What marketing works best for MCA: social media or Adwords? It’s the age old question for ISOs. Whether you read deBanked, talk with other ISOs, or go to industry events this is sure to be mentioned. In this clip from our webinar “How To Craft Effective Social Media Ad Campaigns For Your ISO Business”, financial marketing expert Mike Langford tackles the topic.

Both Adwords and social media ads have their pros and cons. Google Ads have been a foundation of ISO marketing since the very beginning. The great thing about them is they are shown to an audience based on expressed or inferred intent. Adwords gives you the ability to target based on location, language, keywords, and more. If strategically used, Google Ads can be a great marketing tool for ISOs.

The problem is that most of the time ISOs can’t figure out the ‘special sauce’ when it comes to Google Ads. Because merchants find your ads based on keywords like “merchant cash advance” and “business funding”, you miss out on the merchants who may be looking for financing but have no clue a merchant cash advance even exists. For that reason, and for notoriously high CPCs, Langford leans towards the other option – social media ads.

The benefit of using social media ads is the ability to define your audience in an extremely granular way (example: 35 year old men who own businesses in Texas who make $20k or more a month in revenue). With this, you’re able to get your ad directly in front of the people you want to be in front of at what can be a significantly lower cost than Google.

Unfortunately, there’s no true answer to this debate. Some ISOs will find success with Adwords, while others will drain their marketing budgets trying to figure it out. Some ISOs will find their golden ticket in social media ads, while others will only see an increase in “likes” but a drop in deals funded. For both social media and Adwords, it will take trial and error  to get things right.

What marketing channels have worked best for you? Do you have any questions about this topic or want to find out more about partnering with Pearl? Let us know by emailing [email protected] or calling 1-800-888-9959 anytime.