TRADING AND MARKETING
It took me some eight years to go from being interested in the stock market to becoming a trading (money-losing) hobbyist. Like many others I’ve been dipping my toes in the water buying popular stocks, sometimes along with the reddit crowd, for fun.
And while picking out neet sounding tickers and seeing what happens scratched an initial itch, at some point I started thinking that perhaps I could become profitable if I learned a lot more than I knew about trading. Little did I know that I was about to get one of my most significant lessons in something else entirely: content marketing.
Information about trading is tricky, there’s way too much. I was reading books, watching youtube videos, searching online bulletin boards — wherever I looked and whatever I read felt so incredibly vast, that no matter how much knowledge I accumulated I couldn’t tell if I was going in the right direction or not.
I was starting to lose interest as none of the methods seemed to click with me, they either were not articulated well enough or were too extensive for a newbie to get a full grasp of. Discouraged by the lack of a clear path, I’ve significantly reduced my trading and increased my available funds, which was nice, but not what I wanted.
CONTENT MARKETING
One day I came across a rapidly trending reddit post that was narrow enough to make a real difference for me. In roughly 1000 words, one new reddit member explained his rather simple method to making money in stocks. He had demonstrated how he’d approach picking a stock to trade, the timeframes he’d look at, the correlation between the charts and market psychology, all based on a single trading setup. Before, I didn’t even know there were setups. After reading his post, I came to memorize his entire trading setup by heart. Me and thousands of other previously lost newbie traders.
The sheer amount of likes, comments, and questions he’d received made it clear that this person had an actual, deep understanding of his target audience. He had approached a crowd of incredibly eager, clueless trading enthusiasts and gave them exactly what they needed: their very first tool, their very first implementable tactic. He had given some direction to a crowd that had none, and that’s big. The curious thing was that he’d left no social profiles to visit or courses to buy.
However, with the content being so valuable, the newbies were immediately looking for more — one of them had found the trader’s instagram account and posted it in the comments (an accomplice, maybe?). Obviously, a flood of visitors ensued — they had found a goldmine. The trader had posted his stock picks daily, along with price targets to watch for and his condensed strategy behind picking each particular stock and how he would play it should a particular scenario occur.
I started following the account. Visiting daily, eagerly anticipating his every post to learn about his stock picks and trading strategy. I can’t recall the exact numbers, but within weeks the account grew from a few hundred followers to over ten thousand. Not very long after that, in a perfectly orchestrated move, he’d launched a paid trading chat channel where he’d engage with a smaller group of people on the daily, answering questions and accompanying them as they make their first educated steps in the trading game.
Fast forward to not much more than 6 months later, his channel consisted of almost 400 paying members, each shedding around $100 a month. A-ha. This guy had literally turned free, on-point, valuable content into a full time job paying a $40K monthly salary.
As I mentioned earlier, seeing the whole thing unfold right in front of my eyes was one of the most significant content marketing, or social media marketing lessons I’d ever encountered, and I’ve been reflecting on it ever since. This trader understood his target audience so well, that he knew exactly what to give them — and that’s so different from a lot of the content marketing being done — which for the most part consists of blogs that are somewhat SEO worthy.
TAKEAWAY
Providing value via content marketing is not a new idea, but I’m hoping this story can help shed some light on the process, and just how successful a winning strategy can be. To conclude, I’ve outlined what I think are the most important steps to replicate the success mentioned in this article:
1
Spend TONS of time getting in your customers shoes and understanding what they want. In this case, our guy was probably a confused beginner himself for quite a while and could recall exactly what he wanted to know at the time. If it isn’t you (the marketer), then find living, breathing examples of your target audience and study them. A single, powerful enough pain solved for your audience is all you need to kick start a chain of heightened interest.
2
Outline your marketing funnel — it doesn’t have to be incredibly complex, on the contrary. In our example it was a bait on reddit leading to an instagram account. Seems sort of basic considering some marketing tactics, but you’d be surprised at the amount of companies pouring big money into content with no clear premeditated goals.
3
Provide immense value FOR FREE. Make yourself so valuable that the temptation to get the paid service is irresistible. I could argue that at least 50% of the hard value provided in this scheme was free. I bought into the service to see what it looked like. And the rest of the 50% seemed to be the community he’s built, most of the actual tips were available for all to read.