You’ve decided to start up a forex broker, or add a prop trading sub-brand to your existing offering. The big question on your mind is whether there is room for yet another brokerage and how can you carve out a corner for your firm in a highly competitive landscape? The Directors at Contentworks Agency have been marketing forex firms for over 15 years. And while some tools and approaches are timeless and fundamental, there’s a bunch of new techniques to successfully market your brokerage. Let’s dive into marketing for forex brokers and discover the essentials you need for an effective marketing strategy.
Forex Marketing Strategy
To launch a brokerage in this crowded market, you will need a rock solid strategy. Here’s what should be in it:
Market Research
Identify your target market, their geo-, demo- and psychographics. What are their behaviours, which social channels are they on, why do they want to trade? Conducting this research can be as extensive as employing a market research firm, which can be expensive. Or there are a lot of reliable statistical sources online. Either way, it needs your focus.
USPs
Also called Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is perhaps the most underrated point in most brokers strategies. You will often hear the same things – “we offer multiple markets to trade”, “excellent customer service”, “MT5 trading platform”, “zero pips”. But in 2024, these are standard offerings that all brokers offer. So think carefully about what makes you special and what your target market would appreciate. Is it the founder’s story? Do you plan to offer personalised education? Are you solving a problem? Whatever it is, make sure you can deliver.
Expanding to a new region? Download our free eBook that’s packed full of helpful tips.
Documented Content Plan
A solid marketing strategy also includes a content roadmap for the next 6 or 12 months. This calendar will help you maximise resources and stay on brand. Your content plan may include:
- Events and expos coming up in your diary and how you will prepare for them
- Webinars and Seminars
- Educational activities – videos, podcasts, eBooks
- Company milestones or rollouts
- Special dates or holidays that will require a campaign
- Product launch dates and company announcements
- Thought-leadership activities – identify where you want to be a leader and how you will show that off
- Exhibit your USPs
- CSR and ESG initiatives
Your content plan will identify what your target audience is interested in and set out which channels you will communicate on and when.
Get Out Your Measuring Tape
You’ve probably heard of the SMART framework for marketing goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Here are some areas we measure when marketing for forex brokers.
- Customer leads – monitor which channels and campaigns are converting leads to know what to discard and what to double down on. There are 2 types of leads:
- Marketing Qualified Leads – someone who engaged with your marketing, maybe by clicking on a Facebook ad, downloading an eBook
- Sales Qualified Leads – Someone that has already interacted with you and shown interest, e.g. signed up for a demo, and is ready for a sales call
- Conversion rate – the percentage of users that take an action after interacting with your campaign or promotion
- Cost per lead (CPL) – divide the cost of your marketing activity by the number of leads received
- Life time value (LTV) – some leads might cost more to bring in but they might have greater overall returns in terms of higher deposits, more trading volume etc*
- Return on Investment (ROI) – this measures the overall value of your marketing. And importantly, whether you are getting a greater return than the amount you spent.
*Contentworks tip: boost your LTV by upselling to existing clients. A good business intelligence system can help you understand the behaviour of your clients and how you can support and encourage them to trade more.
Content Marketing for Forex Brokers
The content you create and how you communicate it to your audience sets a baseline to how your clients will perceive you. Which is why at Contentworks we advise clients to develop a copy style guide. This sets out your brand rules and tone of voice, and is aligned with your target audience and USPs.
Your content strategy should set out the direction for your:
- Website and blog
- Education centre
- eBooks and White Papers
- Emails and newsletters
- Daily market updates
- Social media posting
- PR and thought leadership
SEO
Content needs to be targeted, creative and compelling. But it also needs to be optimised for SEO with the right keywords, meta data, responsive to mobile and ticking all the technical boxes. SEO is a constantly developing sector and you need to stay updated on the latest updates and trends.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is essential for your forex broker but it needs to be smart and stand out in a competitive space. Here are some key points to include:
- Select the platforms that your audience are on. Don’t try to spread yourself too thinly.
- Post regularly, have a calendar and keep to it – this can be a combination of educational posts, market updates, trading tips, company news and events.
- Follow fintech and finance influencers on key platforms like TikTok. Learn what makes them popular and why their audience engages.
- Consider the resources and budget you have. You will need a videographer, designer, social media manager or agency to perform your social media management.
- Mix up your posts with short snippets, longer posts, infographics, reels, videos, live sessions
- Engage, interact and answer questions promptly
Digital Advertising
Now you’re ready to start spending! Paid advertising with Google AdWords and Facebook can boost your online visibility, drive direct traffic and provide measurable results.
To create effective AdWords campaigns you need to ensure your ad copy is on target. You will need to:
- Identify your target market, which cities they are in, what time of day they’re online
- Ensure your website is set up for conversion tracking
- Maximise performance and conversions with smart bidding strategies, automated bidding using Google’s AI
- Conduct keyword research and identify high-intent KWs – e.g. “best forex broker in Vietnam” or “how to trade forex for beginner”. And ensure your KW is in your heading
- Sort into ad groups (tip: break larger groups into smaller more specific ones)
- Create killer content
- Ensure your CTA is clear, easy to understand and motivational
Another key part of your digital strategy is remarketing. This tactic targets people that have already visited your website but haven’t signed up. Maybe they aren’t ready to or didn’t have the time. Retargeting gives you the opportunity to convert visitors to your site at a later stage. You’re probably aware that with the upcoming Google cookie ban that you will have to get a lot smarter with your retargeting activities.
Email Marketing For Forex Brokers
In 2023, emails outperformed banner ads and SMS marketing by 108%, social media posts by 12% and social media ads by 11%. At Contentworks we’ve worked closely with many finance brands to build out their email strategy – whether that’s upselling through trading activity prompted emails, or as for lead nurturing through smart, timely communications. Here are some of our top takeaways:
- You need to segment based on user behaviour, activity, and demographics with personalisation
- Setting up automated sequences to onboard, get special promotions and market updates is essential to save time
- Know the frequency and time zone you should be sending out emails to each target segment
- Consider header and in email designs and ensure that they are on brand.
- Track open rates, click throughs and conversion and always refine your approach. A/B testing is a great way to do this if your database is large enough.
Public Relations
PR is crucial to how you present yourself to your clients, regulators, employees and industry peers. A well thought out PR strategy ensures a branded experience for your audience and spends your resources in targeted places to achieve your aims. Here are areas you need to consider in your PR and communications strategy:
- Live events – expos, speaking events, seminars, networking, educational webinars, workshops
- Media outreach – nurture relationships with publications your targets visit. Offer valuable information and unique insights
- Thought leadership – this needs to follow the strengths of your spokesperson/people for the company. Authenticity reigns supreme here. You can have ghost writers assisting you to put the content together, but you need to know what expertise you want to show off
- Crisis management – get all your marketing brains in the room and think about what might go wrong. Is your site down? Did you get a bad review? Has an affiliate gone rogue? And plan! Create a response plan that is ordered, timely and controlled.
AI and Martech
Martech tools are software solutions designed to help businesses plan, organise, execute, and measure marketing campaigns and activities. Your martech stack (marketing technology software) needs to be responsive to your teams needs and able to scale. These tools are designed to help you plan, organise, communicate, execute and measure your marketing activities.
Here are some tools to consider:
- CRM – your customer relationship management platform captures and organises all client information, tracks behaviour and and budgets
- Website plugins – from voice search optimisation, to tracking and security, there are a multitude of plugins to add to your site. Their purposes is to help your client navigate your site and you to automate and better understand what’s going on. Keep in mind that some plugins can slow your site considerably
- Support – AI driven chatbots can provide instant customer support but you need to know when a real person has to step in
- Business intelligence – data analytics, tracking software come at a cost but in the long term may help guide crucial business decisions.
- Team communications – platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams can keep your internal and remote teams communicating correctly.
- Project management – Tools like Jira, Asana or Trello help to structure your project and event roadmap.
- Marketing automation tools – Tools like HubSpot can help you create, manage and monitor campaigns
- Social media tools – Management tools like Agorapulse streamline scheduling across multiple networks, helping you monitor your community and provide insights and analytics
- SEO tools like Semrush – These allow you to identify competitor keywords and create your own organic ranking strategy
Contentworks Tip: The array of marketing tools can take up a lot of your budget. If you’re working with an outsourced agency, they should have many of these tools that means you don’t have to buy, integrate, monitor and measure.
Where to Start?
There are many areas to cover when setting up your forex broker marketing strategy. You need to invest in content and social media marketing, undertake performance marketing, digital advertising, SEO and PR. You need to have a strategy, identify goals and decide on your roadmap to get there. You need to stay updated on the latest trends and refine your strategy accordingly. And you need to have the martech tools to help you implement, manage and monitor your success.
It can seem a little overwhelming. Especially if you’re concentrating on getting your brokerage set up. If you need help from an experienced financial marketing team, book a free zoom call with Contentworks and we can discuss what you need to get started.