Whatever the nature of your trading platform, content creation is something you can make a start on today. If you like, you can fire off a couple of blog posts, garnish each with some basic SEO, and call it a day.

Unfortunately, you probably won’t see the results you wished for. If you want to attract thousands instead of dozens of readers and hope to convert a significant fraction of them instead of a pittance, a trading platform’s content strategy has to be developed with a little more forethought!

While you will rely on best practices and common sense to achieve this, though, even a professional digital marketing agency doesn’t get it right 100% of the time. 

This means that actual content creation only makes up one part of the job: aside from planning in advance, you also need to continuously evaluate your content’s performance, unearthing ways to refine it as you go along.

Key takeaways:

• A trading platform’s content marketing should follow a defined cycle: even while future material is being scheduled, existing content’s effectiveness is evaluated in order to fine-tune your strategy.
  
• You need to characterise your ideal customer so you know who you’re addressing, set specific objectives to work toward, and target content channels that allow you to do both.
  
• Content marketing is comparatively cheap, but it still costs money. Doing more with limited resources requires planning each campaign in advance.
  
• Finding the right topics, content mix, and promotional mechanisms may take several iterations. This is entirely natural and represents an opportunity to hone your insight and skills.

1. Define (and Understand) Your Target Audience

Though you may not think in these terms, a lot of a trading platform’s content solutions are based on storytelling. You can, for instance, cast your reader as the protagonist, making it that much easier for them to form an emotional connection with your brand.

Fortunately, you won’t be writing a novel, but it makes sense to figure out what makes this character tick. As investors, for instance, are they motivated by acquisitiveness, a desire for security, or something else entirely?

Rather than jumping straight in and writing for a generic audience, consider who you’re speaking to and what they want to hear. Think of one broad, or several narrower, buyer personas. What’s on their minds, what problems can you solve for them, where do they spend time online?

If a trading platform’s content plan answers questions prospective clients didn’t even know they had, it’s probably on the right track. Take, for instance, this opinion piece from Morningstar that could, potentially, bring a whole swathe of budding investors on board:

2. Set Useful Goals

If there’s one kind of business that’s all about the numbers, it has to be trading platforms. Content solutions’ achievements can indeed be measured very accurately. However, you do need to make sure that you’re monitoring what matters and setting objectives that are aligned with your broader business strategy.

As is often the case, SMART is a useful framework. The metrics involved can be a little confusing, though; a digital marketing agency can work with you to determine the most appropriate KPIs. At times, these can be remarkably telling estimators for less easily quantifiable forms of success.

3. Choose Channels and Content Types

Different trading platforms’ content strategies may equally well be aimed at acquiring 10 multimillionaires or 10,000 middle-class retail investors. The expected RoI and effort required could even be similar for both campaigns – can you guess where these two approaches really start to diverge?

In each case, you need to figure out on which platform (and within which spaces on each) you can reach your chosen kinds of prospects most effectively. This decision will be influenced by your chosen goals, what the competition is focusing on, and the available budget.

Different customer personas tend to congregate in particular areas of the internet. Some of these are clearly more appropriate for trading platforms’ content marketing than others. However, this doesn’t mean that you should totally ignore apparently unsuitable channels like TikTok.

Such forums may not attract huge numbers of your favourite demographic but they do make it easy for users to share clips they find interesting. This kind of thing does a trading platform’s SEO and brand recognition no harm at all.

Alternatively, you could just slap a well-designed infographic on Pinterest and use it to channel self-qualified prospects to your website.

Source: Pinterest

From there, you can pick up the slack with more serious trading platform content. Plan on using your company blog, supported by an email newsletter, white papers, podcasts, etc., to explain exactly what you can do for clients.

4. Count the Cost

The more, and more sophisticated, content you want to publish, the more you’ll have to spend. A professionally produced YouTube video, for instance, can cost anything from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per minute. It may also end up appealing to a large number of prospects who have little desire to consume written content.

Of course, what matters at the end of the day is how much business you get in return. Spending what’s needed will often increase your overall RoI, like when a trading platform content strategy on social media is amplified by “boosting” some posts.

Retaining a specialist digital marketing agency can help you measure the effectiveness of each campaign more accurately and make sure your trading platform’s content creation efforts aren’t heading down a rabbit hole. Their fees, as well as the following, should all be tallied up in a content marketing budget:

• Software licensing costs (to track trading platform SEO performance, organise and follow up leads, curate content, etc.)
  
• Working hours spent on content marketing in-house
  
• Freelance professionals (graphic designers, editors, social media managers, and so forth)
  
• Advertising (search engine marketing, display, PPC, and social campaigns to improve the effectiveness of content marketing)
  

5. Draw up a schedule

You can now decide on what topics to base your trading platform’s content creation efforts around. Browse the internet to find out what your particular market segment is interested in and see where these subjects intersect with your brand’s messaging.

You’ll want to pay special attention to other trading platforms’ SEO strategies. Are there any low-hanging fruit they’re not plucking? There may well be some keywords that align perfectly with your company’s unique selling point that aren’t drowning in competition. If so, it makes sense to schedule a whole series of blog posts, social media announcements, and other content on that subject.

Source: Yourfinanciallaunchpad

Hook someone with any instalment and get 3 views for the price of 1.

All this information can be tabulated in a spreadsheet defining timeframes, responsibilities, and SEO details. The frequency at which you post new content will largely be determined by available resources. Still, for any trading platform, the content tip that will do you the most good is that quality is preferable over simple quantity. The more engaging people find your material, the bigger your wins will be.

6. Create, publish, and promote your content

You probably thought this was the first step, didn’t you? While actually pulling the trigger on a trading platform’s content marketing is not a trivial exercise, it’s going to be that much more effective if it’s:

• Targeted at a particular audience,
  
• Linked to precise goals,
  
• Optimised for specific content channels,
  
• Organised according to what you can afford, and
  
• Planned to take advantage of definite opportunities.
  

You should also take steps to ensure your message reaches the right people. Highlighting specific pieces using your email list and social media outreach often works wonders. Paid advertising and influencer marketing can be even more effective but naturally comes at a cost.

Of course, there’s still one piece of the puzzle missing once you’ve published your carefully crafted material. Is your trading platform’s content solution actually serving its purpose?

7. Monitor, refresh, and refine

Digital marketing agencies typically schedule weekly meetings between account managers and each of their clients. You can also set up a similar forum within your own marketing department if you don’t want to outsource this function, but there does need to be a designated time and space for everyone to keep an eye on how well you’re doing.

Apart from checking results against benchmarks and expectations, this provides an opportunity to discuss what’s working, consider dropping or modifying that which isn’t performing as it should, and brainstorm new opportunities. Fortunately (and in contrast to much of non-digital marketing), it’s almost always possible to base these conversations on solid figures and metrics.

If, for instance, your articles on cryptocurrency issues prove to be popular, you may as well get a few more written and reinforce this success. If people spend longer on your website after being sent there by social media, you’ll want to put more emphasis on that aspect of your trading platform’s content plan. Depending on regulatory and market developments, older articles may have to be revisited to provide more up-to-date advice and revive their SEO credentials.

Final thoughts

A well-integrated trading platform content strategy is much easier to successfully implement than a bunch of scattered, uncorrelated efforts. Knowing what you’re doing also aligns your inbound marketing with business goals, streamlines the process of getting buy-in from different stakeholders, and lets you course-correct if the results you obtain are less than stellar.

That having been said, the devil is most often found in the details. Frequently, those minor things you assumed were covered are the ones that trip you up. For a trading platform, content tips found online – on drafting compelling headlines, generating shares on social media, and ranking on the first page of search engine results – can get you some of the way. However, there’s no substitute for experience, which often means looking for certain skills outside your own company.