Where can I get users from Financial Industry or Banking IT?

Discussions
#1

I am building an application for young professionals within the Financial Industry whether they are in Ops, IT, Finance, Marketing, Sales, Investment Banking, etc…

Currently I activated Facebook Ads.

  1. LinkedIn Groups (Intern Class 2012, etc… ) = No, Private Groups
  2. WallStreetOasis = Yes
  3. Twitter Blast = No, might be conceived as spam

What are other channels I can get in-front of these users?

Thanks.

#2

Ads in wall street bars.

Meetup sponsorship for F# and associated “finance oriented” systems

Parallel computing conferences.

#3

Thanks mj,

I forgot to mention, I would like all users within only 3 companies. Very targeted.

For ex: JP Morgan Chase

#4

Twitter allows ads as well, and I have had varying levels of success with them. I found them more successful when you use content marketing to raise your profile, rather than just “buy this.” You can target people who post in certain categories, or follow certain people.

#5

What sort of application?

#6

That made me perplexed. What common could be between IT and Investment Bankers? Even the elevators they use are different.

Are you sure the application is “very targeted”?

#7

The application is similar to Glassdoor. In order to study the interaction between users, it would beneficial to have them (5+ users) be in the same company.

rfctr, you make a good point. Like in Glassdoor, an Op person wouldn’t necessary read about IT - however they still would read it if its about the company culture in general.

I definitely can get 1 user from each of the Fortune 500 companies, however that doesn’t work well to study interactions. It doesn’t validate much about the product when only 1 person is using per company vertical.

Thoughts?

#8

Try getting in through the Accenture networks. They have lots of consultants in IT and Finance. Most Accenture folks are always looking for networking and growth opportunities. You might make an inroad via LinkedIn.

#9

Caution: If you are anything like Glassdoor, do not approach distribution and marketing as a single effort.

Platform Thinking is required reading in this context. Read this. And this.

If your product is anything like Glassdoor, you’re building a platform - the product you build will not be delivering value to customers in itself.

The product you build will enable producers in your network to deliver value to consumers.

Thus, you must address the war on two fronts:

  1. You must attract producers to your network, and incentivize them to produce, and
  2. You must use their product to attract consumers.

How you approach these two targets will differ. You should not use a single, unified strategy to attract both.

This is the classic chicken/egg scenario that all marketplaces and platforms must address in their distribution strategy.

Two Protips:
1 - Approach your target demographics (producers vs consumers) from two different angels.

Example: in this episode of TWiST, Uber founder Travis Kalanick discusses how he and his co-founder each owned one side of the market. Travis was responsible for lining up supply (limo companies), and his partner was responsible for lining up demand (riders).

If you can, separate responsibilities between a partner so one of you owns supply (producers) and the other owns demand (readers).

At the very least, recognize the subtle yet important fundamental differences between the two demographics you must cater to, and tailor your marketing approach accordingly.

2 - Cold call. Do things that don’t scale. Online advertising when you’re just starting out is a cop out.

Sure, you’d love to find some scalable shortcut right now so you can just tweak power editor and throw money at customer acquisition and sit back and watch users roll in.

It could work. There’s ways to make it work.

But, especially to start, you need to be picking up the phone.

Calling your customers will be the single best way to learn their pain points, learn the best language and selling points for your product, and develop relationships with your first customers.

Find a database of finance industry professionals and use this Fiverr gig to scrape it into a CSV.

Then write a cold call script, and start dialing for dollars.

I share the cold-call method I learned as a sales rep at Yelp on Super Smart Sales. There’s free guides on the site there that will point you in the right direction, and premium content available if you want to explore further.

Now go crush.

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#10

Do you have existing contacts within the finance industry? If not, how well do you understand the problems they have, and whether they’d be interested in your solution? Should you be pursuing this market?