Despite a spike in popularity of cryptocurrencies in 2017, traditional Forex market is 5 times bigger than Bitcoin, Ether or all cryptocurrencies combined. Due to increased volatility Forex trading volume has grown significantly in early 2018. If you are thinking to start own forex brokerage company or a social trading service, now is a good time. Despite high competition on this market, there is a steady flow of new and returning investors. Key question is: how do you catch their attention? How can a new unknown and small forex brokerage compete with giants and generate forex leads?

Trader personas

First of all you need to work on competitive advantages. Research your target customers and create several buyer personas for your brokerage. It is a lot harder to “sell to everyone” then to “Joe, a manager with average salary who has two kids and too little time to learn trading tactics”. If you are trying to sell to experienced traders, spend time researching online what disappoints them in their current broker. Is there a way to improve it in your brokerage? Maybe you offer faster payment processing or better customer support? Find out which of your strengths matter to your target buyer and build marketing campaign on those keystones. Small things, such as guaranteed reply to customers’ emails within 20 minutes, may make a big difference.

For Joe from our example above and many other novice traders, such advantage may be copy trading service built into your brokerage and educational videos.

Forex Leads – Sales funnel

Since we live in the world overloaded with advertising, clearly defined competitive advantages are a good start, but this is not enough to close a sale. People usually are not happy when someone aggressively sells to them any product or service. Luckily there is a way to overcome this problem and generate forex leads.

1. Create educational course

E-learning niche is booming, various free and paid courses are on the edge of their popularity. If your potential customers like to learn (and most people do), use this interest to build their trust. Create an educational course that solves problems of your target customer (do they need to learn trading basics? master calm state of mind while trading? get familiar with Fibonacci levels?). It is best to create several courses for each of your buyer personas, including both novice and experienced traders. Each course can consist of 5-7 daily emails, video masterclass series, webinars, etc.

2. Find your advertising channel

When it comes to advertising, promote educational materials, not brokerage services. Look at your buyer personas to find the best advertising channel and promote your course through services they visit most often. Some popular outlets are Facebook, Google and various investment websites and niche forums. In some cases, especially if you are promoting video course, video ads on Youtube may bring higher conversions.

3. Start generating leads

To stay competitive you must have a well-designed product presentation. Invest in video content and clean uncluttered landing page (or several pages). Make it easy to understand what exactly you offer and how your prospects can benefit from it. For example, with copy trading service, you can show how easy is it to sign up and start getting passive income from copying trades.
Don’t place complicated registration forms on a landing page. The shorter the form and the less information it requires, the more people will sign up. Many modern landing pages don’t even have the ‘Name’ field, all they ask for is visitor’s email.

4. Transform leads into customers

When people go through your educational course, they transition from ‘strangers’ to ‘prospects’, and now is the time to bring your brokerage to their attention. A lot of people register on the landing page, but won’t complete course or proceed to open an account and make a real-money deposit. They may be not confident enough, or busy with other project, they may not believe in possibility of success. Work with these leads and help them transform into customers. The easiest way to do so is via an automated email marketing campaign. Bonuses and time-sensitive special offers may also help convince people to make a deposit.

Please keep in mind, that this is not a ‘get rich without effort’ scheme. Our suggestions require a lot of work at the beginning to produce high quality content. The webinar and/or educational course must be well designed, appeal to the target audience and solve their problem. But once the foundation is ready, the rest can be automated. For best results, we recommend that you track the stats and experiment slightly with course content, ad texts and newsletters all the time to see whether it will improve conversion rates.

Final thoughts – Forex marketing strategy

Some experts predict that crypto currencies may hit 1 trillion dollars in 2018, which is less than 1/5th of the traditional currency market. Capitalisation of the Forex market exceeds 5 trillion dollars. Of course this market is highly competitive, but there is still enough of room for a new brokerage or stand-alone copy trading service with a smart marketing strategy.