Marketing is a tough, highly competitive industry. Sometimes you need to find inspiration from industries completely unrelated to your own.
Investment platforms are a perfect example of this. Many of their strategies apply to every business industry. If you read through this Motley Fool review you’ll soon see that the tactics they use to market themselves can be used to boost your small business.
Let’s take a look at some investment platform marketing strategies you can apply to your business.
1. Make Your Unique Selling Point the Focus
Unless your business has invented a completely new product or service, you’re competing with thousands of other businesses all doing the same thing. Your challenge is to make your brand seem superior to the rest.
Take SoFi Invest as an example. This robo-advisor investing platform has observed the pain points of small-time investors and focused on high fees. The center of their marketing pitch, as seen in this SoFi Invest review, is they don’t charge any.
Consider the major pain point of your target market and figure out how to alleviate it. Once you home in on that aspect of your business that’s the main way to market your company.
2. Communicate Regularly With Your Customers
Everyone likes to declare that old-style methods of marketing are dead and that social media marketing has supplanted everything.
Social media marketing is important, but you can still make major gains from starting a blog for both existing customers and SEO purposes.
Don’t believe us?
The statistics make it clear. Old-style SEO still generates more traffic than organic social media. In fact, SEO drives 1000% more traffic than social media.
It may not be shiny or sexy, but there’s a reason why these big investment platforms still put a lot of effort into creating simple blogs.
3. Grow an Email List
Your average person loves newsletter lists. Encouraging your customers to sign up for your newsletter creates a private, personalized communication channel.
This is even more important if you’re mainly selling and marketing on platforms like Amazon and Facebook. You don’t control those platforms and they could shut down or kick you out at any time. Bring your customers to a platform you control.
The impact of growing an email list cannot be understated. The Motley Fool’s primary offering its Stock Advisor subscription.
This is little more than a monthly newsletter providing informed stock picks. It’s a simple tool yet hundreds of thousands of people pay $99 per year for the privilege.
Email marketing should be a top priority of any marketing strategy.
4. Building Personalization
Would you rather receive an email from “Dave from Amazon” or “Amazon”? It might not seem like much of a difference, but we see time and time again that consumers want to know the real you. They don’t want to talk to the brand they want to talk to a human.
When you are collecting user feedback or trying to solve a customer’s problem, people are more likely to cooperate and engage when they believe someone just like them is on the other side.
The Motley Fool, for example, doesn’t promote itself through being the Motley Fool. It promotes itself through being the platform of Tom and David Gardner.
They regularly sign off with their real names. They speak to their subscribers through their real names. And they give insights into their lives.
Building in that level of personalization may not be a silver bullet SEO tool, but it goes beyond that. It strengthens that business-to-customer relationship. This is vital to their long-term success.
5. Offer an Easy Entry Point
Investment platforms are the kings of selling huge, expensive packages to their customers. But if you don’t know a business, would you give them $1000 of your money? Few would.
This is why the top investment platforms are offering easy, low-cost entry points. M1 Finance is another investment platform. They charge no fees, no commissions, and a minimum account balance of $0.
They make their money through upselling later through their personal loan and checking account services.
Apply that principle to your business. Let customers find out what you’re all about without a firm commitment.
Not only is it essentially an opportunity for you to market your brand, but the modern consumer expects it.
Conclusion
Marketing is a long game. Even the best marketers cannot yield instant results. Most successful brands take years to gain traction. This is regardless of the approach they use. Whether it’s a content marketing strategy or focusing entirely on social media ads, it will take time.
The key is to follow a series of tried-and-tested strategies with the confidence that you’ll build your profile and customer base.
Without that commitment to consistency, your business is practically guaranteed to fail.
What is the cornerstone of your small business’s marketing strategy?
