Buying Merchant Accounts on Facebook

Our industry has not taken advantage of Facebook marketing much at all.  I’m shocked to realize I haven’t ever talked about it on my channel, even though I love it and use it all the time for my business.

One of my strong passions is the future of FOS or the “feet on the street” model.  I believe there is a huge value to having feet on the street.  However, the value of having feet on the street isn’t just getting somebody out there to close the deal on straight commission.  I really believe there will be a big shift away from this model in our industry over the next few years.  A problem of the pure, “1099 – good luck – get out there and make a sale – have fun while you are doing it” model is that it leaves so much value on the table.  Another value of FOS with a sales team or even as a sales person is data collection.  Two particular types of useful data are email addresses and website traffic.

Without getting too technical, on your website you can put a little Facebook pixel, a snippet of code similar to google analytics.  This will enable Facebook to build a custom audience of everyone who visited your website in the last 180 days.  When people visit your website, Facebook grabs their IP address (the identifier for their computer or phone or whatever device.)  Then they match that with users on their end and, thus, identify the same person.  Facebook then targets them on Facebook with ads about what’s on your website.  Without revealing the identity of people – protecting privacy – Facebook allows you to target individuals through a custom audience.

Let me explain the benefits of doing this.  Although I plan to give more detailed information and instruction in the future, this is rather a broad stroke here to plant the idea.  The goal is to build a “look-alike audience” on Facebook.  Many ISOs right now have a database of 500, 1000, 2000 email addresses of merchants.  You need to leverage that data by uploading it into Facebook marketing as a custom audience.  Then you can create a look-alike audience from your custom audience.  A look-alike audience basically tells Facebook, “Hey Facebook, see these 500 people?  Go find all the people with these email addresses on Facebook and then find the 1% of the population that is most like these 500 people.”  You can also do the same with Facebook pixels if you combine the two.  Perhaps you have 100 email addresses and 500 people who have visited your website in the last three months.  You can combine those two numbers and tell Facebook to find two million people like them.  That is literally the number because they do about 1% of the whole population of the U.S.

Thus, you will have a “cold audience” of small business owners potentially.  Not all of them are small business owners.  However, Facebook algorithm is really good at doing these look-alike audiences, so most of them will be.  Then you can cross reference that with interests.  Ask Facebook to find all of those 2.2 million people who also have an interest in business – small business, retail, restaurant, etc.  This will narrow the field and help you identify those who are probably business owners.  So, now you may have brought that 2.2 million down to maybe 400,000.

Then you can also ask for only those within a specific geographical area.  At that point you can run Facebook ads against this information.  Start with Facebook ads that are a good content strategy which will warm people up:  good videos, content, free eBooks, things which will familiarize them with your brand.  Then leverage something like our quote tool by saying, “Get your free quote online.”  The goal of this process is generating leads.  You’ll be able to follow up with either an online application or feet on the street.

In summary, here are some suggestions:

#1.  Have your sales people start collecting data and get that data from them.  Get any data you can:  email addresses, updating the business name, address.  Three or four years from now, data is going to be golden.  If you have good data, you can make a lot more money.  Even if this stuff I said about Facebook is Greek to you, start collecting the data!

#2.  If you already have data, explore Facebook marketing.  The reason you even know I exist is because I understand Facebook marketing, YouTube marketing, Pay per click advertising, web strategy, and content marketing.  Ironically, I spend most of my consulting time addressing the subject of recruiting and training agents as well as financial projections.  I do love all of that.  However, I plan to spend more consulting time in the future discussing these marketing subjects.

If any of my readers has an interest in that side of business, reach out to me at james@ccsalespro.com.  I’d be glad to schedule a call to talk about Facebook marketing and give more details.  It is a golden opportunity right now.  I promise that four years from now, the cost of doing Facebook ads is going to be so much higher than it is right now.  It probably won’t even be feasible, just like pay per click today.  Some of you are still doing google ads.  For key words such as “merchant services,” the charge is about $30 a click.  Making money that way is very difficult!  Facebook is not the same way.  You can target by getting that data from your agents, or even from your callers.  Leverage that data on Facebook to target the right people with the right message, and you can get your cost per merchant account down significantly.  

Please enter any questions or comments in the section provided.  Maybe you’ve already done Facebook marketing and want to share some ideas.  Just email me at  james@ccalespro.com.  Make sure you check out our instant quote tool if you are going to be doing marketing.  I’m actually working on a whole marketing course about which I’m really excited.  Hopefully, I’m going to roll it out the first quarter of next year.  We have exciting things going on!  The marketing course is only one of them.