Note: This is the continuation of Marketing: The Sniper and the Machine Gun models (Part 1), please refer to it in case you don’t understand what is this article about. It’s highly advised to read it first either way.

So last week we saw our incredible sniper maximizing the results of his actions by acting smart and carefully aiming to his target instead of just shooting bullets at random. Easy to say, hard to do, but at least now you have some insight on how to do it and hopefully you started doing it. This week’s article is about what happens when companies grow to a level where they get so big and powerful their target’s are becoming a real problem. I’m calling it “The Tumbling Sniper” and you’ll see why.

Before anything, please take a look at the image below these lines:

As you can see in this nice 3D model (not so coincidentally, the graphic mathematical representation of this model is a 3D graphic as well), our great sniper became more powerful, more resourceful and, at least in theory, he has all targets at sight and within range.  In his mind, he can win the war by himself, but not everything is as promising as it looks. Let’s see: after his first campaigns, he has a solid foundation (budget) that provides him with more range. He also wants to keep his position in the market, so he needs to add an additional level of resources for branding. However, to keep himself going stronger, he needs yet an additional level: human resources. Metaphor aside, this is the bread and the butter of business administration: how to keep your business organization rational.

This is one of the biggest challenges an organization will need to face sooner or later, and it will define whether this organization will keep growing or just disappear. In our example, we can see how that 3rd level causes a real problem: our sniper lost his accuracy and he’s busy trying to hold equilibrium rather than getting new targets, while other snipers are closer to the targets. To make it worse, our sniper’s range clashes with the other sniper’s range (competition), which means there will be more resources applied to fight the other snipers as well. In business terms, our sniper will have an untouched market (the reddish zone behind him in the graph), a shared unfaithful slice of the market (the zone our sniper and other snipers are fighting for) and an exponentially growing amount of non-targeted marketing actions.

As you may imagine, this means our sniper (who isn’t a dumb one) must do something and he must do it immediately. The “beauty” of this is action paths will get really limited, making the choices more clear. However, as time passes by, the cost for taking each path will increase. In this model, there are 2 obvious choices:

1. Professional development: Improve human resources by hiring professionals or by adapting the existing human resources via training
2. Atomization: create smaller business areas with a high degree of independence between each other, each one of them dedicated to a certain market target (product, service, etc)

Personally, I think that in 80 or 90% of situations, option number 2 is the best. Of course, it’s more expensive, but it usually gets the biggest and better results, therefore it’s the path followed by most (if not all) successful companies. You can see this happening in adult industry as well, only that in a lesser scale and usually with a higher degree of inter-dependence between business units.

Real life techniques

Stronger foundations

To provide our sniper with a stronger base, we need to maximize the results in the sales over business levels costs equation. In maths terms:

x=I/(B+Br+HR)^12-1

where I=Total Income, B=Budget, Br=Branding Costs and HR=Human Resources applied to marketing actions. 12-1 is the period (if we want 6 months, it will be 6-1 and so on). Needless to say, the higher x is, the better we’re doing.

Question is: how do we achieve this if we don’t have a big budget or a strong business organization?

Answer is: TECHNOLOGY.

First of all, if you want to run a tight ship by using applied technology, do yourself a favor and HIRE A PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMMER.

Now, let’s get our hands dirty. Take a look to our previous tutorial as well as Data Research: Working with Search Engines. I’m sure you already know what will this be about, but just in case, what we’ll try to achieve is smart data tracking applied to concrete marketing solutions. To achieve this, get your programmer to create a backend in which you can add as many business units as you want. In example, you may have Site 1, Site 2, Site 3 or Program 1 (Site 1, Site 2, Site 3) , Program 2 (Site 1, Site 2, Site 3) and so on. After that, make him create an auto-import feature for Google Analytics or at least some CSV, XML or whatever importer.

Inside Google Analytics create a custom report where you include AT LEAST traffic, Avg Page Views, Mobile and everything in the content tab, including Site Overlay. All of this but the Site Overlay is the data you’ll import into your script. Now, you’ll have at least 2 data analysis sources: a general one and the Site Overlay. Take a very careful look at this one and check what are the most clicked areas in your page/site (Tip: if you want to include this into data tracking analysis, simply assign “zones” to links, ie Header=Zone 1, Nav= Zone 2, Sidebar=Zone 3 and so on). Now… is the most important link in your page being clicked the most? If not, why? Just take a look at the position of the most clicked zone and try to move your join page link there. Did it improve? If so, you can refine, if not, change color, shape, make it blink, whatever. Once you start seeing results, you’ll need to use another module you’ll need to add to your script: a page builder. This module will need to build pages according to your optimized template and change all other business units automatically. By the way, it’s very fast and easy as long as you use CSS CODED BY A PROFESSIONAL. If you plan to save $50 or 100 or 200…. well, good luck.

Finally, if you’re using a stats script, make your coder import that data as well so you know what sells and what not. It might be better if you have it custom coded, but as long as you can auto-import this data into your database you’ll be fine.

So now we have all other sites being dynamically targeted and refined. That’s great and you can stop here, or add a degree of complexity (and hopefully results) and make your project totally dynamic and driven by data. In this scenario, your sites will change dynamically depending on time of the day, geo IP and even on how are other sites in the network doing. Let’s say you are using 5 sponsors across your network of 10 sites, and the previous hour Sponsor 1 was the best seller in 5 of your sites, Sponsor 2 in 3 sites and Sponsor 3 in 1 site, while Sponsors 4 and 5 had no sales. Then your program may assign the best sellers to your hotter spots and keep it like that as long as the situation continues.

Well, hard and complex, but believe me, we’re just starting, this is just the tip of the iceberg!

Don’t forget to bookmark this page and visit us again next week: Our sniper goes on the hunt!

Update: I didn’t have time to add the new article, but see a LIVE EXAMPLE of what I said in this post in exchange of the article I didn’t deliver

(note: this is an adaptation of my Marketing degree thesis and as such you may have seen a similar post somewhere else since I used it in a couple boards)

When dealing with marketing research and niches, we’ll always find ourselves in a point where applied research requires optimization to make the most out of our marketing budget(s). This point can be planned in advance (ie if we’re setting goals by time frames) or may surge out of necessity (ie, we notice our marketing efforts aren’t working as expected).

Now, if you’re worried this post may be something heavy and tiresome, don’t worry,  I won’t go into deep technical stuff nor research methodology. Instead, I’ll try to explain this in an as simple as possible way, by providing easy to understand examples and then some ideas on how to implement these techniques in a really easy way.

To start, let’s go with what I called the The Sniper and the Machine Gun models. In this scenario, we have two soldiers trying to reach their targets. One of them has a high precision sniper rifle, and the other has a machine gun. At this point I’m pretty sure you’re figuring out what will be this about, but let’s have a look at it:

The Sniper Model

This is the Sniper Model. Our sniper is using few bullets (money/resources) to make a sale by researching the proper way to get an easy target. Thus, the full line goes straight to the heart of the target (or, in other words, make a sale). Now, you’ll see the blue dotted lines that goes to the “body” of the target, “injuring” him, which may lead the target to “survive” (meaning he won’t buy because of a weak call to action or unrelated motives) or maybe he will “die” because of his injuries (meaning that he may NOT buy at that exact time, but may be buying sooner than later).

To add to that, our shooting range has 3 zones: niche targeting, media delivery (proper or wrong choice of media and marketing materials) and competition, and it’s easy to see our bullet will be farther from the target as the zones become bigger. The more accurate and restricted our “zones” are, the less loss in accuracy.

Let’s get the metaphor out of the picture and straight to business:  If we define our niche in an accurate way, our target will be closer to become an effective sale since we’ll have less dispersion. Once we start adding more factors, the dispersion ratio will have a compound rate increase.

Before continuing, let me add something that I know most of you hate to guts, but it’s very easy to use and extremely useful and needed in marketing and economics research: the Compound Interest Function. It’s as simple as this:
Value   =   IV (1  +  R / t)^Yt

where IV=Initial Value , R=Interest Rate , t= times of occurrence per year (every month would be 12) and Y=number of years.

In the graphic above, I’ve used a reasonable deviation of 3.4%, which comes out from the difference between total sales per campaign minus impulse buying multiplied by dispersion factors. So in this simple graphic, with only 3 dispersion factors, we could notice that around 30-35% of our budget is being 100% effective (leads to a sale) while the remaining budget has a 33% of chances of convert to a sale at a later time. Again, this is a very simplified model, you may find out that working with real numbers adds an exponential value of difficulty *

The Machine Gun Model

So we got to the dreaded “machine gun” model. Here, our soldier will use a really high number of bullets to get the same results than the sniper. Take a look at the graphic below:

Here we can see that the amount of resources used to achieve the same results increases in an exponential rate. In the basic example, we have a 360 degrees market with 8 targets, so, to our machine gun soldier it will take 45 bullets to get a 100% target (sale). In other words, the budget will increase 45 times for 100% effective sales. You’ll also notice that brand awareness is a little higher in this model, and that’s why companies going for wide range branding won’t care much about niche refining (this is a very common usage in mainstream marketing, however, in my humble opinion it’s a waste of energy and resources in online adult marketing).

In short, it’s common sense to use the Sniper Model. However, most people uses the Machine Gun Model. Why? Well, because unless you’re part of a certain community or a very knowledgeable person about a certain market niche, the sniper model requires a lot of specialization and the use of every single resource available to refine data. Of course, data research is the most important one, but technology usage, smart design elements, competition status research, innovation, economics and so on are factors to keep in mind. As an example, I honestly doubt any designer could compete with me in certain niches (ie pornstars, glamour and some fetishes) when it comes to results. But, what if I need to do a design for an amateur mature site? Well, 99.99% of designers will say “Yes, I can do that” and come with the same cookie cutter design, just changing the subject. We all know it’s like that, and I can’t blame anyone on that, there’s not a lot of work for designers, and at the same time, some site owners aren’t well informed on the subject as well, so it all comes to a vicious circle.

However, information is power, and I’ve the knowledge to make things different, so why not use it? I’ve seen/heard many times the usual mottos “marketing is useless”, “you don’t need a designer to do a site, do it yourself because you know the niche better” (I gotta admit this is the funniest one, out of tens of thousands of adult webmasters I can count with my hands the number of people capable of doing this with decent results), “I’ve been doing this for years” (yet most old adult companies are closing doors) and so on and so on. And so on. I won’t say anyone is wrong, to each his/her own. However, if everybody else is failing, why keep following the path of failure?

So yes, information is power, and although it’s very uncommon to see someone providing secrets to competition, well, here here are some useful techniques.

Some real life techniques

Marketing Effectiveness Research

First define a budget, no matter how small it is as long as you can do something with it, you can grow it later. Isolate this marketing action by using specific custom campaigns so data isn’t contaminated. Now, choose 2 to 4 marketing models (ie banners, text links, galleries, different traffic sources, same marketing materials with different selling claims/colors and/or any combination of these) on a strict time frame, for example 1 month. Try to keep traffic levels to be consistent throughout the whole time frame, for example, if you buy 90,000 hits try to make those hits come at 3000 per day.

After the time frame ends, you’ll have some amount of data, including traffic (one column per each source), CTR, sales, time frame and so on. Using Excel, input all the data per day (1 row per day) including amount of traffic, amount of traffic to sponsors (or to join page if you have a paysite), amount of sales and a last column should include cost of traffic (if you didn’t buy traffic, use the average value from traffic providers for the same kind of traffic you have). Make a graph with this data so you can see the results at first sight. Do this for each marketing model.

Now, if you kept the traffic flow at the same level, the last column should give you a somehow flat line, but chances are you’ll see several hills and valleys in the other columns. Quite possibly, you’ll see differences depending on day of the week and day of the month. So now, let’s go to data analysis:

a) first thing first, subtract  your initial budget from the total amount of money derived from that campaign. If you get a negative number or a little positive value… well, you’re doing everything wrong, so time to rethink your strategy.

b) take your total number of sales and divide it by 30 (or any time frame you decided to go with) to get the average sales per day. Add it as a new column to your graph, repeating the same value on each row. Now you’ll have a flat line. Check out every spot where the value is above the line, and try to find something in common. For example: are those spots on weekends? at start of month? coming from some traffic source? is there a daytime/nighttime difference? (most probably, yes). Again, do it for each marketing model.

c) now compare the marketing models themselves and you’ll see a lot of information that will help you to diagnose which are your strengths and weaknesses.  Thus, you may end with something like “best results came from Tour A with TGP traffic on Wed around 6PM and 3 AM with geo IP US-DE-UK”

so in this example, it’s very easy to see that all tour versions converts better on Wed to Fri  of Week 1, between 6PM and 6 AM (day/4 means we have divided the day in 4 equal parts, but you can do it with 3, 4, 6, 8, etc. I like 6 myself), with geo IP us-de-uk. We also see tour A converts great on TGP, while tour B seems to be built for SE. Let’s say our original budget was $3000 using 3 tours and 3 different traffic sources all equally divided, thus we invested (or wasted) $66.66 per sale, and common sense tells us to divide our budget in a more efficient way since most traffic fell out of effective range. Now it will look something like this:

Model 1: Tour A, TGP traffic, 3 days a week (Wed to Fri), first week of the month, 6 hours a day (6PM to 12PM), US-UK traffic

Budget explanation: when we started, we had 3 marketing models with $0.463 per hour per traffic source investment ($1000 divided by 30 days divided by 24 hours divided by 3 traffic sources).  Now we’re weeding out 2 traffic sources, 4 days, 3 weeks, 18 hours and we realize that each sale in this targeted model would cost us only $8.33 . See the maths below:

0.463 (hourly investment) x 1 (traffic source) x 3 (days) x 1 (week) x 6 (hours)

so Model 1 real cost per sale is 12.49% of what it was.**

Model 2: Tour B,  SE traffic, 4 days a week (Wed to Mon), first week of the month, 12 hours a day (6PM to 6AM), DE-UK traffic

Now we’re weeding out 2 traffic sources, 3 days, 3 weeks, 12 hours and we realize that each sale in this targeted model would cost us only $22.22 (33.33% of what it really was) . See the maths below:

0.463 (hourly investment) x 1 (traffic source) x 4 (days) x 1 (week) x 12 (hours)

Therefore, although we could use a budget redistribution of $1875 for Model 1 and $1330 for Model 2 (or $1750 and $1250 for budget correction ), we still don’t have a tendency, so we’ll give tour C another oportunity, only that the budget will look more or less like this:

Model 1: $1700

Model 2: $850

Model 3:$450

After this time frame, we repeat the analysis, only that instead we’ll add a “previous time frame growth” column (in %): anything over 0 will tell you we’re on the right path. Any negative number will require further adjustments. Either way, in no more than 5 or 6 months you’ll probably have a defined tendency and a pretty targeted niche

Next Week: Our Sniper Tumbles! (and even more techniques) Updated: New post is on!

*if you’re interested in going deep further into statistical analysis and research, you should use Variance or Standard Deviation to measure the dispersion values

** according to the table, you may say that I’m leaving out the 19 sales, however in this example we’re working on time frame trends and the cost isn’t per sale, but for the best hour spot

This is a really high end design for Miss Bella Bellini with a custom CMS that helps to handle several of the design aspects and eye candy. Yeah baby, beauty by programming! On top of that, the treat was to create a CMS that can do everything as easy and fast as possible. Well, we kinda made it: upload content, write some text, PUBLISH. Yes, everything else is automated in the background, so adding each set may take 30 seconds to 1 minute. Of course, this custom CMS has features no other CMS has, therefore it’s easier to achieve this kind of behavior. Thus, this site is not a “dynamic” layout: it goes BEYOND dynamic

By the way, there’s some integration with 3rd party scripts to handle certain areas or features, as requested by the client. And last but not least, the real, real, REAL important thing is the amazing content I was provided to work with, Bella Bellini is the queen of fetish and here she shows why!

Anyway, I hope you like it, I’m really proud of it, and even though I know that the best part of it is the coding, I always have a weak spot for design. And the design for this site is amazing!