A Florida-based marketing company proves that the adage, “high reward = high risk,” isn’t necessarily true. The company, Harbor City DMA Ventures LLC, is an internet marketing company. Since 2013, it has been racking up huge returns for investors in the inherently low-risk Online Performance Marketing (OPM) industry. For example, investors who take part in the company’s “DMA Profit Program” are promised a return of $250 monthly for an investment of $5,000 in the company. That adds up to a whopping 60% return annually-and the company has achieved this in its first year of business.
How does the company do it? The company’s founder and CEO, J.P. Maroney, says it comes down to their secret recipe-a proprietary mix of economies of scale, special training, and using the best tools and task specialists available. He says that any mom-and-pop lead generation company can go out and promote an offer for an advertiser. “What sets Harbor City apart is doing it on a much larger scale.” Maroney has dubbed Harbor City’s particular OPM niche Digital Marketing Arbitrage or DBut The company creates revenues by generating leads for advertisers and selling them at a higher price than the cost of each piece of information.
To do so, the company creates a “sales conversion path” or “funnel” consisting of engaging steps to convert prospects into action-takers using banner ads and other web-based advertisements. The idea is to get consumers to take a desired action, such as filling out a form or providing their email addresses. In the process, Harbor City gathers and analyzes a great deal of valuable data. Moreover, the leads they produce due to the refinement of their sales funnels over time are of higher quality and cost less than anyone else can have them.
“Any business is going to have competition,” Maroney says, “But if you’re going to be a successful business, you have to exploit your competitive edge. We’ve got several, but ours is primarily our ability to seek out and negotiate lucrative deals with large-scale, high-volume networks. In that regard, we separated ourselves from our competition quickly. We have CEOs of advertising networks who personally talk to us where most of our competitors would get some third or fourth-level representative or an affiliate manager talking to them.”
OPM is an industry with many players that distinguish themselves with subtle variations on the affiliate advertising format first pioneered by Amazon.com. As much as 40% of the goods sold on Amazon.com are sold by affiliates, accounting for up to 12% of the company’s revenues, totaling an astounding $74.5 billion last year. These affiliates-literally hundreds of thousands of people with funnels and capture pages, websites, and blogs worldwide-help to promote the myriad products available for purchase at Amazon.com. Any sales they generate lead to a commission for the affiliate.
READ MORE :
- Can the iPhone Beat Symbian OS?
- 10 Reasons Why the Dollar Is About to End As the World Reserve Currency
- Understanding Cloud Computing and Is It Worth the Spend?
- 5 Immediate Website Traffic Methods for Beginners
- Mobile operators finally agreed to cap bills in cases of theft.
“That was the beginning of an industry based on performance and results,” Maroney says. “What we did differently was we said, “I’ll bet there are some economies of scale, and I’ll bet if we could go in and buy all of the media in a particular niche, and generate a large volume of these results, then there might be some specific advantages for us where we’d make more money than the mom and pop blogger that was trying to do it in the cottage industry.”
It turns out that Maroney was right beyond even his expectations. The larger programs proved successful, and by creating such high-volume affiliate campaigns, Harbor City became a favorite of the advertising networks and their clients. The larger volume translated into more favorable terms from the advertising networks, lower costs, and better commissions.
Additionally, advertisers, impressed by Harbor City’s remarkable success, were willing to make payouts faster. Whereas small affiliates get paid every thirty to sixty days, Harbour City typically receives a wire payment within two to seven days of a campaign. This meant more drives, more turns on capital, and greater profits as the capital and ROI from Harbor City’s increasingly large campaigns were in play more often rather than being held in an advertiser’s accounts.
Shortly after launching the company in 2013, Maroney realized he “had a tiger by the tail.” He began seeking investors to provide the capital necessary to increase the marketing campaigns’ volume further. Harbor City has since partnered with Hong Kong-based venture capital company Global DMA518 Ltd, which will raise $100 million to ramp up the capital at Harbor City’s disposal. By Maroney’s account, 2014 was a bumper year for the company. In 2013, the company set money-raising targets for the next three years: $5 million by the end of 2014, $10 million by 2015, and $25 million by the end of 2016.
“Here we are in early February 2015, and within the next two and a half months, we’ll be at $10 million,” Maroney exudes. “We beat our first-year goal by a month-we did it in 11 months. We will beat our second-year goal probably within the first four months of the year. And we’ll beat our third target by the end of 2015, almost a year ahead of schedule.” In a world of low investment returns, Harbor City has distinguished itself by its ability to prove you can have high, consistently double-digit returns with minimal risk. The difference, Maroney says, is that Digital Marketing Arbitrage is a highly trackable process, so unlike conventional advertising, the success of a DMA campaign can be monitored, tweaked, and made profitable every single time.
Maroney compares his online performance marketing campaigns to a Super Bowl advertisement. “Super Bowl advertisements have become an industry unto themselves,” he says. “People pay huge, huge sums of money for these ads. Some are funny; some are emotionally evocative, but as far as I know, no advertising agencies running those ads have used any significant measurements to test their efficacy. Did those ads generate a profit or a return on investment? Not likely… that is a pure branding exercise great for egos but not bottom lines!”
Conversely, Harbor City operates in the performance space, where advertisers and affiliates must prove the success of their campaigns by providing the advertiser with a specific, measurable result, such as a filled-out form, an email address, or a sale. “In the online space, our links are all trackable,” Maroney explains. “If you’ve ever spent a dollar in online advertising in the pay-per-click advertising space, not only is it trackable, and you know if it produced a result and got an ROI, but you didn’t have to pay for it until it fully generated a result. Until it generated a click.”
Each marketing campaign run by Harbor City begins with market testing. Maroney says marketers must be “absolutely obsessed” with testing every aspect of a campaign. “That’s the cool thing about marketing,” he says. “You’ve got an ad out there, and that ad can have countless variables that can be tested. Then you have a landing page with a headline on that page, you’ve got a copy, placement of your hook, links that lead to your opt-in page, or whatever your offer is. You’ve got colors to test. You can have a sidebar on the left versus a sidebar on the right. It can have links at the top versus no links. You can have a logo versus a straight-text name.
“You’re talking multiple steps, multiple variables, and that’s what makes what we’re doing exciting because one little change can move the dial two or three points, and that volume change can dramatically impact your bottom line.” Maroney has had to focus on rapid growth to compete in the increasingly competitive online performance space. To do so, he’s focused on three aspects of the company that distinguishes it from its competitors.
“Our secret sauce is about people, and then it’s the systems and tools,” he says. “I decided, about six months into this business, that instead of trying to go out and buy or hire racehorses, we were going to raise our own. So we’ve trained the people, created the checklists and systems and the back end system, and all this has allowed us to manage the campaigns we’re running so effectively, where we’re bringing a lead-in for $2.50 and selling it for $7.”
If a campaign set up by Harbor City underperforms, Maroney says, there are many options available to his team to tweak the campaign and make it profitable. “When we are watching the numbers on the first test of a campaign, and we see something performing less than optimally,” he explains, “we can slow it down, we can reduce the budget, or we can pause it. We can tweak the messaging or the imaging. Or, if it’s an email buy and if it’s still in the process of being sent, we could pause the send.”
, This accountability helps to explain the rising popularity of OPM. Once dismissed as a niche form of online sales that generated only “silly commissions,” OPM has, since 2006, been the preferred format for online advertisers. In its 2014 review of the US internet advertising industry, PwC stated that online performance marketing now accounts for an estimated 65% of revenues generated or about $27 billion in the US annually. Compare that with conventional advertising, where tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions, are spent with little concrete evidence of return on investment.
With such a huge market at his disposal, Maroney’s excitement is palpable. He says every new dollar invested into the company is put straight to work. “We have many offers that are running at 10% to 20% of their capacity. When we get new capital, we scale those campaigns and throttle them up. No testing is done with investor money; that money is never at risk since the campaigns have been repeatedly tested. That’s one of the beauties of multiple campaigns and a pipeline of offers constantly going online.”
Maroney, a 25-year entrepreneur with a colorful pedigree that boasts everything from publishing and real estate to textiles and training, says he came up with the idea over a decade of watching the online advertising space grow and evolve. “There have been plenty of people that have built investments funds, and there have been plenty of people that have done online performance marketing, but as far as I know, no one ever combined the two,” he says. “I consider myself very fortunate to have stumbled across an idea that worked so successfully. With online marketing, online advertising, your up-front risk is negligible at best. It’s almost nonexistent.”
