The adage goes: “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” and it doesn’t apply just to flies. It looks like merchants too like honey more than vinegar.
Yet, it is astounding to see the large number of ISOs and merchant acquirers that use vinegar in their marketing and then complain about low response rates to their marketing campaigns.
What’s vinegar to merchants? EMV, PCI and even Low Rates in certain cases are vinegar to merchants. And just like flies that would fly around the vinegar out of curiosity, these ads might get their attention, but they don’t get a response. Proof? Look at how many people liked, commented and shared the advertisement below.
If you want response, you need to know what merchants WANT. Not what YOU think they need. Your solution might be the one thing they need the most to save their business, but if in their head they decided they want a blue shirt, unless you give them a blue shirt, you will never get their attention.
Honey to Merchants: Growth Strategies
Knowing what merchants want is the most valuable piece of knowledge to engage them in a deliberate, systemized, controlled funnel that nurtures the relationship through serving them the delicacies they want.
And what MERCHANTS WANT more than anything else is GROWTH. Now, we know that there are only 9 possible ways to grow a business. So, the goal is to cover the nine areas in a series of articles, blogs, newsletters, books, and other information products that help merchants grow in the specific vertical.
“Does that mean you have to specialize in a vertical?” Yes, it will really enhance the chances of your marketing success. Actually, among the nine strategies to grow a business, none is more effective in creating substantial (as opposed to incremental) growth than vertical specialization. There is a reason Proctor & Gamble manages their detergent brands differently (Tide, Ariel, Dreft, Gain, Cheer and others) and that’s because each one aims at a different demographic.
“Do you have to create and curate material for that purpose?” Absolutely!! It is actually easier, faster and more profitable to go this route.
I’ve only seen one application of it so far and it was from Lightspeed POS. Below is one of their ads they run in Facebook. This one will get more responses because most merchants would like to know how to better price their merchandise.
The second ad below, although the idea behind it is good, will get less responses for two reasons:
- The target audience (people that want to open a restaurant) is small in comparison with restaurateurs who are facing issues.
- The message mismatches the psychological make up of a merchant wanting to open a new business. Most merchants opening a new business project themselves into a future of success and have very little room for failure. So the message isn’t as effective as it could be.
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However, with a little adjustment of the target audience (targeting restaurants with issues rather than people that want to open a restaurant) this could be the beginning of a successful sales funnel. It starts with promising and delivering information that merchants want and CAPTURING their information to feed them more information that they want.
The Acquisition Methodology
There is a formula to get new merchants. It follows 9 specific steps in 3 categories:
Research:
1. Identify a high-growth vertical where you will thrive based on your strengths and assets
2. Research what merchants in that vertical want
Marketing Implementation:
3. Create and disseminate material about the vertical’s ecosystem (growth, issues, statistics)
4. Create solutions for the problems identified
5. Design and implement a sales funnel (including setting up website, flow automation, etc.)
6. Create ads and copywriting
Sales:
7. Start advertising using the top three media used by the vertical
8. Ascend the prospect through the stages in the prospect nurturing process
9. Close sales
This methodology is documented in our upcoming research report: “Double Your New Merchant Acquisition: A Step-By-Step Implementation Guide.“