4 Ways to Increase Your Brokerage Volumes

If there’s one issue we’ve been trying to hammer home on our blog, it’s the importance of harnessing brokerage data. The development of brokerage-friendly technologies to manage and utilise this data has been a long-running priority for us as a company. In recent years we’ve taken this further by incorporating developments in A.I to provide human teams with assistance in the management and use of this data. In this way, certain big data processes that were once the domain of the big tech companies are becoming available to smaller businesses.

Below you’ll find three of these discussed, and a final non-techy suggestion thrown into the bargain, just in case you thought we’re always talking our book! Enjoy!

Stop leaving FTDs on the table, track your marketing campaigns properly

This is the most obvious one, but we still see it all the time. Brokers do a great job of spending money to get their names out there and increase visibility, but sometimes they don’t do as great a job of tracking those efforts. More often than not, it’s because they’re not set up to consolidate the data from all the various marketing initiatives and platforms they’re using into one central “brain” so that the business can make sense of it.

As the competition between brokers has grown, those that are able to extract value from the data generated by their marketing efforts, are able to manage their advertising budgets much more effectively, as well as target their messaging in a more intelligent way. By and large, the changing fortunes of the top ten CFD brokers over the past decade has been the story of who got smarter with their data.

This is especially so with marketing, which tends to see the largest budgets, as well as the most wasted resources (which often get chalked up to “branding.”) If you’re not tracking your marketing efforts, and using that data to improve them, then you’re leaving FTDs all over the table for other brokers to convert.

The changing fortunes of the top ten CFD brokers over the past decade has been the story of who got smarter with their data.

Listen to what your clients are saying

Never forget that it’s traders who know markets best. You may be offering the exposure, but that neither makes you an authority on markets, nor on what traders really want. So, listen to your traders. The content of your CS, sales, and retention calls is worth its weight in gold if you use it in the right way. The same goes for live chats and email communications. We’ve had a lot of contact with many brokerages over the years, but rarely have we seen them using what their customers are saying to inform business development decisions.

Again, this comes down to not having the means to make the most of all that raw data. In smaller brokerages, an attentive CS or sales manager can sometimes detect these themes emerging in customer communications. If they have the ear of the right people, or a seat at the table, they can sometimes offer these insights to upper management. But listening at scale requires a technical infrastructure in the same way that tracking leads does.

The above two points really do go hand in hand when you get them right. One listens for what clients are saying is important to them, the other reaches out, using that knowledge to craft the marketing message.

In a saturated market where almost all your competitors are offering roughly the same instruments, with roughly the same spreads, on roughly the same platforms, any chance you have of standing out from the pack should be jumped on.

Move quickly to add trending assets

This follows on from the previous point, but deserves a paragraph of its own because it’s a big cause of lost volumes. By not listening to the traders you have access to, you’re often adding assets well after they’re trending, and sometimes even after the reason for the interest in trading them in the first place has faded (this happens more often than you might think).

In today’s rapidly changing markets, being there first by offering exposure to trending symbols that your competitors are sleeping on is a sure-fire way to increase volumes, without having to really change anything about how you do business, other than being slightly more attentive to trends and being able to move quickly in the addition of these assets to your offering.

Tell the story

Panda offers technological solutions for the management of marketing (and CS, and sales, and retention) data. Panda CRM has evolved from a customer relationship management tool, to a complete brokerage intelligence system that does all of the above and more, including the recent addition of A.I modules to help every department be much more in touch with the data, and make better, more productive decisions as a result.

But rather than only talking about solutions that we offer at Panda, this last point is equally important and you can start on it today, almost for free. Tell the story of markets in your communications with your customers. Whether it be your email list, company blog, or social media channels.

Today, more than ever, people are looking for someone to boil down the complexity of markets into a narrative they can understand and get behind.

The single greatest change that’s taken place in global markets since the Great Financial Crisis, is that narrative plays a huge part nowadays, often to the perplexity of those who exclusively look at the fundamentals. The ubiquity of the smartphone and social media are obviously a big part of this, and demographically too, you’re dealing with a different kind of market participant today than you were in the mid-2000s.

The point is that today, more than ever, people are looking for someone to boil down the complexity of markets into a narrative they can understand and get behind. So devote some resources to telling this story. Potential clients are not just looking for a venue nowadays, they’re not just looking for an education section with a boring glossary of terms. They can get these things everywhere else. What they want, and what they can’t get everywhere, is the story told in a compelling way.

By story we mean something more than just market news. It’s the talk behind the news, the discussion of events, by people in the know, with opinions and hot takes. Stories speed up understanding (it’s why everyone’s so obsessed with podcasts nowadays) and education, which increases confidence, which is a fast track to wanting to test this newfound knowledge and confidence on markets. There’s a lot to be said for good, old fashioned opinion. You wouldn’t think it would have anything to do with trading volumes, but a confident trader is a trader who’s trading. We’ll see you next time.