Callie Simms Marketing Blog

Background: Adult Marketing & The Rest of The World

When it comes to marketing, search engine optimization and web design, it seems there is ADULT and the rest of the world. There appears to be no real correlation and there are many mainstream marketers who make fun of “supposed adult online/SEO marketers.” They don’t take us seriously and think that the only SEO & marketing techniques we are privy to are link scams and black hat techniques. Well that is not true.

Standards: Adult Marketers Define New Online Marketing Strategy

There are marketers, such as myself, that do not come from strictly adult backgrounds. We are successful mainstream marketers and have advanced degrees in business, design and entertainment. We have refined our design and marketing approaches to become the culimination of our adult & mainstream skills. By utilizing a holistic approach to our marketing strategy, we are redefining what adult marketing is and we are now setting the standards for how mainstream marketers conduct campaigns.

Porn is no longer just porn, its adult entertainment with many different outlets. There is erotic film made by women for women and there is specialized “kink” that caters to specific fetishes. Those mediums don’t fall under the traditional definitions of porn and they are not sub-sects or off-shoots of it. They are their own form of adult entertainment.

Mainstream marketers have always used sex to sell products. You want to be accepted, you want to be hip, beautiful and desired? BUY THIS? Ummm – where did they ever get that idea that sex sells? Most of the sexual concepts or undertones in advertisements today are taken straight from adult content.

• Agent Provacateur’s latest European advertising campaign features Femme Domme outfits on beautiful, yet domineering, models. Riding whips, proper camera angles and all.
• Music video vixen Vita Guerrera’s website looks like that of an upscale escort (it even has legal disclaimers that she is not).

Following Suit: Mainstream & Niche Markets

I read the article – Ning’s Infinite Wisdom – in May’s Fast Company magazine. It was very exciting and read it three times, not because I was learning something new, but because a concept that I have been utilizing in my adult marketing that I know works, is being leveraged and used successfully by major social media companies and is in fact, the basis of their phenomenal success.

Ning’s Business Model & Article Concepts

1. Viral loops are the most advanced form of direct marketing strategy in the world now and they must be replicated.
2. Nothing can be viral unless it is truly good. If you create something people want/need/enjoy, the customers will build the business for you.
3. The Viral Adoption Model is the cheapest way to grown an audience. The more connections you have, the more nodes you have = the more people you have and the more value you have.
4. Instead of having a one giant audience, you have millions of small ones. The bigger the network, the faster it grows.

How does this translate to the adult industry?

Niche marketing has been happening in the adult field for years. Mainstream marketing newest buzz terms have been put into practice way before the term Web 2.0 was created.

Example: Kink.com has one corporate site, but it is divided into fetish specific sites – Water Bondage, Fucking Machines, The Training of “O”, etc. All the site have the same design concept and have cohesive marketing strategy. But each site itself is dedicated to ONE thing, and that ONE thing has a very loyal, very lucrative customer base.

The “under one umbrella” model for adult sites still exists, but demand is waning and the cost of obtaining customers is rising. This is the jack of all trades, master of none syndrome. A site that has three, five or ten different genres going on is not a desireable thing to have, it is extremely hard to market online because there are too many focuses. That effects SEO and the profitability as the marketing goals and vision are hard to streamline. Furthermore, it begs the question of, “With sites like PornoTube.com, why pay for hodge podge content?” A person can get the content they want for free and not have to pay for it.

But sites that provide, high-quality, well-produced content with a specfiic purpose are extremely lucrative. It has one marketing goal, it has a targeted customer base and the content has the goal of being the best in it’s genre. This makes for targeted marketing strategy, streamlined search engine optimization and lets collectively the users represent the site and it popularity and expand the customer base (affiliate marketing programs, word-of-mouth referrals).

Can the adult industry use social media effectively and safely?

Yes. If Nazi right ring religious leaders and stalkers can use YouTube and Facebook to spread their messages, so can we. But we have to do so responsibly, follow the rules and regulations of the websites. Not because we want to play nice, but because loosing one account could loose thousand of potential clients. Believe it or not (gasp!), mainstream audiences are interested in adult entertainment. They have all had fantasies of being Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, to swing with their wife or to be dominated. If you deliver a tasteful dose of whatever it is your specialize in, the mainstream masses with come.

Tips on Social Media

1. Social media takes hours and hours to set up and lay in place – connecting your 43Things to your Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Stumble, Pownce, Utterz, Last.Fm, LinkedIn, Twitter, Technorati, etc, etic is painstaking work. But there are ways to streamline it -HelloTXT.com allows you to update Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc all at once.
2. You will learn what works for you and what doesn’t quickly, only focus on what works, not what doesn’t.
3. Common sense dictates not using site that are heavily religious or focus on kids (with the exception of MySpace – it is not for just kids anymore) and set adult preferences whenever you can, that way no argument can be made that you deliberately tried to promote adult content to under age viewers.
4. Once you have your social media in place – You have to MAINTAIN it. Brands take time to build, as do proper SEO results. Social media is a key component in this, if you don’t maintain it, you won’t reap the rewards.
5. If distribute target video content to 10 ore video share websites – try TubeMogul.com, it allows you upload the video once and distribute it across all your accounts.
6. Pay attention to your content, what is its purpose? What is the medium you are using appropriate?

Personal Note: Becoming an adult marketer was not an easy task, it took years for me to learn and cultivate my skills. I I’ve spent countless hours reading the experts and digging through forums to learn what I thought were industry standards. But what I found was disappointing and/or didn’t make sense. So decided to set my own standards. I firmly believe that mainstream marketing and adult marketing have a cohesive existence and can work together to build awareness along with customer bases.