So Exactly What is Your Plan B?

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The world of luxury marketing has changed so dramatically the last few years. Last year, the advent of AI was the largest seismic shift in its history since print waned into a support role and the tsunami of technology took over. In our newest “new normal,” digital marketing content creation and management are the keys to luxury marketing success. You don’t buy in? In denial of the new landscape and its value to your company and sales success? Allow me to state some irrefutable facts:

2 decades ago all newspapers started their own digital arm and started selling online banners because print readership had tanked.

Billboards now share clients, so your display time is ½ or ⅓ of what it used to be for the same cost.

Direct mail is cost prohibitive for lead generation. 

TV is SO fragmented between a gazillion cable stations and streaming options, you could never hit a luxury marketing segment efficiently.

ChatGPT and the other up and coming AI options are becoming a crowded arena, even before it makes advertising an option.

Radio is too fragmented and too expensive to use for ongoing lead generation.

Magazines are primarily for branding because they live in perpetuity.

A human representative is always the best and most impactful resource but we’re trying to figure out the marketing that gives them opportunities. They can’t cover enough ground to be their own lead generator.

Google search is losing ground to AI search daily. SEO is being replaced by GEO. AI search now commands 50% of all searches, but though leads cost more, their pricing (Googles’) is staying high so it costs twice as much for a search lead now.

So back to my original question: What exactly is your plan B? Meta has no current competition, much like it was in the good ole days when print was king and the post office set the rates. We could get a call per 500 mail pieces, then folks stopped reading and started watching. Now, if you want to go where the crowd of buyers hang out, you have to accommodate the social media users.

Social media is where the buyers hang out and get their information. 

So, unless I missed something, there is no Plan B.

ANYONE - correct me if I’m wrong after you read these current statistics; our piano industry ad series in a medium sized market achieves these average analytics:

15 opt in opt in “consent based” leads per app monthly

1,500 Facebooks visits

885 Website visits

59% of Facebook engagements = website visit

The ability to access Andromeda AI to shuffle well-constructed, positive ads in front of a targeted audience at a reasonable cost is unrivaled in its efficiency in the history of luxury marketing.

So what other plan would rival this strategy?

I think I hear crickets, but if one exists please tell this old, serial innovator what it is! I’ll sell that instead!!!

On a serious note: (OK, that was a bad pun to a musical audience) we are blessed with a FANTASTIC way to craft and deliver a retailer’s unique story to the right audience on a consistent basis. A well constructed ad series that tells a businesses’ story is the best way to position your company as the best option for a shopper to contact for information. 

You will never hear us say that there is a better way to build your business than through direct “person to person” contact. Working socially and through COI’s (centers of influence) will always do the best job of creating institutional and large retail and wholesale opportunities. Nothing can replace the power of personal contact.

The naked truth about day to day business is that more relationships in the luxury marketing space begin online than ever before. However you reach out to the consumers, you have to go to where the fish are biting, digitally. The message can be changed. An ad series can have different images and CTA’s, but online and currently with Meta is where the school of catchable fish is. Will that change? ABSOLUTELY! But most likely to another online "fishing hole" when Meta does get some formidable competition, which we are hoping for. 

We can, and will, do all we can to tell your story spiced with manufacturer images and affiliations, but confidence is achieved in the local buyer’s mind most effectively when they feel good about who they’re dealing with as much as the brand of what they’re purchasing. The presence of local feeling content has never been more important. Through constant monitoring of the ads that perform best, we can affirm that a corporate affiliation has great value but in today’s ultra-connected world, the local feeling speaks as loudly as ever. The moral from a marketing stand point? Use social media to inform the public about not only what you sell, but also who you are so you can grow the seeds of confidence and trustworthiness in the hearts and minds of the consumers in your market. How does AI explain what I just advised? Here: “In marketing, building your local brand in conjunction with your product's value is critical for establishing confidence and trustworthiness with local buyers, which remains important in today's connected world.” 

Plan A is to build your local brand in conjunction with your product's marquis value and do it online. I’m sure it will change in time, but presently Meta is the reigning champion for lead generation and outreach. Search still has some application but with the advent of AI SEO is giving way to GEO*, so you must appear in sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and Quora with consistent and helpful (information oriented) content. AI will access the most impressive resources and serve them up based upon your content quality and output, not a paid-for ad spend. What is profound about this reality? Google, whose AI is Gemini, agrees that SEO, which it has dominated for the past couple of decades by Google search, is giving way to quality content.  When Gates said “Content is King” he was right; yet in today's AI driven environment “Context is King” is the new buzz phrase. The bottom-est of all bottom lines is this: be the social thought leader through quality, consistent articles, and videos in your market, and you will win the GEO positioning without spending any SEO dollars. Post likeable, intelligent things regularly and watch your harvesting improve exponentially because your reputation and credibility does. And what have we always said is the first step in the 5 Steps to Selling Success?  That’s right, “Credibility.” Couple credibility with consistent, good story telling and leave your competition in the dust. 

Plan A for harvesting/lead generation depends on the value and believability of your marketing and specifically your offer. Alex Hormozi teaches that when an offer is strong enough, the focus shifts from "sales and marketing" to delivering exceptional value, transforming businesses from surviving to thriving. If you do this convincingly in social media where you can use video and testimonials to tell your story, there is no Plan B. Plan A has no rival.    

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We are what we repeatedly do." — Aristotle   

*GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing content to be cited, referenced, or quoted by AI-powered search engines and chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. GEO is considered the evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the AI era