Guest Post: 6 Steps to Launching a Digital Marketing Campaign in Payments

By Brenna Ellis, Vice President, Product & Marketing, Signature Payments

Every industry has its unique challenges when it comes to digital marketing: Who is my target audience? What is the best way to reach that audience? Is this the right time to communicate my message, spend resources, launch a campaign? What platforms should I target? What medium should I invest it…the list goes on and on.

These challenges feel particularly daunting when experienced from within the confines of the payment processing ecosystem where a company may have a number of different customers they serve from small mom and pop merchants, to large, savvy restaurants or not for profit organizations. There are also partner relationships to consider including Agent and ISO partners, Developers and Associations to name just a few.

With so many different customers, what is a payments company to do? How can you get your message across to the right prospect, at the right time, via the right channel and medium? In this highly competitive and often fragmented industry, creating effective digital marketing campaigns that deliver an impressive ROI is a challenge.

Here are 6 tips for creating digital marketing campaigns that deliver results.

1. Choose An Audience
Making the choice to single out a target audience and focus their unique pain point is a smart strategy. Don’t try to be all things to all people (or audiences). Many companies or individuals are faced with having to decide which audience to target and spend their precious ad dollars on. In an effort to make ad dollars go as far as possible, campaigns are created that attempt to speak to everyone with the end result being they target no one.

To create an effective campaign, you must have a target audience in mind so you can speak to their specific problems and how you are the best company or person to offer the solution. Don’t be afraid to niche down. Be known as an expert at one thing. That alone will help you not only create an effective marketing campaign, but it will also help drive customers to your business once word gets out you are the expert in [insert that one thing].

2. Know Where To Find Your Audience
What platforms does your target audience prefer? This information will help you not only know where to place your campaign but may also help you identify when to place your ad and via what medium. If you are targeting merchants, you might consider Facebook. Videos are rapidly becoming the medium of choice on all social channels, but mobile is still critical. According to Sprout Social, 94% of Facebook Ad revenue is from mobile. If you post an ad on Facebook, make sure it is mobile friendly.

Are you targeting Agents & ISOs? If so, LinkedIn may be your best option. LinkedIn has some great stats on sentiment and lead generation for the platform. Depending on your budget, LinkedIn offers a variety of options for launching a paid ad campaign. If you want something simple but effective, a single image, sponsored content ad is a safe bet. LinkedIn has free resources to help you get started if you are new to the world of LinkedIn ads. If you are targeting Developers or ISVs LinkedIn may still be a good option but you may also want to explore Youtube or Instagram.

3. Start With The End In Mind
Know what your goals are going in. Once you decide which audience you are targeting whether it is small mom and pop merchants, Agents looking for a payment partner or an Independent Software Vendor looking to add payments to their solution, the task of identifying the goals of your campaign should become a little more clear.

Still, you will need to decide on specific goals. Are you looking to increase brand awareness? Or are you hoping to drive more traffic to your website? Maybe you want potential customers to sign up for a course or newsletter. Once you’ve identified your goals, you need to decide what KPIs you want to measure so you can track and measure the effectiveness of your campaign. If your goals are around brand awareness, you will want to monitor your social media followings. If you are looking to drive traffic to your website, make sure you have Google Analytics set up and identify what metrics you want to monitor. Starting with the end in mind helps you track and measure.

4. Cross Pollinate With Supporting Content
What other content, resources or channels do you have available to share or promote your campaign? A baseline starting point is making sure employees are familiar with the ins and outs of the campaign and can help spread the message with their own social networks. Beyond that, do you have a company blog? Write a post or promote a recent post showcasing your companies thought leadership on the topic. Your website is another great resource. Promote specific content or update content to promote your campaign. Send an email campaign to existing customers if relevant. Promote on your social channels with status updates, hashtags and other relevant content posts. If you are looking for some ideas on cross pollinating and re-purposing content, check out this blog post.

5. Monitor, Measure, Optimize
Once you launch your campaign, the fun really begins. This is where you get to see your hard work and creativity in action. The beauty of digital marketing is you have the ability to jump in and adjust when something isn’t working or isn’t hitting the right note. Not hitting the right audience? Adjust your targeting. Did your cost per click suddenly jump? Go back and revise.

There are many advantages that digital marketing has over traditional marketing and the ability to adjust as you go is at the top of the list. Digital marketing is not a “set it and forget it” strategy. You must be active and engaged to make sure your efforts (and dollars) are working as hard as they can for you. If not, optimize, optimize, optimize.

6. Invest In Your Marketing Strategy
It can seam daunting to launch a marketing campaign for your payment processing company. Planning your digital strategy is worth your time and will make overcoming the marketing challenges payments companies face possible. By doing a little research and spending some time on the front end of your digital marketing campaign in the planning stage, you will reap the benefits in the end. That said, a digital marketing campaign is MORE effective when it is part of a holistic marketing strategy. If that sounds scary, don’t fear. There are many (free!) tools and resources available to help you get started.  Hubspot has a good starter template here.

Your strategy will help you determine how to allocate your time, resources and dollars. If creating a marketing strategy for a 12-month period seems too big a task, start smaller. Plan by quarter. As you get into the rhythm of planning and determining based on data (see tip 5) what works best for you, creating a strategy that covers larger periods of time will come naturally.

The world is changing quickly. Each week it feels like there are new trends to follow, new strategies to employ and new verticals to go after. Don’t get distracted by all the shiny objects!

Following these 6 steps will help you crack the code to an effective digital marketing strategy for your payments business. A carefully planned strategy and consistent execution will help you get the most return from your digital marketing campaigns and set you up for future success.