The marketing space for credit cards and merchant payment processing is very competitive. Aside from the significant initial costs associated with starting a credit card processing company, marketing can easily eliminate early profits. The best option for newly established firms is to concentrate on low cost marketing options, such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Marketing for Credit Card Payment Processors: An Overview
Due to the Internet and other technologies, there are a number of available marketing options. More established companies can have marketing budgets that can exceed six figures every month. Of course, newer businesses will probably not have this luxury. As a result, these companies have to get clever with their marketing strategies. With enough planning and consistency, low cost marketing options can lead to new clients and increased revenue.
The best avenues for cheap marketing use other products, like Google and Facebook, to increase awareness and drive traffic. Effective online marketing is rarely concentrated on making an immediate sale. Generating leads that turn into sales is the primary goal of PPC, SEO, and social media marketing.
SEO for Merchant Payments
A basic and consistently implemented SEO strategy is required to some degree for every merchant payment processing company.
Achieving a front page ranking in Google search results for industry related keywords, like “merchant payments processing”, creates sizeable amounts of traffic that generates leads.
The best way to create a high quality SEO profile for your website begins with content. Producing articles based on your industry and inside perspective creates a keyword profile for your site that is recognized and indexed by the Google search engine. One or two articles will not be sufficient. Consistent posts on a weekly or even daily basis give your credit card payment processing business the best possible SEO profile.
Social Media Content for Payments Processors
Though billions of people around the world use social media, especially Facebook, on a daily basis, the medium has yet to come into its own in terms of marketing and advertising. Since going public, Facebook has made more of an effort to monetize its user base. Advertising on the platform is among the cheapest available. It also gives merchant payments marketers the ability to concentrate on specific demographics. Not all social media advertising is created equal. Twitter has had numerous issues bringing advertising to its platform.
Social media can still be useful to business payments processors even without an advertising budget. Quality content can be found and shared that might be interesting to your current and potential customer base. Pictures from content sharing sites like Reddit or articles from Digg can shared via Facebook and Twitter to cultivate an audience.
Find out how! How StumbleUpon can Drive Web Traffic
PPC Strategies for Merchant Services Providers
The quickest way to generate leads and revenue from online marketing is to utilize PPC advertising. Available from search engines, like Google, PPC refers to the ads that surround search results. Based on the keyword inputted by the user, PPC ads are incredibly effective. One of the major drawbacks for merchant payments processors is the cost “per click”. Ads for keywords like
“merchant payment processor” can cost as much as $27 per click. These ads often do result in sales, m
aking them worth considering for any new company.
Andrew Egan is a writer based in Texas. He concentrates on the credit card processing and finance industries.
