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Articles
Sellers and buyers are always looking for a better way to do deals online
Recognizing that social media is not the same as selling, and that selling in a sea of competitors is not efficient, we believe businesses are ready to go to something that works better. Deal Acceleration’s core purpose is to help businesses grow. We connect buyers to a landing page, where they can view a broad array of products and services. They can easily click the ones they like or search for others. Our search is unique, in that it helps users drill down to find the right choice globally - even for the smallest business. Once users find the product, service, or business they want, they click a link to go directly to the seller’s site and make a purchase.
This ability for buyers to easily search our database of businesses and click once to go to the seller’s purchase page—on any retail, channel, or other website—allows them to effectively bypass the clutter vying for their attention. When a buyer clicks the link to a business’s website, he or she is taken to the purchase page, not the homepage. No wading through more noise to get to the "buy" button. This means real return on investment for sellers who drive audiences to their profile page on Deal Acceleration.
Additionally, Deal Acceleration provides advertising services that move participants to the front of the line to drive revenue and awareness. Deal Acceleration’s overall combination of services provides the most interactive and comprehensive set of amenities, tools, and messaging capabilities giving users and companies a top caliber selling and buying experience.
Here are the specific technologies that help us provide this experience
- We consolidate traditional message-based pages so companies can connect with their audience through topical messages, coupons, discounts, special offers, and incentives.
- Deal Acceleration has the ability to partner with large online retailers to allow their sellers or customers to link directly to products or service to enable quick purchases.
- We offer a comprehensive and unique ability to search out, find, and connect with companies and sellers.
- We enable direct connection to partnered retail sites, providing an ability to put specific product or service types and/or their individual sellers at the front of the line for customers to find and purchase.
- The bottom line to getting to the head of the line is to rethink your social media presence by talking with Deal Acceleration. Talking is free. Not acting, not optimizing your presence in this new marketplace can be costly.
The Benefits of being a Deal Acceleration Consumer
If you’re typical of most online users, you’re online for one of two main reasons:
- Social interaction
- Shopping
Let’s talk about your shopping experiences. If you’re typical, you have a long list of bookmarks of the online retailers you want to keep ordering from.
So what? We all have long lists. But what if there was a way to keep the lists, but save time and improve the odds that you’ll be getting the best value when you shop online in the future?
May I suggest you go to www.dealacceleration.com and take a look around the website? First of all, you’ll see that it’s free. You can create your own social media account as a consumer. Second, you’ll get the benefit of putting all your favorite online businesses, products, and services in one place. Third, because Deal Acceleration is social media retail, you get to interact with your favorite online retailers. That long list of bookmarked URLs becomes a two-way exchange of your interacting with your vendors and your vendors interacting with you. You no longer have to navigate through intermediate links to find the products and services you want to buy. Your favorites page now connects you directly to where you want to shop.
Also, because this is social media, your issues and complaints are addressed directly and your favorite retailers can now tell you about the latest products and services. Now that’s social media worth the time spent.
Real Return on Investment from Advertising Investments in Social Media
A number of technology observers see Social Media is as the next big thing. At the moment, the early adopters of the Social Media space have been the bloggers and picture posters, the gamers and the Tweeters. Users by the billions are spending time participating in Social Media, but businesses have been slow to capitalize on built-in markets of consumers for everything that can be consumed.
So if your business is standing on the outside looking for a way in, let’s talk about how to benefit from being a successful Social Media company. The first thing you will need to do is let the massive market know who you are. The way this has been traditionally done is by advertising, and Social Media is no exception. You have to advertise to be seen in this new online marketplace.
Still, the Social Media landscape is new and most businesses do not know how to interact with it. Many avoid this space because they feel advertising here is too much of a gamble. Actually, looking at investing advertising dollars in the online, Social Media space as a gamble is a good strategy. Gamblers, who succeed in the gambling world, do so because they understand the odds. As Kenny Rogers once observed, they know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em. Applying this logic to advertising in Social Media means knowing your return on investment or ROI.
Measuring your return on investment is measuring increases in revenue as an outcome of investing in advertising. There is no magic, no mythical force at work here. If you invest 10x in advertising and see a 20x increase in revenues, you are deemed reasonable to conclude that your return is double your investment.
So how do you accomplish this in the Social Media marketplace? The question is valid given the lack of business focus by the leaders in this space. These are companies that dominate in numbers of users, but who have yet been slow to figure out how to monetize this space. So it seems reasonable to look for a Social Media presence that has a business plan to monetize Social Media already in place. One such company is Deal Acceleration.
Yes, Deal Acceleration is new, but if you can measure your return on investment, you should be able to justify investing a limited amount of your advertising budget, for example - 20%, and letting Deal Acceleration help you drive customers to your products page at DealAcceleration.com. The result predictably will be a real return on your investment as your sales and revenues increase.
The Price of Promotions
In the real world, free promotions usually elicit caution because experience has taught that you get what you pay for. If it’s free, it can’t be of value. It is at best a bright shiny loss leader to attract our attention, so a hustler can trick us into spending real money on some thing or some service we would not otherwise have given a second thought to.
This is true of the brick and mortar world of retail with their ‘free points programs’ and the service world with their frequent buyer programs. So this must be true of the emerging social media marketplace as well, right?
Well actually…maybe not. The economies of scale, of volume in traditional retail and service depend on giving up a real, but limited cost (a free dinner, a free movie, a free car wash) with the expectation that for every one of something given away for free, the business will experience a two-fold, a four-fold, a ten-fold increase in purchases of these or more pricy products or services. The economies of scale in the online, social media marketplace are not about ten-fold increases. They are about thousand-fold increases, million-fold increases, and more.
The logic is very much the same regardless of the marketplace. In the brick and mortar world, you give away a movie ticket with the expectation, if you do it right, of selling twice, four times, ten times as many tickets. Online, you give away two hours of free entertainment downloads with the expectation of selling a thousand fold subscriptions to a movie download service.
This works for the simple reason that product or service promotions for physical businesses is limited by the physical markets served, by the hours and staff available to process the free stuff. But the virtual world of social media has no physical limits, has no hours, and has few if any resource constraints.
So when you see something promoted as being free in the online world of social media enterprise, maybe you should take a look, because the vendor can likely afford to price the real products and services behind the free promotions, as real bargains. The economics are flipped between the physical and the virtual. A movie theater may accept the risk of giving away 100 free tickets and hope to attract a thousand new patrons to end up with a profitable promotion. But an online movie streaming service can afford to offer a hundred thousand free connections because maybe a thousand users will try it, like it, and sign up to be new subscribers. And maybe that’s all this online service needs to yield to be profitable.
A real example of the logic of free having real value to both buyers and sellers, is the free campaign being promoted by Deal Acceleration (dealacceleration.com). “Sign Up Now – It’s Free” is prominent on their website. If you are a consumer, you can create an account and a sharable profile to announce to the Deal Acceleration universe what it is you want to consume. And the Deal Acceleration universe will hear you and respond. For free.
If you are a business, you can sign up and create a sharable profile that announces what it is you are selling. That too is free. Well, it is free, as long as you are unsuccessful at selling anything. If you are like most businesses, you don’t value time spent failing to sell. You analyze, you investigate, you ask for help, until you find your market, your customer base. Then you start to sell. That’s when your Deal Acceleration account stops being free. But because this is the online world of social media, subscription fees don’t need to go from free to expensive. No, the online world is the world of billions of people. So Deal Acceleration reasons that charging a $49.99 annual fee every twelve months to the date you sign up for your account is quite reasonable. And it makes sense when you realize that the Deal Acceleration business model works well when there are millions of users, but it works even better when there are billions of users. A billion times a small number is still a very large number. So Deal Acceleration can realize large revenue streams from small fees, if the number of users is large. Businesses being businesses in the online space know that a successful website is one that attracts a lot of hits. Being social media, any business that creates an account on Deal Acceleration, also benefits from the installed base of all the other businesses who sign up. So Deal Acceleration just needs to attract businesses looking to grow. That is a shrewd understanding of the concept of win-win. Don’t believe me, go see for yourself at: www.dealacceleration.com.You have nothing to lose – after all, it’s free.
A Better Way to Search
One aspect of social media that makes sense for using it is to buy and sell, which is the connectedness of it all.
That connectedness has not been obvious, because if it had, the uses which people have put social media to would have started with commerce, instead of purely social or even professional communication.
To help put this into focus, imagine looking at buying and selling just a few years ago. Imagine that the want ads section of a major regional newspaper has an ad for say a 1957, red and white Chevy, fully restored. In another major newspaper serving the same area, there is an ad that someone placed wanting to buy a 1957, fully restored Chevy, preferably red and white.
What are the odds that the seller and the buyer will find each other? Perhaps the buyer will spend the time crawling the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of ads in every regional newspaper’s want ads sections. More likely, the buyer and the seller will not meet. Perhaps the seller will find a willing buyer, if the price is right. Perhaps the buyer will find a seller of a similar car – a 1958, turquoise Chevy station wagon needing work and perhaps this seller will know that there is a buyer out there with the exact match for what this buyer is looking for. Perhaps this seller will forgo his sale in the interest of helping this buyer out. Right – not going to happen.
So what does this have to do with social media? For one, you don’t have the siloing effect of limiting ads to individual newspapers. In the social media marketplace, you have a seller who lists what he is selling – for example, a 1957 Chevy. In the same marketplace, you have a buyer who advertises that they want to buy a 1957 Chevy. Leveraging the search technology available, the connectedness of the social media marketplace ‘sees’ the match and puts the two parties in touch. With this search technology, seller’s items are tagged as specific items for sale and buyer’s desired items are tagged as specific items to buy. The logic of this search technology matches the two items and connects the buyer to the seller. Imagine that! You want to buy something and all you have to do is say so and the next thing you know, you are being contacted by sellers who have exactly what you want to buy.
Great idea isn’t it? But wait, before you go running off to enter items to buy or sell in Google, you should know that this great idea actually belongs to a social media marketing company named Deal Acceleration. Sure Google will return millions of hits in milliseconds, but the hits are not filtered for relevance. That 1957 Chevy you are looking for will return every website with 1, 9, 5, and 7 as well as ‘Chevy’. You’ll get the person (that is, Mr. Chase), the place (in Maryland), you’ll get the company, and you’ll get a history lesson about what happened in 1957. What you likely won’t get is a car to buy.
This interactive keyword focused search engine is patented by Deal Acceleration, which means you will need to go to Deal Acceleration to benefit from it. The good news is that it’s free for consumers and nominally priced for businesses. The newspapers that are still operating can’t touch that price.
Go to www.dealacceleration.com and find out for yourself.
The Real Price of Free
So why should we be motivated to investigate the benefits of Deal Acceleration just because of claims that it is free? Sure, free usually limits the risk of trying out something new. But things that are free usually end up being worth what they cost – nothing. Right?
It is easy to understand that customers who sign up for Deal Acceleration should be welcomed at no cost. After all, successful businesses work hard at making the shopping experience pleasant, safe, and well, free. Obviously, they do this because they know getting a consumer to look at their goods or services is the key to actually getting a sale or closing a deal. But businesses? Businesses expect to pay for everything. Shrewd business folk expect to get what they pay for. On the surface, trying to attract new businesses to a site like www.dealacceleration.com by saying that it costs nothing to try, doesn’t seem to make good business sense. If Deal Acceleration is worth the time and experience, it should cost something – not a lot, maybe $10,000 to sign up and $2500 a year to renew. For that investment, I as a businessman, would expect access to customers I don’t now already have. For that, I should have an advertising platform that I can use to grow my business. For that expenditure, I expect at least a tenfold return. For that cost of admission, I expect to get a competitive advantage. I want to invest in business growth that will help my business stand out from my competition. How can free do any of that?
Actually, it can’t. Deal Acceleration isn’t saying it is free in the long run. It is taking a risk, betting on the future, that making this online, social media marketplace free to join will result in more businesses, especially more mom and pop businesses that can’t readily invest tens of thousands of dollars, and that will ultimately yield a large result. Deal Acceleration is betting that say 50 million business users makes for a rich and attractive commercial experience that at say $50 a year is an impressive five billion a year enterprise - just on registration fees. And coincidently, $50 a year is precisely (well, $49.99 actually) what Deal Acceleration is charging. Going one step further to attract users first and make money second, Deal Acceleration doesn’t charge this fee to join aside from the annual $49.99 every twelve months after signing up for the account.
So don’t take a risk. But do take the time to sign up for a business account at dealacceleration.com and follow Sign Up Now – It’s Free links. The worst that can happen is nothing, because you do nothing. On the other hand, if you invest a fraction of your time and energy into creating your Deal Acceleration page, you just might be surprised at the power of social media to magnify efforts. That’s how small things catch fire, go viral, and become huge things. You’ll never know if you don’t try and don’t let the fact that it’s free slow you down.