“What in the world is this guy talking about now”, you may ask yourself. Well I will tell you: the marketing campaign techniques that escorts use can be applied to all facets of traditional business marketing. While trying to brainstorm topics for this week’s blog post, I tried to come up with all of the taboo industries existent in America. While doing this, I realized that escorts, or a less invasive term for prostitutes, must do marketing campaigns to stand out against the rest of the competition. In a non-regulated industry like this, I originally assumed that some of the techniques would be radical and vastly different than approaches a regular business may use. The reality is that many of the core concepts and approaches translate over very easily to more traditional businesses.
After doing some basic researching online, I came across a website that was dedicated to giving tips and advice to women who were interested in being an escort or how to further their existent escorting service (http://www.howtobecomeanescort.net). Not to make a joke here, but you can consider this a service industry for the sake of marketing strategy. The escorts are not necessarily selling a product, but rather supplying an experience that services the desires and imaginations of their client. Once that notion is understood, the escort can start to better market the experience that they supply. This is very similar to the professional sports ticket sales, which thrives under the premise of selling a fan experience as a whole, opposed to just purely a ticket to a sporting event. What I discovered while reading posts on the escort website was that the success of the escort is more closely related to her marketing and customer relation performance opposed to her looks and attraction level. Naturally, I can imagine that looks play a role to some extent, although it does reiterate the notion that the better marketed company can out compete their competitors even if they have a slightly inferior product or service. With all of this said, let us look at some of the main points and approaches that I gathered to be the most important for escort marketing.
1. Advertise with the Best
Here, the author discussed her opinions on the best places to advertise your services. She includes a subscription based online directory, escort agency phone books, as well as a few other agency websites. She also touches on the importance of maximizing SEO for individual’s websites. These ideas of basic advertising are no different than say the construction industry, an area where I currently work. If I need to find a subcontractor who works with glass and glazing, I will look in the Construction Blue Book, which is not a free network to be part of. The concept of maximizing SEO and search results is also an area that is majorly focused on in every other business with an online aspect.
2. Keep Regular Clients
This section is fairly straightforward. The importance of repeat customers is imperative in any business venture. In a quote from the article, the author states, “Keeping regular clients is one of the most important things you can do as an escort. When I was making $30000 a month as an escort before I retired, $25000 of that was from regular clients and $5000 was from random clients calling and booking an hour here or there.” What we can gather from this is that roughly 80% of this escort’s monthly revenue was generated via repeat customers. For a lot of companies, obtaining 40% (1/2 of what the escort experienced) revenue from repeat customers would be a large feat. Knowing your amount of repeat customers is vital in your marketing approach. For example, this escort would be wise to focus on customer relations and maintaining continued relationships rather than focusing on customer acquisition. The lesson in this section is that your primary efforts should be a result of current customer base. Essentially, those who better understand their customers will better understand how to market towards them. Keeping existent customers happy can often be more valuable than solely focusing on new customer acquisition. Improving customer relationships can actually lead to better acquisition results since you have a subset of die-hard and passionate customers who will act as company ambassadors.
3. Stay Active and Consistent
The last two sections on the website looked at both Internet marketing and becoming active in the local escorting community. These are in my opinion the most vital for branding a service-based company. The author writes about the importance of maintaining a consistent level of activity of various social media platforms. By existing across the spectrum of social media offerings, your brand can continue to gain recognition even when the customer was not previously thinking of you. If you make an effort to regularly post relevant content of these platforms, you increase the mental real estate you have in their mind. This translates well to non-social media platforms as well. Utilizing a monthly or bi-weekly email newsletter allows you to show off what’s new with your company and an easy opportunity to slip a promotional code or discount opportunity for your products. For the escorts, this could be in the sense of maintaining contact with customers who are likely to become regulars. Initiating contact with them can play a big role in whether they start to contact you exclusively, or will take his money to a variety of sources. Staying active in your local community is important for both maintaining relationships and also as a way to help your own business. For example, it is in the best interest of a skateboarding shop to be sponsoring local skaters or hosting skateboard events for the neighborhood and local area. By investing your own time is the community that you cater towards, you project a more favorable and relatable image to your customers. For escorts, the website author spoke about how she would partake in legalizing prostitution campaigns, and being vocal about sexual health and protection. These not only improve her image, but also acts in her personal interest by better educating her customers about safety and potentially legalizing her occupation.
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