My mate just signed up today 243,94*
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Since itās not launched, probably not.
Just persuaded someone from Trading212 to see the light - 2442XX
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Iām not a marketing/advertising person so the following opinion might be weak or invalid but ā¦
I am getting worried about the lack of advertising by Freetrade. On Twitter today I have seen numerous ads by Trading212 and something called AvaTrade, who the hell are AvaTrade? never heard of them until today, but now I have heard of them and so have potentially MILLIONS of people - you know how many Freetrade adverts I have seen on Twitter? ZERO. Which means the only people who get to hear about Freetrade are the people who already know about Freetrade.
The reason I am worried is because Monzo had this whole word-of-mouth push and now every other bank in the World is pushing their adverts saying their app does this and that and I think to myself āMonzo already do that better, but no one knows Monzo do that because Monzo arenāt telling anyone!ā
Maybe Freetrade are waiting for their Plus account to be in a ready state, but I donāt want some crappy little upstart taking all the customers because they shouted louder.
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I get the concern. I think they need the right people in charge for this but itās not necessarily an issue.
You point to monzos word of mouth approach. Staring bank essentially did the same, but they did push a tv marketing campaign last year when they decided it was the right time to do so. That seemed to work really well for them and now they have a new referral campaign. Slow and steady have worked really well for starling and despite monzo having more users starling are the ones looking to be making money this year.
Thereās also a lot of untapped customers to go around. And Iām pretty sure Freetrade have had ads before.
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Monzo is a bad example because, they have a pretty dominant position in the neobank space in the U.K. Still fastest growing bank in the U.K. by some distance also. As for Freetrade I agree that itās a good time to push with advertising. The only thing is that effective advertising costs a lot of money, perhaps they are waiting to conclude Series B before pushing this agenda who knowsš
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I hope so, I think this is a solid product and I would hate hesitation (waiting for the perfect product) to lead to failure.
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Maybe, I do think an advertising campaign has to be part of the 2021 agenda. I agree it is expensive and so I would hope some smart people (which we know Freetrade have) could cost-benefit analyse any such campaign to ensure maximum returns.
It has been mentioned before that people believe once SIPPās are available in Freetrade we should see a dramatic increase (assuming a competitive model) and maybe that is a good time to drive a marketing campaign?
I think it may be best until they have the Plus offering fine-tuned. Otherwise theyāre advertising to potential customers who either just use the free account or who are not impressed enough with the Plus account and go elsewhere.
You need to be bringing in customers who are willing to pay as advertising is not cheap and we already have a decent stream of new sign ups everyday anyway.
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Fair enough, I will continue to watch how this unfolds. I just noticed there is going to be an Ask-Me-Anything session with Adam on Tuesday 6th October, perfect for my question!
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The stock universe is getting to the point where a campaign could realistically achieve a decent conversion rate. Feature wise they still have a lot to do, but agree with the point that there has to be a balance between user growth & product perfection.
Iāve been really impressed by the growth over the past 3-6 months, 400 new stocks last week & 100 ETFās this week continues the momentum. I think a campaign that coincides with the 2021 ISA season would make a lot of sense
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It would be great to see a marketing push this year, I presume it will happen after Plus launches?!
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Clearly someone at FT has been listening to you allā¦
I just bumped into a FT advert whilst watching a finance related video (possibly CNBC or Bloomberg) on YouTube. I liked the ad as it was eye catching, obviously the FT brand, whilst also being very clear in terms of the messaging.
If you want to see the FT ad, I imagine that you are going to need to watch a few finance videos on YouTube until it pops up either within or between videos.
Enjoy! 
Matt
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YouTube could be a good avenue but they just need to avoid what T212 does with spamming unskippable ads constantly on basically every video, I feel this has put a lot of people off T212 due to feeling harassed by them. YouTube ads are also not the most UX friendly now theyāve got comfortable with double unskippable ads.
Instagram seems possibly the best avenue for social media advertising, their ads are pretty user friendly as they donāt impose their will on you and FTās branding would definitely catch peopleās eye with the bright pink colour scheme on there.
Also on YouTube people are generally there for a purpose to watch a video, while on Instagram people are more passive in their engagement they can click away to an ad at anytime because theyāre usually not looking for a specific thing when scrolling through their feed. I know I am much less likely to engage with a YouTube ad because Iām there to watch the video and I donāt want to be distracted from that, but I engage with Instagram ads all the time because Iām generally just there scrolling passively so if something piques my interest Iāll more than likely engage with the ad.
Sorry for the long post but just some thoughts I had because I did my masterās research project vaguely in this field lol.
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Also Youtube ads by their nature select for people who arenāt willing to spend Ā£12/month on an app which might be a sub-optimal demographic.
I completely agree FT should be going harder and itās disappointing user growth rate hasnāt increased materially in the past 6 months (with an enormous tailwind).
I put this down to two things; failing to execute Referrals 2.0 (the fact you can only recommend one person with your code is absolutely mental - hundreds of companies have nailed this) & not enough paid social advertising (when benchmarked against competitors).
I agree the product is nowhere near perfect - but you need to grow the user base nonetheless.
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They clearly are doing something to attract users as there 100k more of them since they raisedā¦
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It all comes down to money, freetrade canāt just burn thru the cash pile, it all needs to be balanced out and they have their overheads to cover. It easy to just spend money but FT has to do it wisely with what they have.
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I think youāve touched on a critical point. To me it would seem sensible to wait until Plus is launched before a major marketing push would commence.
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Honestly if FT wanted to mitigate a lot of these concerns people are having with the value of plus a simple solution is to heavily reduce the 0.45% FX rate or just make it 0% entirely I think that would make a difference for a lot of people and itās such a simple fix which adds a lot of value.
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