Know-How Exchange : Strategy

If the ads are producing traffic, and your website isn't converting traffic to inquiries, the problem is your website (as Phil surmised).

Before you try to get more traffic, you need to boost your conversions. You can keep running the ads, and split test your website's copy, etc. That'll give you more data.

Consider asking an expert for a website critique (there are many experts on this site who'd be interested). Post your project here: https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/pfh_addco.asp

Dear Red

Assuming that yours is a legitimate business which makes its money by allowing people to trade stocks and make profits or losses, depending on their skill or luck, there’s not a lot of point in looking at the majority of stock trading sites to get any ideas. For entirely separate reasons, applying many of the standard criteria of web-based marketing success also do not apply.

The private stock trading business and its marketing are very different to selling most tangibles through a web site. Or, come to think of it, most conventional intangibles such as insurance or loans. Unfortunately the majority of stocks and share websites are driven by get-rich-quick “web marketing” techniques where it slowly dawns on the paying sucker, sorry, participant, that the priority is to recruit visitors and then show them how they can, in return for a fee, make a pile out of, er, recruiting more visitors to whom they in turn can teach, for a fee, how to recruit more people etc, etc. Somehow in this type of business, the actual product, whether it’s a stock trading system or trombones (I’m not kidding!) just fades away into the background.

Assuming that your business really is about making money for both yourselves and your clients, and then the techniques needed to make it successful through marketing are differentiated from the mainstream by orders of magnitude in the difficulty of achieving good results. Chris Cardell and other UK based marketing experts sell their courses and expertise partly on the basis of recognising just this. If a website is successful at attracting visitors through search, SEO and direction from adverts or email, then the next question must be, “What percentage of visitors take a further positive action (Subscription, signing up for e-newsletters and so on and what percentage toddle off somewhere else."

He quotes 1% taking affirmative action and 99% leaving before making themselves known. They very rarely come back and do it again, so the owner has only the one chance to get them to sign up. Doubling the income from such a site at first glance looks daunting, through whatever method, but if you put it a different way, it looks modest. Get only 98% to visit and leave and as long as your conversion ratio is unaffected, you will achieve the goal from the 2% who act affirmatively.

How far you can take this argument depends on how engaging the site is; how well the copy does the closing for you and with what ingenuity you can apply incentives to encourage participation. This makes the assumption that once they have “bought” something, you have hooked them and they will come back for more if satisfied. Psychologically this is perfectly valid and it is a truism that the best time so sell something to someone, is when they are already paying for something else that they’ve just bought.

You might be able to use some of the bait from other intangible sites, but be careful about the legislation – the idea that follows would be illegal; in the UK, but it serves to illustrate what is possible.

Casino and gambling sites have the same problem – few visitors decide to participate. They mitigate this by offering a bonus for joining. Superficially it looks attractive to be given a golden greeting for using their site, but it is very cost effective – they are only going to give the money back to the owners and the terms prevent you from making one punt on both black and red and walking away with half of your free stake. Once they’ve experienced the thrill of the table they will usually come back for more, right down to their last pair of cufflinks is they are unfortunate enough to discover that they have a problem with stopping.

Apart from finessing such inducements, all that is left is the ability of your site and the quality of your copy to close more visitors and to increase your traffic. The beauty of the internet is its size and you can afford to have huge order to enquiry ratios and huge enquiry to sales ratios such as 1 in 1000 or more, because you can get enough people to visit your site to still make it worthwhile. If SOE doesn’t work then the whole gamut of email advertising, blogs, twitter and so on become the means you use to drive traffic. Apart from the legal restraints in a regulated market, you also have to be careful – something like 32% of all spam was at one time for investments, most of which were rip-offs. Such are the bad memories that many prospective traders would run a mile if invited to visit your site through an email!

Finally, it is not for nothing that stocks and shares are traded professionally by sales people on the exchanges. Talking to prospective investors is still the strongest way of getting them to buy a stock or to buy a financial service such as yours. It might therefore be an idea to offer a free-phone number so that they can talk to a sales person. Their close rate might not be all that great, but I’ll bet that it would be vastly better than to 0.001% of visitors who will decide to sign up of their own volition.

Steve Alker
Xspirt