Convos with Marketing Pros, Episode 4: John Soriano of PayMongo tells all about underrated marketing practices, overhyped trends, and the myth of ‘growth hacks’
We’re back for more with episode four!
On this edition of Convos with Marketing Pros, we are featuring John Soriano, head of marketing at PayMongo. He goes in depth into the wonderful world of B2B marketing in the fintech space and offers his expert knowledge about the tried-and-true secrets to building trust and loyalty with small businesses and corporations alike.
Tell us more about your company and what’s keeping you busy these days.
“We're a financial OS that enables businesses of all sizes to accept payments, manage transactions, and borrow capital. Our platform serves everyone from small local shops to some of the largest enterprises in the Philippines. Outside of work, I keep active with regular basketball games, online chess, and figuring out this whole 'staying healthy in your 30s' thing.”
What do you believe is the most overlooked aspect of marketing today that brands should be paying more attention to?
“I think the most overlooked aspect of marketing today is customer retention analytics, especially in fintech. Everyone gets caught up in acquisition numbers, but there's gold in understanding why customers stick around.
“I’ve found that small businesses stay for completely different reasons than larger companies. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) don't care about complex enterprise features. They want simplicity, ease of use, and features that directly improve their conversion rates. They need solutions that work right out of the box and help them turn more browsers into buyers.
“By tracking what keeps these smaller merchants happy, we've prioritized things like our recent Click to Pay feature powered by Mastercard—the first of its kind in the Philippines. We saw that cart abandonment during checkout was killing conversions for small businesses, so we focused on eliminating manual card entry to speed up checkout by up to 40%. For small merchants, these conversion improvements directly impact their bottom line, which builds incredible loyalty. Understanding these retention drivers isn't the flashy work that gets a lot of attention, but it’s an underutilized growth lever.”
Can you share a campaign or initiative that you're particularly proud of, and what made it successful?
“Right now, I'm pretty excited about our brand launch and website revamp (stay tuned for this!). We're taking a product-led growth approach to our self-serve funnel—learned a lot from Reforge (a career development platform) on this one.
“A key component we're implementing is our sector-based approach to content. Rather than one-size-fits-all messaging, we're building what we call 'content-market fit'—personalizing everything from landing pages to case studies for specific industry verticals. Retail merchants get completely different suggested solutions than educational institutions or food businesses. Each sector sees messaging, features, and examples tailored specifically to their unique challenges.
“For example, our education vertical landing page focuses on managing seasonal enrollment payments and minimizing drop-offs during tuition processing, while retail pages highlight inventory-friendly payment reconciliation and omnichannel solutions. Every sector gets copy that feels like it was written specifically for them because it was.
“Doing content right is my big bet. When we’re speaking to the right customers, I expect higher conversion rates when prospects land on these industry-specific pages versus our generic content. We're also using the rebrand to build out deeper content collaborations with some of our more interesting customers in each vertical. Nothing sells the product better than seeing how a business just like yours is already using it successfully.”
In your experience, what role does influencer marketing play in building long-term brand loyalty, and how can brands measure its true impact beyond just engagement metrics?
“I think influencer marketing looks pretty different in B2B fintech. Our 'influencers' are basically just happy customers who are willing to talk about us.
“We've had good success highlighting stories from small business owners who've used our platform to grow, specifically with PayMongo Capital. There's something powerful about seeing brands like Curva Shapewear explain how accessing working capital helped them expand their women's clothing line, or TinapaIsLife describing how they used financing to scale up production of their specialty food products without cash flow constraints.
“It's almost always an expansion or inventory challenge where PayMongo Capital comes in handy. South Locker, an online sneaker retailer, used Capital to stock up on inventory ahead of high-demand drops—something that would have been impossible with their regular cash flow. These are universal pain points that instantly resonate with other SMEs facing the same growth hurdles.
“We watch how these Capital success stories affect specific behaviors: how many merchant inquiries do we get for Capital? Are they applying for financing at higher rates? Are they coming back for additional rounds of funding? What matters is whether these stories drive actual business outcomes for us and our merchants.”
What’s one marketing trend you believe is overhyped, and why?
“I think the whole growth hacking obsession is pretty overhyped. There's this endless search for a silver bullet that will deliver explosive growth without doing the fundamental work. This creates real problems when marketing to small businesses, who get bombarded with promises about digital solutions that will transform their business overnight.
“The trend gained momentum because everyone loves a shortcut. We constantly see headlines about how some company grew 3x with one simple tactic, and suddenly everyone is chasing that same approach. But these stories miss the foundation that made those tactics work in the first place—the product-market fit, the customer experience fundamentals, the operational excellence. Without those elements, no hack will save you.
“We focus on growth loops instead, not hacks. Hacks are just tactics—they're short-term, might build some initial hype, but can never sustain. Loops, on the other hand, are repeatable playbooks that scale and actually pay better over time. For example, when we help a merchant improve their checkout experience, their customers have a better experience, which leads to repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals, which brings more merchants to our platform.
“It's not as exciting as promising to 10x their business with some secret growth hack, but it builds trust. And in payments, trust is everything.”
What is one common mistake marketers make when trying to scale their efforts, and how can they avoid it?
“The biggest mistake I see marketers make when scaling is treating SMEs as an afterthought. PayMongo has a great growth team that has helped us grow in recent years. The high-touch approach can definitely win, but it's hard to scale. There's a natural pull toward enterprise clients with their bigger budgets, but the SME segment has completely different needs that get ignored.
“That's why I chose to focus on improving our self-serve funnel. We need a scalable means of acquisition, and we're laser-focused on optimizing the entire funnel.
“Our vision is to create a seamless experience where a small business owner can discover us, understand our value proposition for their specific industry, sign up, and start accepting payments—all without needing to talk to anyone on our team. We're rebuilding our onboarding to be more intuitive, creating sector-specific content that speaks directly to different merchant categories, and streamlining our documentation with contextual guidance throughout the product.
“If we get this right, we'll unlock a completely new growth vector for the business. Our growth team can focus their high-touch efforts on larger accounts where that approach makes more economic sense, while smaller merchants who prefer self-service get an experience that's actually better tailored to their needs. The result should be a more balanced acquisition strategy that scales efficiently across all segments, rather than just focusing on the largest clients.”
Sometimes, brands forget that their most eager and effective ‘influencers’ are really just their satisfied customers. So remember, if you want to successfully market your product to your audience, you have to first work on offering a seamless experience that makes a customer want to keep coming back. Good marketing is an extension of excellent service!
Get into the latest trends in marketing in our 2025 trend guide here. Interested to work with us? Message us via sales@nearcreative.co!
