How FTX Does Marketing ($25B Valuation!) + How They Can Improve

Today, we're going to talk about how FTX, the crypto exchange, does marketing. They just raised a bunch of money and they're now valued at $25 billion. We can see that their founder, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, says the firm could spend the proceeds of its funding rounds on acquisitions, which I think is super smart. And we're going to come back to how acquisitions and marketing kind of come into play here because there seems to be some good opportunities here. So What is a crypto exchange exactly? Just think about Coinbase. Coinbase is a really good example. Binance would be another great example, right? So FTX is a good example right here. So new funding round includes Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and funds managed by BlackRock, right? We're going to talk about a couple of different areas. We're going to talk about SEO, maybe paid media as well. And we're going to talk about maybe how acquisitions relate in with SEO here. So FTX has a bunch of different domains. They have FTX.US, which is geared towards its US customers, and then FTX.com. And then they have a bunch of subdomains, right? This is ftx.com/en, and you can see that they have a bunch of other languages as well. I want to start off and talk about things from perhaps a branding perspective, an email marketing perspective as well. If a bunch of people are going to land on this site, what you want to be doing ideally is you want to be collecting emails. They have this section over here, but you know, I'll tell you one thing that I've realized in the past doing a lot of testing is that carousels like this typically don't work well. So focusing on one key, what's the What's the subheadline? And what type of value are you trying to drive? From there, you have to make your offer a no-brainer, right? So how can you have such a no-brainer offer where people are signing up? I guarantee you the conversion rate for people to fill out their email address over here is not that high because it's not clear what value they're gonna get from putting in their email address. If you think about what Coinbase has, I believe what they still have on their homepage is, if you sign up, we're gonna give you $5 in Bitcoin, right? So that's a much more enticing offer than this, and then you enter in your email address, right? And let's go to coinbase.com. So sign up and get $5 in Bitcoin. Okay, the future of money is here. Over 68 million people. So they're, by the way, they're constantly testing their homepage, right? Because a lot of people are hitting the homepage. You know, there's kind of a partial form fill over here and then get $5 in Bitcoin for signing up. There's an element of trust over here, the future of money, right? Like if you understand crypto, like, you know, say no more. And then they have this loading bar up here. Okay. You know, the call to action, the call to actions are kind of, they're consistent and then you can see all the different offerings that they have. So that's Coinbase. So that's on the email side, right? And so you might have an exit popup if you want. To kind of focus on driving the conversion rates higher. Ideally, hiring an email marketer full-time because they're working on expansion right now would be huge. Full-time person on emails, full-time person maybe on SMS marketing as well. Just being super aggressive because the market's growing so quickly right now. You know, we're gonna leave the App Store alone. I'm sure they're spending on App Store ads. You know what, we'll leave that alone for right now. They have a referral program as well. So let's take a look at what they're doing from an affiliate standpoint. You receive 30% of their fees and they would get 5% of their fees back. I wonder what Coinbase's affiliate program looks like. Like you got to be competitive here, right? So referral program, because affiliates are going to drive a lot of revenue here and you're going to have a lot of creative marketers trying to get into the space, right? Yeah. I mean, just skimming this right now, this is not a very good offer. If FTX can have the best referral program in class and they can have an affiliate manager just tied to that, they're going to be in a good spot to continue growing. Now I want to come back to things from an SEO perspective. If I click on BTC over here, this is their BTC page, right? This doesn't give search spiders a lot to come off of or to crawl. Sure, there's a lot of movement. These graphs are cool and all that, but you got to give some meat for the search spiders, right? When we look at what Coinbase does, if you search for like buy BTC as an example, right, Coinbase is over here. And so I'm going to actually go incognito again and go buy BTC. And let's go over to Coinbase over here. When you click on that, they've optimized their homepage for that, right? You know, maybe what we do from another level is I just want to look at kind of these coin pages, right? Let's take a look at Cardano as an example. How does the Cardano Cardano page look. You can see here there are internal links here that are super helpful to help search spiders because there's a lot of pages on their site and you can see kind of what's going on. You can trade, you know, there's a call to action for that. Look, there's an about section over here. There's resources, right? Cardano is on a decline this week. Here's the top stories around Cardano, popular cryptocurrency. So there's a lot of internal linking going on over here. So what needs to happen here is with the war chest that FTX has, they need to be thinking about how can they hire an SEO full-time or hire an SEO firm To help with this, the white paper. Like this stuff is all good. Like search spiders like this stuff. And so what do you think is going to happen? Let's search for Cardano. Buy Cardano. Let's see what happens here. Coinbase does pay for the ads as well. Makes a lot of sense. Number three is Coinbase, and you wonder why? Because Coinbase has a very strong domain authority. Domain authority meaning they have a lot of links pointing to the website from an SEO perspective. They've also optimized the page well. Look, look at this: Cardano ADA price charts and news. Coinbase, you know. A lot of stuff that FTX is doing right now, they don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel. Who can I hire from Coinbase right now? Who's done this already? I want to look at how they're doing from an SEO perspective. So this is FTX.us, and I want to do a comparison with FTX and Coinbase. FTX, you can see they have about 2,800 referring domains. So these, these can be kind of unique links going to the site. Organic traffic, traffic value, not much organic traffic. So 21,000 traffic values is 1. $1.5K per month. In comparison, coinbase.com, they have about 95,000 links pointing to the website and they have 15 million organic visits. That's per month. And the traffic value, if they're able to pay for ads on this, Google Ads, $7.6 million a month. And they rank for 415,000 keywords and they're bidding on 7,700 keywords over here. Whereas FTX, United States at least, is only bidding on 80. And they're not really running paid ads at all, right? So that's kind of the comparison right now. That's the gap that's going on. You know, the fact that FTX is doing so well already without marketing means there's a lot of opportunity. So we kind of just talk about paid a little bit. We talk about SEO, but I want to take a look at the content gap. So let's do Coinbase.com. Let's do FTX.us. Or, you know what, let's do .com. Sure, why not? Let's even do Binance as well. Let's see what the gap is with these. Let's look at the content gap with FTX.com versus Coinbase.com versus Binance.com versus FTX.us. Okay, so look at this. What's going on right now? Bitcoin price, 10 million visits a month. Dogecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum price. Who's constantly ranking really highly? It's Coinbase. Binance is doing relatively well, but keep in mind they're an international exchange. And so Coinbase is really stacking it up right here. So there's a lot to take from Coinbase's playbook here. You know, when I think about things from an acquisition standpoint, if I'm FTX right now, And I'm talking about buying other companies. I'm gonna think about buying a lot of websites that are in crypto that rank really well, that are maybe monetizing off of ads, and then I can redirect those. Or if they're really popular media sites, I can just let them run on their own. But how can I buy email lists? How can I buy kind of sites that have a lot of traffic from Google already and have a lot of links and creatively think about how to redirect them? But how can I also buy the talent too that's been there, done that, and then stack them onto our team, right? That's basically the game here. I think buying up other— I'm sure there's a lot of good acquisition targets from a strategic standpoint, but I'm thinking about acquisition from a marketing standpoint, right? Who can I acquihire? Where else can I buy talent? Right. Are there some crypto agencies that are out there? That's basically it. But Coinbase has done a good job here. They're kind of the poster child. I also want to take a look at the keywords that FTX is bidding on. If we take a look at the keywords that FTX is bidding on, they aren't bidding on the super expensive ones. Right. But now with this war chest, that might be a different type of story. Maybe the numbers end up working out. Maybe they don't. I don't know. But Coinbase, they bid on 7,700 keywords here and they're bidding on Bitcoin. They're bidding on cryptocurrency, buy Bitcoin. They're basically trying to brand themselves at the end of the day. They just want to keep showing up all the time. That's the game. I mean, but FTX has got this war chest now. They're worth $25 billion and I think they're just going to get a lot bigger. If you enjoyed this video, don't forget to hit the subscribe and the bell button and don't forget to check out the other 2 over here and we will catch you. We'll catch you later.