WARNING: the following article was written for the good people at igbaffiliate.com, and you can only guess who their targeted audience is (hint for Thomas: affiliates!). This is why we are going to use very short words :)

So go ahead and read the complete article on their oh-so-impressive online magazine (page #32), and remember to hug our traffic generating friends if you happen to meet one! 

Get local or go home: A strategy for winning on the global binary options market

Keywords, keywords, keywords — they’ve become an obsession for a lot of businesses. But build your strategy on keywords alone in your binary options operation and you’re likely to suffer.

Here’s why:

Affiliates work hard to find the right keywords to earn high rankings in search results. As an operator, you’re benefiting from their efforts — but so are all the other operators who’ve paid the affiliates to line up customers for them.

So now you’ve got this mass of people to be divided among operators. For simplicity’s sake, though, let’s just compare your company, Smooth Operator, with a less savvy outfit. We’ll call your competition Dense Operator.

Dense Operator, like your group, gets potential customers from all over the world. But again to simplify, let’s concentrate on how you each treat potential customer from England, the United States, and France. Dense is dense, but not so dense as to realize that French people speak French and English people and Americans both speak English. So Dense has its English-language site translated to French and steers French-based leads to that site. Then Dense sits back and waits for the money to come in from all these great leads it got from the affiliate’s keyword work.

Your group, Smooth, of course also has the French version of its site, but you know there are differences between the English and American versions of English: What’s spelled as “colour” on the English site is spelled as “color” on the American one. Subtle? Sure. But we’re just getting warmed up.

Throughout the versions you offer as the Smooth Operator group, you have translated currency references to reflect the denomination of the country. Americans won’t be confused when they see a reference to pounds and some awkward way of converting that amount into dollars. The support operations also are designed to address the differences among the countries, even if they’re not physically located in each spot. But because the sites are so well-constructed — put together with the assistance of natives of each country to avoid any awkward cultural faux pas — there’s not a huge need for customers to contact the support team.

Back on Dense’s site, the group is inviting customers to judge whether the stock of Apple and other global brands is going to go up or down. Your group has all of the same brands, but in France you’ve got companies listed that only the French know about. In the United States — a sprawling country with major corporations sprinkled throughout its cities — you’ve even adjusted what customers see based on their location. For your desktop version, the customers’ IP addresses clue your servers in on where they’re based. For your mobile version, the GPS data from smartphones locks in on their location.  If the customer is located in Ohio, the desktop or phone might show Procter & Gamble. If the customer is in Portland, Ore., the screens might show Nike. (This is connected to a new business trend called SoLoMo, which emphasizes the importance of tailoring your marketing to the local needs and interests of customers, many of whom are tethered to their mobile devices.)

So what’s going on here? Put succinctly, your group, Smooth, has figured out how to localize your offerings to your customers. Dense only is thinking of migrating the leads from the affiliates to its sites with very little distinction among those sites.

This resembles in part the “long-tail” phenomenon of keyword in which companies that can refine their SEO practices to attract customers others have forgotten about will do well. The distinction here is that the separation doesn’t occur in finding the customers to begin with but rather on how they’re handled once they’ve arrived. And with millions of potential customers in each separate country, we’re not talking about the very tip of a tail, but the middle portion or better.  Find out how to ensure your operation is landing there with your binary options site and you’re likely to do very well.

Speaking of tailored offerings, my company, Hybrid Interaction, offers customized solutions for companies involved in Binary Options, iGaming, Social Gaming and related businesses to ensure they’re reaching customers and maximizing each customer’s long-term value. Contact me to discuss how I can assist your organization.

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Shahar Attias, the Founder and CEO of Hybrid Interaction Ltd., is a globally recognized Retention Marketing and Loyalty expert and the blogger behind iGamingCRM.com. He is a frequent speaker at iGaming Conferences and has a deep understanding of all vertical-specific KPI’s in the online gambling industry, as well as an extensive experience in Forex & Binary Options, and recent case studies with applying Player Development Strategies at casino-style gaming applications on Facebook.