One of the things I keep thinking about props is that they are doing more interesting things marketing-wise than a lot of brokers.
You can argue that’s because they’re not subject to the same regulatory restrictions. But I think even taking that into account, they’ve done a good job at reaching a wider audience and making people more interested in the trading world.
Mainly this has been on content and ‘community’ type stuff but another interesting example came to TradeInformer on Wednesday from PipFarm, a prop founded and run by James Glyde. Over the past month, the company ran a campaign advertising a free challenge give away.
Traders had to set up an account with PipFarm, as you’d expect, but did not have to pay for the challenge. The company did no paid ads or partnerships for this. Instead they just announced the campaign and did some PR around it. In other words, the cost was zero.
What were the results? In total, 260 people signed up to take a free challenge. Of those, 17 passed the challenge and then only 8 of them were eligible for a payout. Total payouts that PipFarm had to make were $4,160.81.
‘Ok,’ you might be thinking, ‘so a prop gave a bunch of money away for free. Great.’
This misses the interesting part though.
According to Glyde, the minimum total impressions that they saw as a result of the campaign was 660,000. And because the only cost to the firm were payouts, this was like paying a CPM of around $6 – 20% of the going rate for other websites, according to Glyde.
“I was skeptical about giveaways at first; would they work? How risky are they?” Glyde told TradeInformer. “Every other firm did giveaways on Twitter, and we didn’t want to be like every other firm. After a few months, I decided to try it, and the results were surprisingly effective. While few winners converted into paying members, the sensation it created around our brand was significant. After four months of data, we can see how effective they were for community building and establishing credibility.”
As that last point hints at, another benefit of the campaign was growth in PipFarm’s social following. They also got new emails in their database and more people into their Discord channel.
Again, I find some people on the brokerage side of things can be snooty about what props are doing. But to me this is exactly the kind of clever marketing stuff that I see brokers (occasionally) doing and reaping rewards from. Credit, as the expression goes, where credit is due.