What is Payments Marketing and what does it mean for your business?

What is Payments Marketing and what does it mean for your business? February 10th , 2021
Tedd Huff: [00:00:00]  You are now listening to Tedd Talks Payments. Bringing you, the people tech and companies, that change how you pay, and get paid.
[00:00:11] Welcome to this special episode of Ted talks payments.
[00:00:15] We will be talking about how payment strategy is the new marketing strategy. for today's discussion, we have a special guest who is the payer symmetry co-founder and CEO, Michele Tivey.
[00:00:26] Her company has advised for fortune 500 companies in payments optimization with deep analysis for the operational processes. Vendor selection. And product enhancements to help optimize spend while maximizing revenue. They're deep payments expertise has given pyrometry the insight to build a suite of technology products That have increased at client profitability by $4.3 billion since 2011. Automated RFPs and improved card approval rates to as high as 68%. If you have more questions or would like to learn more, email Michele @ payometry. IO.
[00:01:02] Let's get started by introducing our other panelists .
[00:01:06] Jim Nickerson is our marketing expert. 
[00:01:09] Jim Nickerson: [00:01:09] Thanks Ted Hi everybody
[00:01:10] I'm happy to be here tonight I'm a little bit of the outlier I'm not sure finTech or payments guy I've done corporate marketing for about 25 years had several payments clients when working at a global PR firm those included Champloo visa Discover I was the director of communications for Verifone and help that company go public and I also uh was part of launching the largest DPO at the time That's a direct public offering at $11 million I can add some color commentary on general marketing issues and questions in the payment space Thanks for having me
[00:01:46] Tedd Huff: [00:01:46] Jim I appreciate you being here I wanted to make sure that we had a little bit of an outside perspective on marketing So we're balancing and on both sides of the house where we look at it from a payments and FinTech side of and you're very familiar with the payments industry next up
[00:02:01] Next up is Rhett Doolittle, the CEO of business warrior that helps small businesses market themselves and manage their social reputation.
[00:02:12] Rhett Doolittle: [00:02:12] What is going on Yeah So I've had a couple ISOs in my former life and sold those and launched business where which is a software application and really solving the problems that I saw After working with thousands of small businesses as a payments guy for years and  everything from local listings and SEO and website and marketing and everything else but for the small business And we just  we really tried to automate everything make it simple super cost-effective and offer solutions to help the small guys get cleaned up and get better and just make it easier to help them find more new customers work with lots of partners and helping them market to their customers and using our software to help them do that as well 
[00:02:52] Tedd Huff: [00:02:52] let's get started talking about what payments marketing is and what it means to you.
[00:02:58] Michele why don't you get started with explaining what this means to you
[00:03:02] Michele Tivey: [00:03:02] thanks everybody  I think we talk about marketing and payments
[00:03:06] You can look at it from two different aspects
[00:03:08] The first would be if you are a merchant with a product and how payments impacts your marketing in that respect 
[00:03:14] the other would be if you are actually a FinTech and how you do marketing for that payments product I really want to focus on the payment strategy for merchants But before I do that I wanted to make a quick comment on marketing By fintechs by payments
[00:03:34] A funny story is about I would say probably about five or six

What is Payments Marketing and what does it mean for your business? February 10th , 2021

Tedd Huff: [00:00:00]  You are now listening to Tedd Talks Payments. Bringing you, the people tech and companies, that change how you pay, and get paid.

[00:00:11] Welcome to this special episode of Ted talks payments.

[00:00:15] We will be talking about how payment strategy is the new marketing strategy. for today's discussion, we have a special guest who is the payer symmetry co-founder and CEO, Michele Tivey.

[00:00:26] Her company has advised for fortune 500 companies in payments optimization with deep analysis for the operational processes. Vendor selection. And product enhancements to help optimize spend while maximizing revenue. They're deep payments expertise has given pyrometry the insight to build a suite of technology products That have increased at client profitability by $4.3 billion since 2011. Automated RFPs and improved card approval rates to as high as 68%. If you have more questions or would like to learn more, email Michele @ payometry. IO.

[00:01:02] Let's get started by introducing our other panelists .

[00:01:06] Jim Nickerson is our marketing expert. 

[00:01:09] Jim Nickerson: [00:01:09] Thanks Ted Hi everybody

[00:01:10] I'm happy to be here tonight I'm a little bit of the outlier I'm not sure finTech or payments guy I've done corporate marketing for about 25 years had several payments clients when working at a global PR firm those included Champloo visa Discover I was the director of communications for Verifone and help that company go public and I also uh was part of launching the largest DPO at the time That's a direct public offering at $11 million I can add some color commentary on general marketing issues and questions in the payment space Thanks for having me

[00:01:46] Tedd Huff: [00:01:46] Jim I appreciate you being here I wanted to make sure that we had a little bit of an outside perspective on marketing So we're balancing and on both sides of the house where we look at it from a payments and FinTech side of and you're very familiar with the payments industry next up

[00:02:01] Next up is Rhett Doolittle, the CEO of business warrior that helps small businesses market themselves and manage their social reputation.

[00:02:12] Rhett Doolittle: [00:02:12] What is going on Yeah So I've had a couple ISOs in my former life and sold those and launched business where which is a software application and really solving the problems that I saw After working with thousands of small businesses as a payments guy for years and  everything from local listings and SEO and website and marketing and everything else but for the small business And we just  we really tried to automate everything make it simple super cost-effective and offer solutions to help the small guys get cleaned up and get better and just make it easier to help them find more new customers work with lots of partners and helping them market to their customers and using our software to help them do that as well 

[00:02:52] Tedd Huff: [00:02:52] let's get started talking about what payments marketing is and what it means to you.

[00:02:58] Michele why don't you get started with explaining what this means to you

[00:03:02] Michele Tivey: [00:03:02] thanks everybody  I think we talk about marketing and payments

[00:03:06] You can look at it from two different aspects

[00:03:08] The first would be if you are a merchant with a product and how payments impacts your marketing in that respect 

[00:03:14] the other would be if you are actually a FinTech and how you do marketing for that payments product I really want to focus on the payment strategy for merchants But before I do that I wanted to make a quick comment on marketing By fintechs by payments

[00:03:34] A funny story is about I would say probably about five or six years ago clients started to ask me to sit in On their marketing teams These are clients who were partners of ours So these are other FinTech companies right Their chargeback providers their processors ISOs PAYFACS and we typically work for merchants And so these are people who we might refer business to and it was kind of a stymie like why did they want us to help them And it turns out that Scott had been speaking at a conference he was up on on the stage and behind him was a hundred foot TV screen And I was listening to the conference online And while he was talking I was tweeting behind him in my company's Twitter account And so I knew what he was going to say because he's my partner and we do this a lot and I would be on topic So right As he was talking a tweet would come up behind him That was very on-point And to folks in the audience this appeared to be like very well orchestrated And I guess they thought Wow How do you do that And how do you get your social marketing social media to be on-brand when you have somebody that's actually sitting on stage and it actually just happened to be lucky at that particular night

[00:05:01] I was just thinking Jim what do you think about the way social media marketing is working for payments companies and fintechs

[00:05:09]Jim Nickerson: [00:05:09] I teach digital marketing at general assembly as a side hustle because when you live in San Francisco everybody's got a side hustle Right 

[00:05:16] what I tell clients right off the bat no matter where they are b2B B2C PTP Social media is just another marketing channel It's the new hot shiny toy right now I actually just finished an article about what clubhouse is going to mean for brands

[00:05:33] It doesn't matter if the platform doesn't reach your audiences it's marketing one Oh one

So if the people you're trying to reach your customers either partners they have to be on those platforms 

[00:05:46] I'm very enamored with new shiny things because that's my personality But the data shows that the tried and true methods of marketing email marketing was ranked as the number one most effective way to deliver your message to a customer.

[00:06:02] When people come to me and say Oh I want to get out I want to take out Facebook ads I asked them to consider The first thing which is where's your audience at

[00:06:10] I always want to have clients meet their customers where they're at in a trade show event or something like you talked about Michelle like those live treat beads are amazing and they're everywhere I was at the Brittany Spears show in Las Vegas And you could tweet and it came up live on the screen

[00:06:26]Michele Tivey: [00:06:26] yeah that's really cool

[00:06:27]Jim Nickerson: [00:06:27] Social is great like for bells and whistles but if you want to sell if you want to sell product um you know there's there's there are many different tools that I encourage people to consider all of them I hope that addresses what you wanted to talk about

[00:06:39] Michele Tivey: [00:06:39] it does I was wondering with your new tool that you guys are rolling out or how are you marketing that

[00:06:47]Rhett Doolittle: [00:06:47] We're having a lot of success with pay-per-click and I would say on your overall topic

[00:06:52] if you "kind of "do anything you're going to fail  

[00:06:54] that's what I see the most whether you're whether you're a major processor or you're a small business mom and pop shop the biggest problem I see is Oh yeah I tried to boost this post or Oh yeah I paid for XYZ or I did an ad but I didn't get anything I didn't say any customers or yeah I paid this agency for two months I didn't see no results So I canceled and I that's what I see that most of marketing and advertising just does not work that way

[00:07:20] as we know you gotta go through the AB testing you gotta commit to it You got to go all in and specialist social media just jumping on and do it and being hot on Twitter for a few weeks or Facebook or Instagram it's just not going to do it it's just like them building their business they didn't do it overnight And their advertising isn't going to be successful overnight either

[00:07:41]Michele Tivey: [00:07:41] I think that when it comes to social media marketing especially people think they're going to quote unquote go viral And so they tend to try to dedicate as little money to it as possible thinking that happens organically And it really doesn't

[00:07:55] Rhett Doolittle: [00:07:55] a hundred percent yeah Pay-per-click is working tremendously well super low cost per lead And so we're pretty happy with just using Google right now for that.

[00:08:06] Michele Tivey: [00:08:06] That a good segue into the bigger topic that I thought we would touch on which is this idea that especially today in a post COVID world payments Really is your marketing strategy.

[00:08:20] What I mean by that is if you're working in the B2C space and if you're trying to reach consumers convenience of the payment is something that consumers consider very seriously right now And pre COVID I used to say that customers crave convenience And that cashless was coming and the more conversion you could get from an app the better off you would be because it was sticky and all those things that you say in marketing but post COVID what we've seen obviously is that there's just so much more purchasing that's happening In an app whether it's order ahead and pick up at the location for grocery or meals or even retail that we know from experience just as consumers ourselves right What we're more likely to do and it's very often around  what the most sticky payment method is For example  the example I used to give was you're not gonna buy billboards that's like legacy marketing If you think of it that way um as much as you are going to put money into making that payment as frictionless seamless and easy for your customers as possible If you invest your money there you're gonna hold onto consumers And keep their customer lifetime value for longer but in today's world you're actually going to get And to give you an example I just recently downloaded the Panera app and loaded my credit card information into it Now my Panera store is my credit card which I find super interesting Ted from a PCI compliance perspective but that's neither here nor there They have that credit card information in there And ever since then I've spent I don't know $750,000 on Panera in the last five days Like I will buy anything at Panera because it's just so easy for me and I don't have to enter The store So I have no COVID issues And from a customer acquisition strategy that payments was really a driver for me and I think that more and more we can see that that kind of strategy can work What do you guys think about that

[00:10:48] Rhett Doolittle: [00:10:48] The whole process of taking out that payment function with cabs and giving cash or credit card and the whole mobile credit card machines at the time I mean that's gone.

[00:10:59] Michele Tivey: [00:10:59] right the invisible payment

[00:11:00]Rhett Doolittle: [00:11:00] We have a client and it's a restaurant in Las Vegas and when COVID hit they were shut down And so he just turned his Restaurant into a little local marketplace whenever they was freaking out about getting groceries Cause he had a great Avenue to get fresh produce and he made the process super simple for people So when you're talking about payments if you're talking also about the order process Like with your Panera experience if you can really think about making that it changed not only saved this business during COVID but when they came out they had all those customers and because he kept all their information He was able to follow up with them later And then now he grew his business 10 X from when he was able to actually reopen the restaurant portion

[00:11:41]Michele Tivey: [00:11:41] Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication That's from Leonardo da Vinci but that's it right the more simple you can make it The more seamless you can make it And in the case of we could really go I could really go down a rabbit hole about why credit card versus debit card and so much if anybody wants to get into that level of the weeds  from your perspective as a merchant whether it's retailer grocery whatever it may be the more attractive you can make that payment And sometimes that's going to include an app or sometimes it's just going to include the experience Like you said like Uber the more likely you are going to be to attract a customer we all know we're not going to stand on a rainy street corner and hail a taxi anymore If we could get an Uber or a Lyft with an app

[00:12:30]Tedd Huff: [00:12:30] I think one of the things that we can't ignore is the fact that visa was willing to spend billions of dollars to acquire a company that is focused on providing an amazing experience to connect people's financial lives To their consumer lives I'm hinting towards the plat acquisition that failed But if you look at the big pieces that they're looking at that being the way to simplify the experience so that They can now turn that new company that new product that new service a new software to get them access into that financial ecosystem in a very frictionless area And I think that's a big sign to show that creating a frictionless payments experience does wonders for you and your marketing and the it actually becomes a tool for that And I'd love thoughts around that before we start Getting that feedback I do want to remind everybody subscribe to the Tedd Talks Payments podcast and join the Tedd Talks Payments and FinTech club on clubhouse app, where we go live a minimum of once a week, every Thursday for this week in payments. And we bring you special guest appearances in panels like this throughout the week.   

[00:13:47] coming back to the team how do you see plaid impacting this overall experience and strategy.

[00:13:53] Michele Tivey: I can say as a consumer whenever I start to onboard myself into a new app and it says powered by Plaid do you want to port over your information I'm like yeah baby let's do it Easy hit the button And I'm just a sucker I want it to be simple And I don't think about because I am your prototypical consumer I don't think about the fact that plaid is now invading every aspect of my personal life and that visa could one day have all of my personal information and that now they have all this data that they can use to sell and resell What do I care about that I didn't have to type my zip code again I mean at the end of the day it's all about the friction

[00:14:33] when it comes to merchants I'll just say this that to go along with what you're saying about plaid and the back end of this from a merchant perspective We advocate that merchants should be thinking about this They should be developing these product strategies all the way back in their product development stages. We would argue that from a startup perspective as soon as you hit the ground running you should be thinking about payments right away.

[00:15:00]Tedd Huff: I appreciate that Michelle And Rhett, last week on this week in payments we talked about how there are so many options in the marketplace And the one that you chose to go with is one that I love the simplicity that they provide You it made it a little bit cringe-worthy for me cause I know what's truly possible in the marketplace I'm not going to name any names If you guys want to find out who it is you need to go listen to Ted talks payments for last week. Moving on we're going to have Katie ask her question 

[00:15:26] Katie Barrett: thanks so much Tedd Um my name is Katie and James Nickerson  invited me to this room so thanks so much James I work for the internet archive I raise money for the nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco We accept donations via Braintree from a variety of different payment platforms Venmo is included in that I'm now seeing that Venmo is not allowing companies onto their platform And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about accepting donations via Venmo native versus for something like a Braintree

[00:15:54] Tedd Huff: Oh yeah this is one of my favorite spots. It's interesting that Venmo has decided to do that And I'm covering this tomorrow on Ted talks payments in a little bit more detail. Doing it native gives you a lot more control even though Braintree Is a subsidiary of PayPal as well You get the all-inclusive under the same umbrella but the downside to it is that you're funneling it through two or three different systems Whereas with your Venmo direct for the businesses is a single point of contact which reduces the failure points. It also probably reduces your overall cost I haven't seen the pricing that Braintree is offering but I would just assume that that Braintree being a subsidiary of PayPal is going to charge an intercompany cost And you're going to probably have to pick that up as a business yourself

[00:16:38] The piece that I do want everybody to understand is that with Venmo although it is considered a person to person payment or a consumer to business now Payment that it is very easy for customers or purchasers to get into a negative balance. One of the things that the CFPB is investigating them on right now is their tactics on how they go after people who have negative balances

[00:17:05] Katie have you guys looked at doing Zell direct as well I know they just opened it up to business to consumer Is that something that that is even on your radar

[00:17:15] Katie Barrett: No it's not but it's something that we'll look into Thank you so much

[00:17:18]Tedd Huff: I'm glad I could put it on your radar

[00:17:20] does that answer your question Is that give you some sort of direction or are you looking for something additional

[00:17:28] Katie Barrett: [00:17:28] No that basically answers the question It's more about do we want to put the engineering time into making that switch I know that the rates are lower I think it's 1.9% plus 10 cents versus what we're getting now at a non-profit rate which is 2.2% plus 30 cents  I believe right now they're actually offering zero fees because of it being a new offer but we make a little in Venmo so I'm just I'm trying to figure out whether or not it's worth the engineering cost to make that switch over the long-term So that's basically where I'm going with that thought

[00:17:58]Michele Tivey: [00:17:58] Is it a recurring donation that you're looking for So are you or do you have are most of your donors going to be somebody that you paying every month or is it a one-time thing How does it...