A Short Story: Marketing As Your Next Profit Center
By: Daniel Stouffer
Tags: Digital Marketing, Product Management, Online Courses, Content Creation

It’s time you learned about Profit Center Marketing. …and the power of digital products, online course creation, and digital marketing automation.

Building this into your marketing strategy will change the ability for your business to generate money. Period.

Why?

Because it’s rather unprecedented and severely underutilized. Just a few companies are doing this correctly.

Much of what follows will feel like a painful wake up call. It’s a new way to think about copywriting and your digital marketing efforts. It may feel like a punch in the gut or a pat on the back, depending upon where you may be in your digital marketing journey.

But this is OK. I’ll explain.

Tuck this fact into your mind while you check out the rest of this post.

What Is a Profit Center?

A profit center is a branch or division of a company that directly adds or is expected to add to the bottom-line profitability of the entire organization. It is treated virtually as a separate, standalone business, responsible for generating its own revenues and earnings; its profits and losses are calculated separately on accounting balance sheets. ( Investopedia )

California Gold Rush: The Merchant Samuel Brannon

You’ve probably heard stories of the infamous California gold rush. Remember the fervor, picture the hordes, and feel the rumble as stampedes of golden-eyed travelers coming from everywhere to make it rich in the lands out West.

Faded black and white photographs from the mid-19th century may come to mind …depicting rough and tough folks out in the bush, camped backwoods-style, up against a small flowing creek, holding prospecting pans.

Looking tired, hungry, and scared.

You know.

…barely anyone made any serious money. Few returned home with any worthwhile profit for their troubles and hardships. Most went broke. A lot even died.

In fact, the one guy that made the most money probably didn’t even get his hands dirty or his shoes muddy.

He didn’t have to go outside and wade hip-deep in a cold river. He didn’t have to break his back on any rock smashing. He didn’t need to be away from his family. …He didn’t even need to die.

All he needed to do was collect the gold handed right to him.

He new exactly what to do. He got organized, marketed himself, and created an environment (…or a place) so that the wealth flowed directly to him. He created his personal river.

You see.

The men and women out in the wild doing all the work were lucky to break even.

Shocking? Not really.

Who made all money in the end?

Merchants, like Samuel Brannon.

Samuel enjoyed a flood of riches like never before. He sold food, prospecting supplies, clothes, camping goods, knives, bullets, and much more to anyone who would buy. He was the one to reap the lion’s share of the money.

In other words, Samuel’s shop sold products to the prospectors trying to get their hands on these marvelous specks of gold-dust He made the real money.

The prospectors who came out West spent money …as they found traces of gold …they spend their money. And the merchants, like Samuel Bannon, became rich. Some merchants — super rich.

The California Gold Rush story helps flip your thinking on the potential of digital marketing.

Don’t consider content creation, your email system, or your digital marketing programs as only a supporting channel to your sales team. Don’t get caught in this narrow ROI metric.

Think bigger.

Do consider a new strategy.

Craft your digital marketing efforts so they become your shop.

…you become the Samuel Bannon of the Internet

…you collect the smaller specks of gold flowing from your marketing content

…your create & sell information products, how-to guides, and training materials.

Your digital marketing activities will build your ever-growing, digital river filled with gold.

What is Profit Center Marketing?

Profit centers usually reside within retail sales departments, professional services, or software sales. In a more traditional sense, the marketing department is identified as a cost center.

…never to make any real money.

Profit Center Marketing changes this thinking. When set up correctly, it coordinates multiple income streams derived from you digital marketing, information products, and training materials that end up generating significant revenue unto themselves.

Marketing is never to be considered a cost center again!

Remember…

I asked you to read the definition of a Cost Center earlier. Understand where I’m coming from?

Special Note: The concept of Profit Center Marketing is explained in detail in one of my writing samples. Check out the “eBook Creation Revealed“ for an initial take on this concept that I first wrote down in 2013.

Your digital marketing activities create such valuable content that your prospects will PAY YOU FOR IT. In the end, this useful content, information products, and training materials drive greater value.

…for your customer and your bottom line.

Rethinking Copywriting, Content Creation, and Digital Marketing

There’s a new marketing strategy to implement.

Each one of the incremental sales, derived from your digital marketing activities, generates small sales to prospects, customer, and multi-buy customers as they ascend your sales funnel. When combined with great copywriting and email marketing automation, you have The Machine in place.

These are simple ideas, yet profoundly powerful.

I’ve watched it perform miracles with other companies. It’s an inevitable evolution of digital marketing.

…And it’s happening right now.

My friends over at DigitalMarketer.com have their own flavor of this Profit Center Marketing concept. They call it Customer Value Optimization. The automation of this process with effective email marketing will knock your socks off.

I am one of their certified consultants.

The question is…

Are you currently using this sort of strategy to get you or your business where it needs to be?

A Example to Illustrate Profit Center Marketing in Action

Let’s say a small group of high-tech, savvy college grads get together. They design a new software program that makes life easier for residential solar panel installers. They foresee a big market exploding before their eyes. They suspect massive traction and growth for their software.

Great! We have a company looking for digital marketing.

They come up with a solid name, design a good logo, and even secure some marketing funds from a medium-sized solar panel manufacturer. In order to sell their software, they need to expand the company’s brand and bring in leads.

They need to start setting up their digital marketing programs.

First, they use their expertise to build a really stylish and modern looking website. Then they hire a webmaster that knows the online marketing world to polish it up, optimize the layout, and set-up the hosting.

Through freelancing websites, they find a copywriter and pay a decent price for a few informational ebooks around the subjects of residential solar panel installation, the future of residential solar usage, and how to increase sales of solar panels for other companies or sales professionals in the industry.

They outsource for more writers and get pages of keyword researched and SEO optimized web content that can be used on the company blog, social media, partner website, etc.

They start using ebooks as a way to bring people to the site, increase traffic, and spread awareness of their specialized software.

As traffic grows through aggressive content marketing, their sales funnel strengthens and leads start getting interested. The get so interested they may buy a low cost, mini-course on solar energy. This $7 dollar information product covers the cost of content creation and traffic generation.

Slowly, they begin offer higher cost information products or consulting services that provide incremental value to prospects interested in solar energy related software.

The larger pool of solar panel installation companies become further engaged through information products like videos, webinars, blog posts, and reports …to the point where they sign up for the higher-ticket software license!

This is all hypothetical of course.

But the point is to paint the picture where information products and training materials are typically free low-level marketing products are now used to up-sell, educate prospects, grow a market, expand an audience, elevate brand awareness, and usher customers up and down a sales funnel.

…and customers will pay you for this super valuable CONTENT.

I’ve watched content creation, digital marketing, and automation transform from a fringe topic to an absolutely astounding marketing phenomenon that is only just catching on and dollars invested only growing.

Most businesses are still stuck in the outdated digital marketing approaches. You go out dig through the marketing mud, put in a lot of effort with strategies that cannot support your business objectives. You basically guess at what marketing will work and hope to generated your revenue targets.

Guessing and hoping are no way to run a digital marketing strategy.

How about you? What are you seeking?

You probably arrived here for a couple of reasons.

You may be looking for a copywriter for you next project. You may seek someone to set up your email marketing machine You may have searched Google looking for some digital marketing education.

I hope I’ve opened your eyes to a whole new level of opportunity.

Starting with great copywriting, yes. But, there is so much more to discuss.

If so, then I suggest starting with our Copywriting Services section. Skim through our services content or recent posts to get a feeling for what I’m all about.

Were you were referred by a friend or found me “out there” socially? Excellent. Social outposts in action.

In that case, I suggest starting with the About Us Page. Knowing the BIG WHY & HOW driving my approaches and my copywriting strategies will help you decide if spending any of your valuable time here is worthwhile.

Yet another reason you’re here might be you are looking for a direct response copywriter, content marketer, email automation specialist, or digital marketing mechanic that can open the hood and help you out.

Possibly, you seek…

a professionally trained copywriter to tackle a variety of projects for you,

a marketing strategy that earns excessive revenue so it becomes a profit center,

an approach that leverages educational content and consulting to drive sales, or

an efficient way to build agile project teams that implement your marketing automation.

In that case, our Samples page will be most helpful to show you the scope of work I’ve completed over the years. I’ve added in examples from older as well as newer work. I purposefully did this to illustrate my own evolution in learning and copywriting skills. No one ever sits still.

Regardless of why you arrived here…

Welcome to Profit Center Marketing!

And I hope you find something helpful, useful, and wise.