Businesses that Don’t Invest in Marketing, Don’t Succeed

Here is where you purchase an online ad package from Fine Art and Real Estate Broker Anna D. Smith. The inherent long-term marketing benefits of these packages provide better Return on Visibility (ROV) than Google or Facebook ads.

Just like nobody “plans to fail,” they only ‘fail to plan”; so too is Branding tied to a business’s success. In the future world of Voice Search, having a consumer tell Amazon’s Alexa, “Get me the phone number to In & Out Burger (which is a Brand),” is far better than, “Alexa, get me the phone number to a hamburger joint.” Whatever business you are in, in the last example, “Do you think Alexa will be serving up your business as its answer?”

Working less hard with the monetary resources of securing your family’s future requires a strategy, and that strategy requires quality customers. So how do you acquire quality customers at scale? You must market your product or service to strangers. For you to go from a stranger, to someone whose product or service is trusted enough to purchase from requires marketing. 

According to finance company Lending Tree, “Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of US small businesses fail within the first year. By the end of their fifth year, roughly 50% have faltered after 10 years, only around a third of businesses have survived.” 

It takes five-years to build a brand! It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the direct correlation between the time it takes to mature as a Brand and the success rate of a business. One of the Quora responses to “How long does it take to establish a known brand?,” Consultant at  Seven Parallel Consulting, Chicago, Illinois, Chang Liu, put it this way, “10 years. Branding is well known. Branding is a relation. Even Google took six years to become known and trusted.

The process of a complete stranger in becoming a customer involves three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. These three stages are known as a sales funnel.

Sales Funnel: 101

AWARENESS: awareness is a stand-in for the term Brand awareness. A long-standing cattle-herding practice in the United States was to heat up metal with a distinct logo or design and to press it against the flesh of livestock. This left an indelible mark on the animal. This mark, or brand, distinguished it from belonging to the cattle herd of the neighbors. 

All businesses must distinguish themselves in the marketplace. This is done through branding. Now that you have a set of ideals or principles that makes your product or service unique from others, the public must become Aware of this uniqueness. 

Social media, social (community) and media (communication) is an excellent digital channel for making strangers aware that you have a product or service in exchange for cash.

CONSIDERATION: consideration is a stand-in for giving thought. In other words, giving thought to purchasing your product or service. A page on your website, also known as a landing page, is the best digital location to convince someone to take the next step and to actually buy. 

Clicking on a social media post to your website’s landing page, is an excellent example of taking a stranger down the sales funnel. 

CONVERSION: conversion is a stand-in for sales. For a brick-and-mortar business, the best place to convert a sale is inside your establishment. For online products or services, that would be the credit card button on a web page designed for taking the customers money. 

Now that you are learned-up about a sales funnel, what internet channels are best for the long-term and the short-term?

Internet Search Engines

Internet search engines are the best long-term Sales Funnel Strategy, for the following reasons:

1. It’s a free source to bring you Web traffic;
2. It allows you to skip past the Awareness stage in the sales funnel; and 
3. Its sales conversion rate is higher than social media.

In the marketing world, word-of-mouth has the highest conversion rate. But why? For the person who is making the recommendation, they have experienced a Brand at all of the touch-points in the Sales Funnel, awareness, consideration, and conversion. 

For the person on the receiving end of the recommendation, friends and family are the most trusted source in receiving information on a Brand.

The next best conversion rate are product or service reviews; again, another information source that has experienced a Brand at all of the touch-points in the Sales Funnel.

The third best conversion results are from emails to people who volunteered to opt-in receiving a Brand’s emails. This is obvious, because an opt-in email recipient is already past the Awareness stage in a Brand’s marketing campaign. 

The fourth best conversion rate comes from a Search Engine Results Page. The rationale for this, it’s targeting the customer right as they’re ready to make their buying decisions. This channel greatly diminishes the necessity for Brand awareness. 

The fifth best conversion rate would be from cold calling emails. A cold calling email campaign is a target rich campaign. In other words, it is focused on a targeted segment of your market, and unlike social media algorithms that restrict reach on their platforms, emailing will reach its destination. 

The lowest sales conversion will come from social media. Most don’t permit selling directly on their platforms. Another problem with social media, they are not seen as search engines regarding a consumer’s immediate desire to make a purchase. While Facebook and Instagram may boast a billion plus users, who uses these platforms when searching for a car purchase, or kitchen cabinet? 

Social media are not sales conversion rich platforms, but they are great for Brand awareness.

Social Media 

Social Media by definition equates to Community Communication. While it is low on Conversion rates, it is excellent as a short-term Internet marketing strategy. 

While it is not official, it is highly likely Pinterest is used as a result more often in all the US based search engines than any other website.

The Benefits of Advertising With Me

Unlike paying Facebook or Google for advertising, my services provide paid content that permanently lives on the Internet. One of those permanent locations is my website, the other is on Pinterest. As noted above, Pinterest is the most expensive and desired source for Brand Awareness. Its value is triple that of a YouTube view, the second most prized view for advertisers. 

Unlike paying Facebook or Google for their advertising services, where your money runs out, so do they, I promote your paid content on social media twice a month. This is 24 times in a year. Don’t worry, automation is a major game changer for digital advertisers.

Just like the service provided if you paid a PR Firm, I too guarantee your paid content getting Indexed in one of the major search engines. 

Finally, Anna D Smith’s Fine Art and Real Estate Daily is the #1 news source for Luxury real estate and Underground contemporary art. The following are screenshots of the type of high valued customers you and your ad would be exposed to. Here Google Ads has placed paid ads from such high valued corporate entities, as Merrill Edge the retail U.S. domestic arm of Merrill Lynch, and MarketSmith, the comprehensive stock analysis service from Investor’s Business Daily (IBD).

Other notables include Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway’s HomeServices, Morgan Stanley, New York Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, all very high valued audiences for advertisers. 

Let’s Get Started

(FAQ)

What kinds of ad formats do you accept?

I support the following types of ads + links:

Text Ad:  Your ad is a word or group of words.

Image Ad: Your ad is an image on a jpg, png, or some other image file, and usually contains text.

Image Ad:  An image ad (created by me): I create an Image ad about your service or product.

Sponsored Post:  You provide me with an article and I publish it. The article must be consistent with the news Daily’s general content, or tie your service or product to my general content.

FOR EXAMPLE:  A travel agency could talk about using the proceeds from selling property for traveling, and using their particular agency.

Sponsored Post (written by me):  I write an article about your product or service consistent with the news Daily’s general content, or I tie your service or product to my general content.

SPONSORED CONTENT is any content which resembles the publication’s editorial content, but is paid for by an advertiser with the intention to promote the advertiser’s product or service. All sponsored content must be clearly labeled.

Editorial Post: You provide me with an article and I publish it. The article must be consistent with the news Daily’s general content, or tied to my general content.

Editorial Post (written by me):  I write an editorial article consistent with the news Daily’s general content, or I tie it to my general content.

EDITORIAL CONTENT is any content that’s intended to inform, educate, or entertain. It provides readers with data about a topic or explains something to them. At its core, editorial content is about providing value to the reader. It’s not intended to sell. It’s not intended to drive conversions.

For example : An article on the company’s founder would be editorial.

What are your rates?

An affordable nonrefundable flat rate of $200. There is an additional $200 if you want me to create the content. My content outperforms industry standards. Here is a Google analytics’s report noting all my new content is within industry standard or above, regarding time spent on that content. 

According to Databox:

average session duration is one of those signals based on merit, meaning it’s hard to game it. You can’t improve it by advertising, by stuffing more keywords onto your page, or by writing more clickbaity headlines.

According to our research, a reasonable benchmark for average session duration is between 2-3 minutes.

This above industry standard regarding content engagement also extends to social media. Here are the Twitter Analytics for my engagement rate. The industry standard for a tweet is 0.5%. My tweet engagement rate of 4.6% is 9x the industry standard. As noted by Databox, content engagement is based on merit, and cannot be faked.

**All fees associated with my content creation are not editable. If you wanted a voice in your content creation you were free to provide me with that content.

Do you provide Sponsored links?

Yes. All links as a result of this service will contain the “sponsored link” href.

adsmith Advertising Services ~PayPal Checkout~

You create an ad: Upon receipt of payment and when you are ready to get published contact me at anna@adsmith.broker, Subject line: Advertising Services. Please provide an ad, and it will be published from 1 to 3 weeks.

I create an ad: Upon receipt of payment and when you are ready for me to get started, contact me at anna@adsmith.broker, Subject line: Advertising Services. I will provide you with a questionnaire. Upon completion, return to me and your ad will be published from 1 to 3 weeks.