Quote:
Originally Posted by Shap
(Post 19925805)
I was recently in attendance at a tech conference keynote where the speaker discussed that many mainstream companies are now struggling online. In the past most online companies relied on mailing, seo and banner advertising as their bread and butter. Those days are long gone. Mailing open rates continue to decline, seo has completely changed and banner click thru rates continue to decline as well. Each of these three areas not only yielded great results but were FAST results. They were easy results. You didn't have to work very hard for them relatively speaking. The companies doing well today are those companies that have invested time and money in developing relationships with their clients.
As I sat their listening to this it really hit home. This has happened in adult as well. A large majority of adult companies that had great success were very successful at banner advertising, seo and mailing. How many adult companies have develop relationships with their existing customers? I would say very few. How many of them spend time developing relationships with prospective clients? Even fewer. I know when I ran Twistys and GayTube I made sure the entire team knew the importance of the customer, the relationship we had with them and making sure they were happy. On Twistys I spent a lot of time on the Members Forum discussing everything from suggestions to complaints to ideas to site upgrades. It was very important to me that the members knew I cared and more importantly I appreciated them as a customer. We didn't always see eye to eye but I cared about them. I think that played a huge role in Twistys weathering the tube storm that hurt many pay sites. I didn't do near enough with non members but the mentality was there and I know if I ran it today I'd have a number of strategies in place to really connect with people and get a huge following for the brand/site.
I thought up of a few starting points for anybody who would wants to try to improve their business in 2014.
#1. If you don't respect your customer change your thinking NOW! He's not a dirty porn surfer. He's not a loser. He's your customer and if you are a pay site he's made the decision to share some of his hard earned money with you. If you were walking down the street and a stranger walked up to you and gave you $25 or the next time you go out to eat some stranger picks up the bill for you. Would you appreciate it? Of course. Would you thank them? Of course. Why not do the same with your members?
#2 Make sure you are close to whoever does your customer support. Don't outsource you customer support. Customer support holds the answer to many of your problems and can give you the pulse of your industry. Make sure you have control of it and full access at all times to all support tickets.
#3 Know when a certain segment of the market is growing and when it's declining. Mailing can still be profitable but it's not going to make a comeback. Know that you will most likely see decreasing returns on mailing from today moving forward. Also know that there are new areas that open up daily for you to explore. Is your brand on Twitter? On other adult friendly social media platforms? Are you working those platforms properly? Or are you applying the same tactics across all of them? Ie are you blasting the same content in the same way across Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook? or are you catering to each market and what works best on each?
#4 Do you have any way to communicate with your customers and do you know much about them? Ie Do you know who your best customers are? Where did you get them? What other sites do your customers like? etc etc
Those are just a few quickies. If any of you want to discuss this more by all means let's discuss it. If you'd like any direct feedback for your particular situation I'd be more than happy to try to drum up a couple of ideas for you.
I'd love to know what your thoughts are on this. Fire away :)
Happy Holidays and a Happy and Prosperous 2014 to you all :thumbsup
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Hi Shap.... it's me, BM Bradley, now appearing as grapesode from Montana... hope you and your family are doing well.... I've read your post and find several relevant points, the one point I'm not seeing though is the attraction of the content to potential customers.
my thoughts are that a 5 years ago there was a limited selection of content available to the market.... sure there was all the niche stuff etc HOWEVER the majority of the adult content was what I think of a 'San Fernando Valley Crap' weird hair and makeup, off the charts moaning, odd facial expressions, contorted unnatural posing in the stills sets and a lot of focus on the 'cock' .... when there was no other content available this stuff was selling... now.... not so much... once the 'potential clients' were able to find 'unmolested content' via the tubes and other avenues like social media and cams... this became the preferred choice, while those unwilling or unable to see the direction of the market shift started losing their customer base.
you can see this in action at GFY almost every day in fact.... models posted that I know for a fact that will convert and retain are belittled and unceremoniously dismissed. and in the case of 'twistys', since you left, the quality of the content has depreciated or at least the images posted at gfy for affiliates is certainly degraded...
from my perspective with the client base I shoot for... I see things from the point of view of the 'member' ... I read the comments every day and follow the scoring on the sets everyday, across the network, everyday... then try and adjust my shooting to follow these trends... I will say that I'm not particularly interested or excited as a 'man' in the content I'm producing HOWEVER my company is solvent and my family feed... this week.
I'm not sure how galm-porn is doing and in fact I have no real interest in glam-porn (is that even what's they call the stuff these days) I do know the guys shooting it are infatuated with the 'look' and that clients are investing HEAVILY into glam porn because it's expensive as hell to shoot but are 'members'? does it convert and retain? I have no idea... glad everybody's working though :2 cents:
and parody's... well once you get over seeing a vagina why would anyone watch low quality productions and bad acting for a 'peek'? you know? sure these companies are busting ass to turn great product... but reality check: they don't have 100 million dollar budgets... and truth be told even 100 million dollars films are crap a lot of the time...
I have my own ideas about content and marketing and that's the direction I'm headed and I'm sure there are very very many smart people out there looking forward as well.. and I'm sure that even though the gold rush is over adult is still viable, and that there are plenty of untapped 'mines' in them hills :)
happy holidays to you and your family Shap.... regards, Brian
