Why Custom Content is Essential for Payments Companies

 

The Payments industry is complex, dynamic and evolving, with new companies and technologies emerging daily. One of the biggest struggles I hear from these companies is finding ways to break away from the herd.  The best answer I have is creating custom content for payments topics. 

Differentiation is an industry-agnostic challenge, but one that payments companies find especially painful. The nature of the business is often highly technical and can be hard to convey in a concise and compelling manner. Even if a company is able to clearly articulate its value proposition, putting it in front of the right audience at the right time can be challenging – and time consuming.

Many companies have an in-house marketing person or team to handle all marketing-related activities. With small businesses and startups, this means one or a handful of people are handling everything from print and tradeshow collateral and direct mail to all online marketing (SEO, SEM, PPC, Email, video marketing, content marketing, social media, network marketing, community building, user experience, branding, interactive and inbound). That’s a lot. It’s too much for any one thing to be done well.

And if there’s any one thing to be done well for payments companies, it’s content.

This article by Hubspot actually outlines a pretty interesting way of structuring your inbound team, regardless of size. It’s a handy guide if you’re looking for ways to effectively allocate internal resources. What’s more interesting than that is the second paragraph below the slide “Organization by Team Size,” where the author points out that awareness and solid content is the best way to generate leads both short- and long-term, and quality leads at that.

Why is Custom Content for Payments so Damn Important?

Content connects your brand to your audience and builds trust and credibility, that’s why. People are inundated with PPC ads and hokey-looking landing pages all day long; I know I am. Content is what allows your brand and your voice to cut through the clutter and start to build relationships with people.

How do you build relationships? By showing up and being helpful. In B2B, that means providing education, which can be accomplished by producing custom content for payments topics, problems and solutions. If you’re targeting e-commerce merchants, put yourself in their shoes and create content around what you’d want to know. It can be helpful to start with information that’s trending or newsworthy topics:

• Card-not-present fraud may surpass $7 billion by 2020
  • Why it matters to them: Online merchants already face a slew of fraud and that it’s rising should trigger red flags and prompt information-seeking about how to protect their e-commerce payments
  • Why it might matter to you: Perhaps you offer a fraud and chargeback prevention solution; wouldn’t it be nice if your white paper on the topic was the first a merchant saw when searching for more information on the problem?

• Chinese shoppers spent $31.99 billion on overseas products purchased online in 2016.
  • Why it matters to merchants: X-border merchants have a number of compliance and regulatory factors they need to take into account, the breadth of which can be overwhelming.
  • Why it might matter to you: By providing information about what merchants should keep in mind when expanding globally, you position yourself as a thought leader and potentially a trusted partner who can help facilitate growth and expansion.

• In the U.S., roughly 70% of cards are now chip-enabled but only 7% of card-present transactions used EMV technology in 2016.
  • Why it matters to merchants: About 47% of global payment card fraud occurs in the U.S. and costs upwards of $3.5 billion. EMV implementation abroad has significantly decreased card-present fraud and can have the same impact for merchants here.
  • Why it might matter to you: If you’re a validated EMV solution provider, you have the opportunity to create interesting infographics, white papers or case studies around the problem, the facts and what merchants can do to fix the problem. If it’s a particularly good piece of content, you can even ask people for an email address.

Quality Custom Content for Payments Builds Relationships

Creating custom content for payments topics that speaks to your target audience with care and intelligence can move mountains. It drives awareness, promotes engagement, positively impacts SEO and generates leads. More importantly, it builds your reputation as a trusted leader in your space and makes you a highly desirable candidate for merchants in the market for new solutions, tools and services.

Don’t skimp on quality content. Create tailored content that envelops information your target audience and core customer base want to know. Answer their questions. Address their needs. Be selfless, thoughtful and helpful and you’ll be amazed at the impact to your funnel.