While in its simplest form the concept of manufacturing can express the idea of creating and selling a product, today’s interoperability opens up new possibilities. For manufacturers, this includes windows that open up new revenue streams. The trend also includes changing consumer preferences, including benefits from services such as subscriptions and guarantees.
For companies like Illuminate Labs, a nutritional supplement company that uses a third-party company to test their products, this means a transition into the advertising world.
“The bulk of our revenue comes from our products,” says Calloway Cook, president of Illuminate Labs. In mid-2021, the company began testing paid advertising as a way to attract leads and drive more customers to its site. Unsatisfied with the payback of this strategy, the company reduced its marketing budget to zero.
“We are now publishing great content,” Cook told The Epoch Times.
Providing quality supplement-related materials has served the company well, with visitors coming to the company’s website to inquire about supplements, nutrients, health and wellness. Website and blog traffic increased so dramatically that Cook and his team were looking for a way to create another stream of income.
“Starting in 2022, we plan to partner with a leading display ad network to monetize the growing traffic to our site,” he explained.
The plan includes placing display ads on non-branded pages of the site; In other words, consumers won’t see ads on a company’s product pages. Ads will appear on pages such as a blog where the company publishes health information and does not endorse its products.
“Thanks to organic search, we have a lot of visitors and we don’t have partnerships,” Cook added, noting that such an arrangement helps to ensure that content is impartial and that ads do not compete with the products the company sells.
Adding display ads to your site can generate recurring revenue, but before doing so, it can be helpful to analyze the costs and benefits. Generally speaking, the revenue benefits can outweigh the costs of doing business for manufacturers who have more than 10,000 page views on their website, Cook noted. Income can increase as the number of page views increases. It is also important to establish terms with any ad networks regarding layout terms such as where the ad is displayed and the type of ad included.
Subscriptions are another way for businesses to provide access to a product or service and generate consistent income.
“We are using a subscription model,” Adam Korble, founder and CEO of the internet fax service iFax, told The Epoch Times. Customers can pay for a monthly subscription and use the service instead of buying a fax machine or paying every time they need to send a fax.
From a business perspective, subscribing can help predict sales.
“You can easily predict next month’s earnings,” says Korble. However, in order to retain customers, value must be delivered at a price that suits their needs. “You need to invest resources to avoid high cancellation fees,” added Corble.
Perhaps the greatest potential for recurring income is the ability to transform and evolve a business model.
PostcardMania, a marketing and printing company based in Clearwater, Florida, began operations in 1998 in a small 600-square-foot cottage.
“I knew from the start I wanted to be a one-stop direct mail center for small business owners because it was all fragmented back then – you had to get a mailing list from one place, develop it somewhere else, and then someone someone else would print everything, and someone else would address the cards, ”explained Joy Gendusa, founder and CEO of PostcardMania.
Under Gendusa’s leadership, the company developed into a department store, outsourcing as needed until sales increased and it became possible to purchase offset presses for commercial printing.
Over the years, competitors picked up the Gendusa Single Window model and began to copy the strategy.
“It was then that I realized that we were being commodified and needed to find a way to stand out and become more valuable to small business owners,” explained Gendusa.
Taking up the challenge, PostcardMania examined the pain points of its customers and found that for many of them it was the uncertainty associated with the postcard campaign: how can they be sure they will get results and not waste money?
The company hired a person to catalog the results of each campaign and then share that data with potential clients.
“As soon as PostcardMania stopped being a product supplier and instead became an expert in providing much-needed services, we started building a range of subscription-based services to increase revenue,” Gendusa said.
One, Everywhere Small Business, is a marketing package that combines direct mail with call tracking and online ad coordination, and aggregates ad performance across each platform into a single online dashboard.
The company currently has over 320 employees, operates in a 69,000-square-foot custom-built site and has a profit that is up 23 percent in 2021 over 2020. Gendusa believes transformation has evolved into a lead generation marketing company. the point of the company’s success.
“If I had never burst out of the commodification box a few years ago, I would never have done it,” she said.
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Rachel Hartman is a freelance writer with a background in business and finance. Her work has appeared in national and international publications for over 10 years. She lives in Miami and travels frequently.
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