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.
It is hardly a secret that spawning leads for companies dealing in merchant cash advance is not an effortless task. With the rising trend among small business owners searching for unconventional funding to tend to their capital requirements, a fresh class of business proprietors is fascinated in initiating their individual business in merchant cash advance. This competition among every MCA provider is turning fiercer, thus making it more difficult for such providers to uphold the businesses.
Lead generating activities in merchant cash advance are of many types, which means MCA providers can use different ways to generate leads. MCA lead generation ways can either be through the use of services, which especially cater to bringing in suitable leads for cash advance businesses or by making use of individual attempts and guidelines.
Unfortunately, when they do start the company, they were modeling the wrong people. On average I talk to 15 to 20 merchant cash advance business owners every week, and that allows me to see a pattern of their behavior and almost make a prediction who is gonna succeed better than the other and who’s gonna fail because unfortunately, this industry has one of the biggest failure rates. People start and within six months you don’t see them around, or the ones who survive their first year do so but they’re really not profitable. They soon find out that they just got themselves another full-time job. That’s happening because they’re modeling most of their competitors out there. Most of the guys are starting out they might be in in their business for a couple years but they’re doing the same thing over and over again.
If you’re stuck in that route of purchasing leads either in the form of UCC leads, telemarketing data, or live transfers, you’re basically tapping into a well that thousands other people are trying to get deals out of at the same time. You are in this competition because you’re calling on the same person over and over again. So my disagreement with that approach is that you have half a million or more people searching online for a business loan, which means there are new faces that are usually not a part of a telemarketing list, even though that doesn’t mean they all qualify. So every day people are searching online, but instead of tapping into that, you’re going after a UCC list or a telemarketing list that has been sold to maybe 20 other companies out there. You can still close deals, but when you’re attempting to close a deal, you’re not closing on authority. You’re closing on the rates that you’re providing. It’s really difficult to build your value and differentiate yourself from other people. The result then your profits go slim, but then you get used to that pattern and thought this happened because Merchant Cash Advance is super competitive. I hear that all day long from business owners who told me that MCA is super competitive. It’s true that MCA is super competitive but so does many other industries.
If you’re a fresh beginner, I suggest that you do whatever it takes to get a couple of deals under your belt and start generating some income, because as you know, sales are above all else. But once you establish yourself a little, or if you’ve been around for a while now and you have a couple of people or have the vision to grow the business really fast, you want to differentiate yourself from other people. This means you have to invest in your business, and the way to invest is by creating your inbound lead generation system.
If your goal is to build this as a business and turn into a sellable asset, you got to have assets! Your asset cannot be your source where you buy the leads from. Your asset is if your website is getting 3000 people you’re converting them at a certain percentage. Or if you have a paid inbound system that brings you leads almost on demand, where you’re putting X you’re getting X plus. Or if you can control how much you’re spending to purchase a customer, that’s a system. Once you know that when you spend $50 for four times it’s gonna give you a customer that would put $3,000 in your pocket, then you know how many times you’re X-ing your investment.
That’s why when you’re deciding on your marketing, I suggest you do not think just about today and to what you’re gonna be selling today, I also suggest that you think about what you’re building as a company. Your company culture, your automation systems in place, your CRM system, your follow-up system, your nurturing campaigns or other email campaigns, your sales scripts, your closing percentages, and revenue per deal. All of that will play a role in a building and real company. Otherwise, you can call yourself just a sales organization because that’s all you might be doing. You’re just getting leads and turning them, and selling them, and looking for more and more data. I know companies that have data of millions of people’s information which they keep calling, and their goal is to grow their floor more and more, having 30 to 50 more people.To me, that’s a scary scenario. Of course, you want to have more people, but not for telemarketing, because obviously, that gives you more headaches. Managing salespeople means higher payroll you even if they are on commission-based, and higher rent. What if instead of adding ten more people, you can add a system that does as much if more than those people. You own it! So you don’t owe it to your people, hoping that they will stay as a long-term employer. They will stay with you and so perform at the level or better.
