Mastercard ‘Digital Doors’ Aims to Help Small Businesses Scale With Marketing and Partnerships

Mastercard has unveiled a number of updates to its “Digital Doors” small business program.

Among these new features are a marketing hub platform and new partnerships, the company said in a Tuesday (May 2) news release.

Timed to coincide with Small Business Month, the rollout comes as small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) feel increasingly pessimistic about the economy.

“Advancing its small business commitment, the company is launching the Mastercard Marketing Hub as a new service platform within Digital Doors to act as a catalyst for entrepreneurs to grow digitally through a structured combination of educational content, offers and an exclusive tool to create marketing assets,” the release said.

According to Mastercard, the company’s marketing hub offers SMBs tools to connect with customers that include Masterdcard’s Ad Design, a free online graphic design tool, as well as discounted memberships for Hootsuite, which lets businesses reach customers across multiple social media channels.

The hub also offers a lifetime discount on Triple Whale, “which helps manage analytics, attribution and creative for Shopify storefronts in one easy-to-use dashboard, giving real-time insights needed to grow a brand,” Mastercard said.

Mastercard’s new offerings are among a host of solutions for small businesses as Main Street SMBs find themselves anxious about their futures.

New research in the PYMNTS/Enigma collaboration “Main Street Health Q1 2023: Using Finance to Ease Recession Fears”  finds that a little more than a quarter of SMBs (26%) have access to the equivalent of at least two months’ worth of revenue in financing. In addition, more than four in 10 SMBs (43%) say that reining in inflation is the greatest issue they face.

“Fortunately for small businesses, future-fit financing solutions and modern payment technologies are revolutionizing the increasingly cashless business operating environment by providing new funding routes for cash-strapped SMBs,” PYMNTS wrote Tuesday as part of a conversation with Charles Zhu, Enigma’s vice president of product data.

Zhu stressed that consumers are continuing to “really move away from cash,” thus leading to a payments void that “certain payment systems and techniques, including BNPL (buy now, pay later),” have begun to fill.

“The big story continues to be that people are not using cash as much — we’re not going back to what cash percentages looked like before, and payment processors are playing an increasingly and accordingly important role in the SMB economy,” Zhu said.

He said that this ongoing transformation has led to an “explosion” in the “amount of financing, and the kinds of financing” now available to small businesses.