Financial industries has always been a tough challenge for the marketers. Not only you have to comply with tons of regulations and provide numerous risk warnings, but also you have to make your ads attractive, as the costs of financial advertising are sky high. In other words, launching a branding campaign for financial industry is an enormous amount of effort and a great expenditure too.
In recent years, everything tends to get more and more online exposure and as a result, there are now many brokers that solely work on their online presence. This of course makes sense, as the brokers have to convert a client on the web and the client has to apply for online trading services via his browser too.
These are three most relevant items for successful branding for your next online trading business.
1. The domain
Domain name is your web identification and it plays a vital role in your branding. In some niches of online trading the prices for the domains can go sky high, as it is the prime source of your branding.
Generally, the domain names in online trading industry tend to be short and are usually an abbreviation of the company name. The following are the examples of the most known forex brokers:
- fxcm(dot)com
- fxtm(dot)com
In some cases, the brokers go for nice 1 word domains. Such domains should have a direct association with trading and usually the prices for such web names are extremely high.
Back in 2010 a company named GFC Markets has undergone rebranding and mostly it has invested the resources into acquiring a new domain – markets(dot)com.
Since then, the company has been doing much better, even though there wasn’t a substantial improvement in its services. The price of the domain purchase is undisclosed.
Other brokers often prefer to go for a two-word domain where one of words is trading, markets or Forex. A good example could be a broker named Admiral Markets. While back in the day the company was called Admiral Investment and Securities, it wanted to rebrand to something shorter and it seems like they did it quite successfully.
Another example is the rebranding of the top site for retail traders. Named as forexpros.com, a website had been collecting a large slice of the retail traders and was generally leading the industry of trading media.
As the Fusion Media owners, people behind forexpros, wanted to move away from forex trading industry and had plans of becoming a second Bloomberg, the invested 2.45 Million Dollars into acquiring a domain name investing.com.
Unfortunately this hasn’t been the best move, as Fusion Media only invested in the domain and hasn’t provided any additional services for the investors.
2. The bonuses
Giving or not giving deposit bonuses has always been a hard choice for the brokers. On the one hand, by offering some 20-30% of the deposit bonus to the clients, a broker can easily gain additional customers. On the other hand, it is pretty harmful for the branding, as such online trading institutions are usually perceived as Market Makers.
Usually brokers try to reward the traders with a certain amount of money for their deposits. This has been done before at mainly gambling industries.
Best brokers tend to avoid such offers in order to associate their brand with the financial services and not gambling. Here you can preview some deposit forex bonuses, and you will hardly find any top10 service provider listed.
Unlike largest online trading service providers, smaller brokers care much more about making profit than establishing a well known brand. This is why the bonus offers are more widespread with smaller players in the industry.
While top dogs will rarely offer any bonus, and in case they offer one, it is probably done over the limited amount of time and the amount tends to be not higher than 10%. Smaller brokers can easily provide a bonus up to 100%.
3. Regulation
Financial services have to be regulated and in online trading industry the rule is simple – the more authorities regulate your entity the better. This is also extremely costly, as a common Cypriot financial license (CySEC) might easily cost you over 100,000 USD paid in legal services and take up over 200,000 USD of your capital for adequacy.
Getting regulated by other authorities is usually even more expensive. Most of the brokers try to go for FCA (United Kingdom) and ASIC (Australia) licenses to establish more trust towards their brand.
In some countries obtaining a regulation can be nearly to impossible. A good example could be United States. Even though it is a great market with lots of potential clients, only a few brokers still operate there. This is so because the regulator requires a lot of capital adequacy and can generally give a fine to a broker for any reason.
In a nutshell, to build a successful online trading brand, everything starts with a domain name, as the customers are more willing to trust a broker with a short and conscience name. Then, the balance between offering goodies for your clients and establishing your reputation is important. Lastly, trust plays an important role and while treating your clients fairly is the best practice, having a few documents from top authorities works quite well.