Online forex platforms are proliferating at great speed. This has led to fierce competition in what is now a very well served market. In order to stand out from the crowd, firms now have to find new and unique ways to promote themselves.

OctaFX is one such firm going to great lengths and efforts to push itself to the forefront of this dynamic and fiercely competitive market. OctaFX is an online forex broker that provides services to over 100 countries around the world.

We spoke to Joanna Archer, Head of the Research and Development Department at OctaFX, to gain a deeper insight into the competitive nature of the forex brokerage market, and how OctaFX is promoting itself within it.

Can you expand on the way in which competition between online forex brokers has evolved in recent years?
Competition has always been strong in the market. While I don’t see it changing drastically, however, now it’s all about who is introducing valued products to customers first, and which companies are able to sustain and develop their products to cater for customers’ needs. It’s all about enhancing user experience now, rather than just providing certain services. Dynamics have changed too – development is rapid, so it requires more resources to stay in line with the progress.

What has OctaFX done to keep pace with the competition?
In order to stay ahead of the competition, we have ensured we are staying up to date with the global tendencies and creating new trends. This is what makes our success possible. We pay close attention to users’ demands, and our clients always come first. We’ve been doing huge projects on forex trading education recently, so anyone who is interested in becoming a trader can now use our website as a guide to learn.

Tell us about your current contest promotions and platforms for OctaFX.
With all of the mentioned above in mind, I’ve been working on OctaFX’s promotional contest, in collaboration with the most skilful IT specialists to deliver the environment that will stimulate traders to discover their trading abilities while competing with each other on both demo and real accounts. The first thing I remember about the contest segment of the industry, back in 2012, is the poor quality of forex contest platforms that offered their services to brokers. We looked at that closely and thought, ‘why waste time on something average if we can do better ourselves?’

Therefore, we took up the challenge and issued two competitions in a row: a monthly demo competition, OctaFX Champion, that runs to the present day, and our famous OctaFX ‘King of the Road’ real contest with a Porsche Panamera as a main prize.

Both contests featured great rating calculation systems, and were very popular with our traders. Less experienced traders chose not to put their own money at stake and competed on demo accounts, while professional traders battled over the Porsche. We lost count of the amount of new accounts that were opened at OctaFX during the launch of both competitions.

The finish time of King of the Road contest was intense. To ensure it went off without a hitch, it involved sleepless nights and scribbling ideas on anything that was within my reach. We had a long list of jobs to ensure the contest went smoothly: preparing our Porsche and the ceremony; organising flights and filming crew; and giving away nine more prizes.

Simultaneous to this we had to develop the next real competition for our users, as the demand for another contest trial was tremendous and we hate making our clients wait. We used the contest as a basis, working over the old bugs, dusting the surfaces, building up cool interface features and keeping our attention on creating a fair competition where the amount of your deposit doesn’t matter and it only matters how good you are at trading. That’s how OctaFX Supercharged emerged, and the crowd went wild welcoming it.

In your view, how important are promotions in enhancing user experience?
User feedback is the most important thing that we get from running our contests. It pushes us forward and helps us to surpass our competitors. We developed our promotions to the point where they represent every possible contest option, whether it is MT4 or cTrader platform, a daily, weekly, monthly or annual contest. Think of a combination and you will find it at OctaFX.

In the middle of our contest journey we’ve also worked on the statistics and user communication to make our contest platform stand out. We’ve added a set of achievements across every OctaFX trading contest, designed a feed of each competition and allowed our traders to comment on their fellow competitors’ profiles. It made our contest irresistible to traders. As any other aspiring person, a trader aims to receive as much achievement and as high a rank as possible.

Our contest audience has now doubled and now we welcome more than 2,500 people taking part in our contests on a monthly basis.

Is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t covered?
With our latest contest we linked together two things that most people probably do not associate with each other directly: online currency trading and football. In doing so I fulfilled my dream circa 2013. We divided our traders into two teams and observed how teamwork looked when applied to an individual thing such as trading.

This fresh format of the competition, as well as MT4 web-platform introduction, helped us attract a vast audience of people from spheres overlapping with trading, who may try performing orders for the first time in their lives, thus introducing themselves to the world of retail forex.

OctaFX is the winner of Best STP Broker and Best Trading Conditions in the 2016 Forex Report Awards