By Jaki Kackert
Creative Marketing Consultant
The summer season brings longer, warmer days as folks enjoy barbeques, family gatherings and time spent in the great outdoors. Although nobody wants to think of it just yet, it's also the time that merchants should plan for the biggest sales of the year: back to school, Halloween and the winter holidays. As a reseller, that's where your marketing team can make a difference.
Developing relationships with your merchants is vital to your business, and creating an effective marketing and communication strategy to help foster that relationship is key to your success. Keeping merchants up to date on new products, services and solutions; celebrating their successes and milestones; and educating them on industry trends that can simplify and grow their business is vital to building trust.
Most resellers understand the importance of developing a strong sales strategy, so I'll go over three top summer essentials that can help you create a sizzlin' strategy for content marketing that supports your sales objectives.
You've invested significant time and effort into building a sales strategy that works to attract and retain merchants, so it's important to make sure you're on target with marketing to the industries you can support effectively. Make sure your marketing strategy is built around the partnerships you currently have with gateways, OEMs, processors and other service providers.
It's also important to understand what your merchants need to run their businesses and grow. Stick to what your competencies are now, and work with your providers to identify potential opportunities to branch into new verticals in the future.
It's imperative to align your brand identity with your brand personality if you want your audience to believe and embrace your marketing message. Finding the right voice to communicate with your audience will be the key to successful communication and growth for your business.
It's important to understand what characteristics you want your brand to have and dig deep to understand the human attributes that will connect you with your customers and effectively tell your story. If your company is seen as sincere – trustworthy and friendly – how do those traits get visualized in your imagery, font style, color palette and so on? And how are those traits voiced through communications, messaging, advertising and social media?
Once you've built your brand personality, be consistent and stay committed to it through both internal and external marketing efforts that best tell your story and relay your message. Your goal is to resonate with your audience to build and maintain the relationship. And like all relationships, that means that over time you can reassess your brand personality; if you've grown and matured over time, then it's a perfect reason to explore rebranding.
With so many uncertainties in today's environment, it can be hard to imagine that marketing would be a priority for any business, but continuing to market and promote your brand is even more important right now. As more and more merchants are having to rapidly alter the way they run their operations to keep their doors open, it's vital that resellers look at alternative and creative ways to communicate and stay engaged with their merchants.
As more merchants go online to get their information, as well as connect with their customers, social media usage has grown substantially, and online communities are changing at a rapid pace. Taking the time to understand the demographics of your followers on each platform can help you tailor your content appropriately and decide which platforms are effective forms of communication for your enterprise.
The goal is to stay connected with your merchants, regardless of communication channels. Email is still a cost-effective and a successful form of communication, but if done inconsistently and poorly with little follow-up it can lead to disengagement from your merchants. They're juggling so much to maintain and grow their businesses, so providing thoughtful communication that can enhance and ease their workload is key.
This isn't to say that resellers should inundate merchants with a slew of haphazard communications to stay relevant. Messaging should remain consistent with a company's beliefs. Merchants can tell when an organization isn't being truthful. And if you're launching communication campaigns, consistency across channels is key, again tying back to really listening to the needs of your merchants.
Marketing teams—in-house or contracted—should focus on the strategies and campaigns that align with their financial goals and enhance their reputation. Knowing who you are and what you strive to be to your merchants will be vital for your success. Being able to quickly adapt to the rapid changes in the world, listen to your merchants, and focus on products and services that matter most, will make all the difference for both the summer and seasons to come. 
As a seasoned marketing professional, Jaki Kackert has contributed to the success of organizations within the payments space and financial services sector and has helped brands, both big and small, create awareness and drive results through effective marketing strategies. Jaki draws on extensive and varied skills in content marketing, digital marketing, public relations & communications, and promotions to offer the right marketing strategies and tools that help ISOs and Resellers attract, retain, and grow merchant accounts. Contact her at jbkackert@gmail.com.
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