What Factoring Companies Must Do Before Marketing
Written by: Husam Jandal, Digital Marketing Consultant and Business Strategist, Husam Jandal International
With the vast ecosystem of marketing channels available, it's challenging to know where to start. Many factoring companies begin with a website or social media, and while these are excellent choices when you’re ready for kickoff, they’re not where you should actually begin. To increase your success, there are a few preliminary tasks to address first. We’ll explore them below.
Identify Your Business Goals
Eight in ten small business owners don’t track their business goals, and two in three senior managers can’t name their company’s top priorities, Entrepreneur reports.
It’s not that you don’t have goals. You probably do. Maybe you want to grow your company, or you’re hoping to retire early. But the challenge is that these goals are often more like ideas rather than tangible, documented objectives. How will you know when you’ve met your goals? How will you know when you’re on track to meet them? Can you tell if your strategies feed into the broader picture?
I meet many business leaders who are at this stage. They know marketing can help them grow, and so they start implementing initiatives that should work. But if you don’t know which direction you’re supposed to be rowing in, you can’t be sure you’re going in the right direction. And, if you don’t share your goals, your team can’t be expected to row in time with you either.
Before you begin any marketing initiatives, determine what your business goals are. Do you want to expand into a specific niche market? Reach a certain benchmark for invoice volume? Reduce churn and boost loyalty?
Once you have specific goals in mind, determine how you’ll measure success, and establish milestones along the way.
Familiarize Yourself with Your Audience and Develop Personas
The average person sees up to 10,000 ads a day, according to Zippia. Most receive more than 120 emails a day, too, per Campaign Monitor. In other words, your prospective clients are dealing with a lot of noise. If you want to be the voice they hear, ensure you’re speaking directly to them and that what you’re saying resonates with them. That starts with developing personas.
Make a list of the industries you serve. Below each, create a list of the types of businesses you serve within each industry. Then, make a list of who you usually work with within those businesses.
For instance, maybe you support a lot of manufacturing companies, and quite a few are in the automotive industry. Are you working with the business owner? Partners? A CFO? Get that on paper.
Once you know who you’re working with, you can develop a persona. Think of this as a dossier that sounds like a real person, but is really just an amalgamation of the most common traits you see when you work with someone like them. Write out their business challenges, cash flow challenges, what they value most about factoring, what causes them to hesitate, and where they’re getting their information from.
When you have a persona for each person you want to reach, and it’s used by everyone on your team, it’s easy to speak to your prospective client and know where to focus your energy. This allows you to cut through the noise and be heard by the people who matter most. It also allows you to reinforce your messaging and build trust with your ideal clients.
Define and Apply Your Brand Identity
Many factoring companies never define what their brand is beyond the service they offer. For instance, when you were just starting out, you probably agonized about the underwriting and funding process. You might have thought about your logo a bit as well, and whether it was professional and befitting of a B2B finance company. And having this mark is important, but it’s not an identity.
When we talk about brand identity, it’s a reference to the ethos of your company. It’s your core philosophies, the service you deliver, and the personality that comes through every time your brand “speaks.”
Spend some time defining your brand identity. Think of it as if your company were a person outline its traits and how it makes people feel. When you’ve completed this exercise, create brand guidelines that can be shared with your team and utilized consistently. This ensures your brand presents the same image everywhere it exists, from social media to email and website.
Over time, this consistent presentation makes your branding more recognizable, builds familiarity, and strengthens trust, so your marketing performs, better and your sales team has an easier time closing deals.
Develop Attainable Marketing Goals That Support Your Business Goals
We talked a little bit about establishing business goals earlier and how they can help ensure your team is rowing in the same direction together. Here, you’ll put them into action and ensure your marketing efforts are contributing to them.
If you’re in the early stages of growing your company, for instance, you might want to focus on brand awareness. That means you’ll look at your personas and decide which channel is ideal to reach them. Social media, specifically platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, are often strong choices for B2B brands, but it depends on your specific personas.
With the platform determined, you can then determine the best measurement of brand awareness. This might be a metric such as page likes, reach, or visits from the platform to your website. Once the metric is selected, set a target, such as 100 page likes or 100 visits to your website in one month.
Then, you can outline how to best achieve that goal. Maybe you’ll share interesting content, engage in groups, or even do direct outreach.
In this example, we have a marketing goal that’s tied to a company goal, a way to measure it, and a specific point at which we’ll measure the results. Each marketing initiative you kick off should follow a similar process.
Commit to Lifelong Learning
Google Search updates its algorithm more than 4,000 times each year, Search Engine Land reports. While many are minor updates, some result in dramatic changes in the way businesses appear in search results. This is only one channel. Every aspect of marketing is constantly evolving. The needs and preferences of your audience will shift. Technology will change. Because of this, you can never assume that what is working today will continue to work tomorrow. Moreover, you should never assume that the results you’re achieving, however good or challenging they may be, are your ceiling.
Be prepared to continue learning. Keep testing new approaches, tools, and channels. Run A/B tests to identify incremental improvements. This mindset helps ensure you stay open to new opportunities and are always getting the best results possible.
Be Ready to Follow a Strategic Approach
You can’t do everything all at once and be successful at everything. When businesses try this, they tend to spread themselves too thin, burn out, or get lackluster results.
I like to use the Digital Marketing Tree analogy here. It means you’re starting from the ground and working your way up the “tree” methodically. You begin with the “ground fruit.” These are the initiatives that your overall marketing success hinges upon.
For instance, all of your activities will likely bring people back to your website, so it’s the first thing you want to shore up. Ensure it’s intuitive to use, accurately represents your brand identity, speaks to your personas, and guides visitors through each step you want to take. Lead management is also an essential ground fruit. Have a standardized process that helps your sales team track and convert leads efficiently.
When these areas and other ground fruits are mastered, you can go for the low-hanging fruit. This includes things like pay-per-click (PPC) ads, which can produce quick wins, and search engine optimization (SEO), which takes longer to produce results, but is one of the most cost-effective marketing methods.
Mid-range fruit and distant fruit come next, but remember, you’re only reaching for one initiative at a time. This gives you the opportunity to perfect it first and begin seeing some results. Most businesses will roll the new revenue into their marketing initiatives to create a snowball effect, amplifying the results even more.
Bring it All Together
If you’ve already started some marketing initiatives before completing these activities, that’s okay. However, unless you’re seeing strong results from your investments, it’s generally best to pause what you’re doing and build a firm foundation first, as shown here, then work your way through each initiative individually.
About the Author
Husam Jandal is an internationally recognized marketing and business strategist who has been helping businesses achieve transformative growth for more than two decades. As a trusted consultant, author, educator, and speaker, Husam’s in-depth knowledge of the challenges businesses face and unique ability to fuse proven strategies with tailored insights empower companies to reach new heights and attain lasting success.
The views expressed in the Commercial Factor website are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the International Factoring Association.