Question

Topic: Advertising/PR

Looking For Business Owners - Merchant Services

Posted by Anonymous on 12/13/2013 at 12:00 PM ET 250 Points
Ok so here's the deal. I have been running my small merchant services company for over 9 years now. I did amazing when there was only a handful of companies in my industry. Well then everything became outsourced to third world countries where labor is super cheap. So I tried to concentrate on my local market but these merchants get called everyday by these companies and want nothing to do with me when I call to acquire there merchant account services.

So I put a few extra products in my offerings palette and see if I could lead with those and eventually get their merchant account. It seems to work for a while but I need incoming leads and the phone to ring.

I sent out post cards for $800.00 and got one lead that didn't close. Chanber of commerce has the same issues as there is 5 other companies competing for their business...I tried PPC but that was a waste. I have a website and I am trying to back link it and do some SEO but Google is a tough nut to crack and my rankings are suffering. I tried going business to business all suited and booted up...but the same story...your the 5th guy to be in here today and we are not interested...? I'm stuck because of the competition?

Since my budget took a bad hit funding is low at this point for a real marketing company to get me out of this mess. Thus I need some help from this forum.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 12/13/2013 at 12:54 PM Accepted
    You can compete on cost or you can compete on service. The lower cost places have you on cost. What you need to do is figure out what about merchant services causes retailers pain, and figure out how you can fix that pain. If you can do this, you can charge a higher rate than the others and still capture clients.

    Think of Square. They made credit card processing very easy for people, and have captured a lot of share. Not saying you can go out and create a smartphone app, but maybe you could do better at packaging equipment and installing it (so dealing with the inevitable bugs that pop up). Might involve interacting with POS systems, so maybe you need to work with vendors and find a way to integrate your solution in to their product.
  • Posted by Moriarty on 12/13/2013 at 1:06 PM Accepted
    Yup, I'm with Peter here - you need to do something that really adds some sparkle. Especially like those bug ideas - the point is to make your expensive solution much, much cheaper because when something goes wrong, it's tens of thousands an hour that your client's missing out on. Plus being in the locale (or being able to parachute someone in) means you can save them a lot of money.

    This angle also works extremely well with PPC, and you can reverse-engineer that into SEO/organic since you've found out where the pinch points are in the market. Again, you're not competing just on a broad field. After all, if you're ASKING their questions, it's pretty likely that you'll pop up on the first page, even without any backlinks. Plus, all the rest'll be gibberish. You'll be the only guy there. Believe me, SEO's about as open today as when Google first looked over the parapet. When I started in marketing 2 yrs ago I thought it would be wrapped up tight. What surprised me most was that most marketing's just put there to please the bosses and make the agency a living.

    Start looking at things from your customers' point of view and suddenly there's no competition at all. Or very, very little.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 12/13/2013 at 10:32 PM Accepted
    Over the years you've likely seem some commonality of needs that people had with issues after they've purchased their services (that you didn't address). What about now? Can you shift gears and handle this set of problems (since you're the expert of what people needed with your small merchant services), so you won't be competing with the cheaper guys.
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