FairFX Group (LON:FFX) Chief Executive Officer Ian Strafford-Taylor caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their new TV advert, the benefits of their new ‘responsive’ website and the changes to their Android and IOS app
Q1: This morning you released news of three new developments central to your strategy, the first being the launch of a new TV advert which will be shown on ITV, Channel 4 and Sky1. Could you explain in a bit more detail how this will complement the Sky F1 campaign?
A1: With the Sky F1 campaign, because it’s a sponsorship, you’re very restricted about what you can and can’t say, you can put your name out there, like a brand recognition exercise. What’s good about that is it’s very tightly aligned to our target demographic and it runs for the whole year and people watch it, we kind of know whose going to watch it but it is brand recognition and name awareness. The TV ad is different in that it’s 30 seconds instead of 15 and it’s targeted to get people to actually do something, there’s a call to action, there’s a more direct response element to it. So when you overlay the two, you’ve got a great name awareness, brand awareness from the F1 coverage then you put on top of that, an ad that showcases what the card actually does and encourages you to go to the site and you get a very powerful combination so the two sit together very well.
Q2: The second development was that you’ve made your website responsive. What does this mean to customers and for you as a company?
A2: The big change we’re all seeing, all internet companies over the last few years, is it used to be that we’re all watching TV and we’d be sitting there with a desktop laptop, that has now changed, a lot. We’ve moved to tablets and also mobiles, people want to sit there and if they happen to see the site on the TV, they’ll browse on their mobile now with 4G, 3G etc. All website will shrink down so you can see them on a phone but they can be impossible to read, a responsive website actually understands what device is being used to look at it and adjusts so that it’s much more user-friendly and that’s the big change we’ve made to our site. You can now pull it up on any device or small little handheld and it looks fantastic and it’s much easier to navigate. What that means is it’s much better for our customers, existing or new, in terms of them being able to use us as a company and also for us, it’ll radically improve our conversion rates because people won’t bounce off, if they open up the site on their mobile and it doesn’t look very nice or it’s hard to read then they might just move on, whereas now it’s far more compelling.
Q3: That leads me to your app for Android and IOS. You’ve made some changes to the app recently, what were those changes and how do they benefit the company?
A3: There’s several, mostly look, feel and usability again in terms of easier to navigate. We’re all used to now using apps in terms of how they typically look, the menu bars etc. so we’ve bought it up to date with that, we actually do have a load more stuff that’s coming, I’m having deployments every couple of weeks on the app. To date, it’s more about usability and increasingly there’s going to be more functionality on it, and I’ve actually just been in a meeting looking at the downloads of the app, the conversion on the website, all of which are pointing in the right direction so it’s all very cool stuff. I think, going back to the earlier point, for people using mobiles we tend to see people using apps to do stuff, whereas they might browse a site on a mobile to see what it does that may not transact necessarily so the two have to complement each other.
Q4: Going forward, how are you going to measure these new initiatives?
A4: Anyone that’s ever done TV or marketing in general knows how hard it is to measure completely scientifically. What’s quite useful for us is that we’ve put the mobile responsive website live a couple of weeks ago so we had a period of time before the TV advert went live where we could see the conversion percentages on the mobile responsive site versus the old site which like I said, are looking very positive in terms of that. When you run TV ads, what you tend to see is more traffic but the traffic can be less qualified than it was before, generally you see a slight reduction in your conversion percentage and trying to factor out what’s down to the site versus what’s down to the ad, it’s all very complicated but the data will get cleaner over time. What I can tell you is the TV ad has definitely made a mark increase in the amount of traffic we’re seeing and the conversion percentages post mobile responsive website are definitely improved over pre.
Q5: You’ve been quite active with brand awareness and partnering with other companies to cross-sell, what can investors expect to see in terms of news flow over the next few months?
A5: The focus is very much now on our product, our website. I am in discussion with some other people about more mutual marketing, a bit like the Hertz transaction and I think what you’ll see is, and we have seen it, is that more people will come to us looking to partner with us now than they did before, as our brand awareness grows. So it’s not just good for customer awareness as in the retail customers coming to our site but also in terms of us finding partner organisations so I’d hope to have more news flow regularly over the balance of the year.
