How to Build an Ultimate Lead Generation Machine For Merchant Cash Advance Companies.
The cash advance industry has emerged as a high-growth, high-profit industry. Yet, for all of the success stories (there are a lot of them), a lot of cash advance merchants are failing, struggling, or simply not growing as fast and as big as they thought they would. Perhaps your merchant cash advanced business is new, or maybe it’s been established for four or five years. Yet the type of growth you initially envisioned -high profit margins, ever expanding revenues- remains elusive. The pathway from zero to multi-million-dollar company exists, but the Merchant Cash Advance industry is highly competitive, sales-oriented, and the failure rate can be quite high.
Let’s go over the basics of securing leads for merchant cash advance companies and outline how you can optimize the whole process.
But before we start, who am I to talk about merchant cash advance marketing?
Well, Local Marketing Stars has helped numerous small businesses achieve seven figure revenues, and high profit margins. We’ve been working with a lot of merchant cash advance companies as of late, and so far the results have been overwhelmingly positive. It doesn’t matter if your company is a new startup, established but struggling, or even if your company is doing quite well, the expertise and industry insights that Local Marketing Stars can provide could lead to tremendous growth for your company.
Pay-Per-Leads: Quick and Easy but Difficult to Scale.
First, most merchant cash advance companies, and especially those that are new to the business, start out by going after the low hanging fruit. The merchant purchases some “pay per lead” lists, usually consisting of emails and/or phone numbers. The goal is simple: pay for a number of leads, cold-call and contact the leads, hope that some people apply, and that some of those applications turn into funding opportunities. At the end of the day it’s a simple numbers game: did you make more money than you spent?
It’s okay to use pay-per-lead lists, but most of the time the conversions will be very low, and it’s tough to really produce a substantial profit. Maybe you’ll make some money, maybe you’ll secure a few hot deals, but it’s unlikely that pay-per-lead lists will offer you enough opportunities to really grow.
You can quickly find yourself trapped in a low growth, low reward environment. You might continue plugging along, trying to build momentum, or maybe you’ll take your money and talents elsewhere.
Another Pay Per Lead strategy is investing in MCA Live Inbound Transfers. These calls will cost more than the telemarketing lists but they are scrubbed, qualified and then transferred to your team real time.
Even within the live transfer option, you have to be very careful what you are paying for. What you want to have is 100% Exclusive Calls Coming From Inbound Sources. There are way too many, so called, MCA Lead Generation companies, who will gladly sell you live transfers but they are neither exclusive nor driven from inbound sources. They are usually called on by an overseas call centers and generated through old, beat-up lists.
MCA Live Transfers are great options if you have a small team and you only want to deal with really qualified prospects, instead you dialing 200 numbers a day.
Paid Advertising Campaigns: High Commitment, High Reward
The next method people frequently turn to is paid advertisements. Why not just buy an ad on Google search and every time someone searches for a “merchant cash advance” or “small business loan” they will see an ad for your services? Thousands of people search for “merchant cash advance” each month. Tens of thousands of people search for “small business loan.” Problem is, you’re going to have to pay $20, $30, $40 dollars or more for a single click! Ads can get very expensive very quickly.
Worse yet, many companies launch expensive advertising campaigns without having the right system in place. They buy ads, but don’t have high converting landing pages, or don’t have the staff in place to make follow up phone calls. Before you spend on advertising it’s essential to make sure you have the right system in place to handle and optimize leads and traffic. Your staff will need to know how to close deals, and your web presence must simply be top-notch. No poorly designed websites or half-constructed efforts allowed.
When it comes to paid advertising campaigns, if you take the time to really optimize your advertising campaign, and you really focus on converting leads into opportunities, you can produce tremendous revenues. However, it’s important to be patient. An advertising campaign can take two months or more to really gain traction. Further, you must constantly be refining your work and efforts. You should also be prepared to spend a lot of money. Five figure advertising campaigns are common, if anything.
The Golden Goose: An Organic Inbound Funnel
Now, we can finally get to the “golden goose”, your organic inbound funnel. Inbound marketing has by and large proven to be the most effective form of advertising possible. Paid advertising is “push” advertising. You pay to get in front of someone’s eyes. With organic inbound, you produce content and media that draws people in (hint: this article is inbound).
First, you create a “funnel” (some marketers are moving away from “funnels”, instead embracing the more dynamic “customer journey” model. For now, the funnel analogy holds true). This funnel will feature content and other methods to draw people into optimized landing pages, and to provide information, such as email addresses and phone numbers. These leads can then be converted into funding opportunities for your merchant cash advance business.
The goal with organic inbound marketing is to get people to find out about your website naturally, such as through social media or through search. You become a trusted source for information regarding your industry, in this case merchant cash advance, and a trusted expert for people who are looking to learn more. Your company blog keeps people informed of the latest happenings, and your monthly newsletter and social media profiles are trusted sources of information. Instead of paying for clicks, your organic content draws people in.
Ultimately, your goal is to develop a true “multi-channel” marketing system. You will have multiple channels feeding you business leads. One customer I recently worked with, I helped him redo his entire website. We built up engaging content, created high performance landing pages, published a report right on his website. It was time consuming work and took us about a month just to get everything in place.
Now, thirty days is a short amount of time in the SEO/inbound world, but the results came quickly. My client got 37 leads within 30 days! Most importantly, one of those leads was for a $100,000 dollar funding opportunity! For my client, this was a huge break. That one deal provided enough funds not just to keep the lights on, but to also pay for more content generation, advertising, and other things.
Conclusion: Invest In Your Marketing Efforts
There’s no one “right” approach marketing. I’m not as big of a fan of paid lists, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t work if you have the right system in place. At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with spending big on ads, again so long as you have the right system in place. If you don’t have the right system in place, your efforts will be wasted, or at least sub-optimal, no matter what approach you take.
That being said, I personally believe that an aggressive, organic inbound SEO strategy is a must for any merchant cash advance vendor who wants to really dominate the industry and maximize profits. Getting yourself to the top of search engines and on the front page of Google will help you draw in as much business as possible, and you won’t have to pay for clicks. A strong inbound strategy will reduce marketing costs over the long-run, and help you establish yourself as a leader in the merchant cash advance industry.
