Blue Wing operates like a combination of a venture capital firm and an online advertising agency. We select partners to work with and invest our money in their advertising campaigns. We are paid only for the results that we directly generate, after we’ve successfully delivered.
Exactly how does Blue Wing select partners to work with and what are the costs involved? In this post, we’ll answer those questions and also look at two hypothetical cases that illustrate the types of businesses we work with, as well as those we don’t.
After reading this article, you should have a much better idea if it makes sense to discuss applying to partner with Blue Wing. During our initial conversation, the goal will be to learn about your:
- Business niche
- Goal action and value
- Targeting
- Traffic volume
- Conversion rates
Once we have this information, we’ll determine if we can work together or not. If so, we will present a fixed Cost Per Action (or CPA) for each goal action completed.
If the Cost Per Action is agreeable to you, we will run the entire campaign at our cost. We assume 100% of the risk and only get paid for successful actions we generate.
While we wish we could work with every company that comes to us, that’s just not possible because of the financial risk we incur with each deal. Therefore, we need to select those partners that have a high probability of long term campaign success.
Let’s look then at a couple of hypothetical businesses owners and how they illustrate the types of businesses we typically work with, and those we don’t.
Example Business Owner #1: Suzie
Overview: Suzie is the owner of Gangnam Style Nails in Brocton Massachusetts, USA: Suzie anticipates her nail salon’s customer base to be 60% walk-ins and 40% appointments. Suzie wants to advertise online to generate those appointments.
Advertising requirements:
- Suzie needs to target only people within a five minute drive from her shop.
- Her monthly advertising budget is $75 per month.
- Her average customer spends about $20, all of which she considers profit as she’s a sole-proprietor.
Verdict: Suzie would not be a good candidate to work with Blue Wing Ads for the following reasons:
- Her demo/geo targeting is so narrow that the total number of prospects we could target is too low.
- This type of low price, quick decision product is not the best fit for our model.
- Suzie’s budget is so limited it would not justify even our internal setup costs, let alone campaign expansion.
Example Business Owner #2: John
Overview: John is the Marketing Manager of VOIPtel.net in Montreal, Canada. VOIP Tel is preparing to release a new line of internet telephones for home and home-office use. The phones sell both on their site, and through selected retailers, for a minimum of $149, of which $90 minimum is profit. VOIPTel also plans to make additional revenue from ancillary services like calling and maintenance plans. The handsets will initially only be sold to customers in Canada and the United States, and later they hope to expand to other markets. John has a monthly marketing budget of $10,000.
Advertsing Goals:
- Sell Phones and Subscriptions: Direct online purchases and subscriptions.
- Generate Leads: Prospect requests further information/joins mailing list.
- Brand Buzz/Awareness: Get highly targeted prospects to visit the site and watch the video.
Verdict: John would be a good candidate to work with Blue Wing Ads for the following reasons:
- He is covering a relatively wide geographic area.
- His per-customer profit is relatively high.
- Many people are interested in the product and service that he provides.
- His goals are clear and realistic.
- The cost of achieving these goals through competitors like Adwords, Yahoo!/Bing, and Facebook is too high.
After the initial meeting with John, we would send a letter of acceptance based on the current costs and the Cost Per Action Blue Wing would commit to.
Market / Competitive Analysis: Google Adwords Prices for John’s Keywords:
With Google, John’s average cost per visitor is $6.63, and he’s found 5 out of every 100 visitors converts. This means his Cost Per Action with Google is $133. With Blue Wing ads, he pays a fixed rate of $65 per conversion with no risk or upfront cost for the advertising whatsoever.
You can see from this example that by working with Blue Wing Ads, John has no risk, is creating new business, and lowering his customer acquisition cost. Blue Wing cannot work with every prospective customer who approaches us because we incur risk by paying hard dollars to build and execute the campaign. We hope this article has explained why we do what we do, and the types of customers we select to work with.
If, like John, you can say “If I can get targeted prospects for a reasonable price, I can convert them in big volume. My only issue is right now it’s too expensive for me to get in front of the people who are looking for my product”, you should reach out to us and we’d be more than happy to schedule a time to speak with you about your specific goals and how we can help you to achieve them.
