sites at low cost while allowing smart algorithms to optimize results based on data and behaviour. One vendor offering this specifically for financial advertisers is MediaGroup Performance (a part of the same group of agencies as MediaGroup London, my company) but there are a lot of other providers in the market offering similar but less specialized services.
9. Invest in good onsite and offsite SEO. For Google to show your site high in the search results two main factors are looked at; what’s on your site and what external references there are to your site (Onsite, Offsite SEO). It is therefore important to invest in a good site setup to begin with and to continue updating your site with fresh content, but besides that it is imperative in such a competitive search market to build and buy good quality links to your site. That can be done in many ways that an agency (or internal SEO person) can help you with.
10. Become a Publisher, not just a Broker. In the age of the internet, every company needs to shift from being just a service provider to a provider of value. Offering value to your prospective customers by publishing helpful information (for instance about the market) is a great way to reach the right target audience even if they are not looking for a broker just this moment. Many brokers such as Saxo, FXCM and OANDA have employed this tactic with success.
These are just some of the ways brokers can increase their bottom line, leave a comment if you have any remarks or questions or would like to add a tactic.
