So you are planning to launch or have recently launched a brokerage firm. Where to start doing Marketing with little budget and a thousand things to take care of? For the purpose of this article I’m going to assume you launched a white label or MT4 brokerage and have little budget for marketing.
-Unless you have something really different and new or you have a large budget, don’t plan for a big launch day. Chances are, you have plenty of kinks to iron out and you are better off starting small, doing a soft launch and learning and optimizing.
-Make sure you think about some Reputation Management. What comes up when a user Google’s your brand? Nothing? In that case, how do users trust you with their hard-earned money? Do a few Press Releases via PRwire and the like, write some content with a by-line mentioning your company, get a few publications to do a review, enter your site in some relevant directories, open up some forum topics for users to provide feedback – but don’t Spam, people see through that and it will hurt you more than not doing anything at all.
-Ensure your website has plenty of clear information about your company, the staff and Regulation to increase trust. -Do a PPC campaign. PPC will bring you the easiest and (sometimes) cheapest results to start with and provides excellent abilities optimizing whatever goal you have. Keep an eye on the bottom line, and you’ll do fine, but consider hiring a freelancer or agency to set this up and optimize on a daily basis.
-With PPC up and running, get an SEO campaign underway to get more links pointing to your site so you get importance and, later on, search engine rankings. You can do this yourself or hire an agency/freelancer, the easiest way to get started is to do content cooperations with many financial publications that place your article (with a link in it) in return for the free content. Ensure whatever you do is high quality as low quality content and placements will hurt your brand and can produce penalties from Google and the like.
-When you are ready to do some paid media, think about broker listings on the main industry sites as well as a small RTB campaign.
-Focus on optimizing the user experience from start to finish. Every point of friction is going to hurt you 10x times later on. Talk to every single one of your first users about their experiences. Ignore the feedback that’s outside of your product and brand vision, but have a laser-like focus on optimizing those issues that do fit within your vision. With typical mid-range brokers spending 100’s of thousands of pounds a month, there’s no use in competing with them head to head. Do this the smart way, and you don’t have to. Any other thoughts or questions? Let me know in the comments below.
