There’s no doubt that sex sells. It has for ages. It grabs attention. It gives a customer or potential customer a sense of validation of their virility that he or she can associate with a particular product, company or brand or buy that brand or product to project their attractiveness, be it real or imagined.
But is it risky in content marketing?
Not in my experience.
When rounding up monthly analytics reports for a former employer that specialized in content marketing in online magazines and social media, the posts that got the most page views were ones with a sexual theme, and the more provocative post or the headline, the more hits it got … exponentially. Many of them were older posts that had been up for months, if not over a year, that continued to get more page views than current posts with non-risqué content.
Does sexual online content offend readers and followers? Yes. It might repel one of two, but it will gain another hundred, not to mention the shareability factor goes up at least tenfold.
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Jordan was raised in Newark, New Jersey, and joked that the women in his family are most proud of this accomplishment.
In B2C content and social media marketing, humor continues to be the biggest attention-grabber, especially if it involves coffee, bacon, Nutella or cats. However, I see the potential for sex to come out of online marketing toolboxes … or toy boxes … in 2013.
Of course, men are visual creatures. Post a teasing picture of some T & A and they’ll click. I’m not just talking about the sloppy, fat, balding men in their wife-beater T-shirts who surf the Web from their mothers’ basements. Taking a cursory look at who like share and follow the more salacious material on the Web, many are men who are (or claim to be) happy husbands, devoted dads, prominent professionals, and yes, even committed conservatives and Christians.
I’ve also learned a lot about the discussions about sex in the shadows “Shades” of the social media space. Out of a large sampling of sex and erotica blogs, about 80 percent of them are manned by women. They’re fueled and shared by women … moms, wives and sisters … some, but not all, who have created clandestine Twitter accounts to talk about their dark Grey fantasies. I’ve also come upon a number of Pinterest pages that belong to women that are (sex-)positively blushable.
Women can rather frank and approachable about what they say and share about sex online. A lot of it isn’t the giggles and wiggles of the Girls Gone Wild of the 1990’s; it’s emotional, sensual and wrapped in leather and lace like a gift pack of E.L. James novels in a Tiffany box.
We hear a lot about the power and influence of mommy blogs (For example, call it ethical or not, Toyota has invested a lot of time, money and resources in courting this group.), but I think there’s a lot to be learned and profited from the cybersex chats of women online. Take a look at the dominance of the “Fifty Shades” trilogy on the bestseller charts. It got its momentum online as an eBook in 2011 before it helped keep booksellers’ heads above water in 2012. Why not use the same approach to sell the things we buy and consume on an everyday basis? Hell, Mr. Clean is a fine looking man, or could be if Proctor & Gamble found a real-life lookalike. I’m sure he could lure me to get me on my hands and knees to scrub my floors and bathroom.
OK, that’s a stretch, but it just might make me want to follow him on Facebook and pick him over those cartoonish scrubbing characters the next time I go to the store.
Or maybe Toyota could hand some keys over to some wanton webinistas to put some va-va-voom into a Venza.
On a smaller scale, one of my favorite restaurants, What Crepe? in Royal Oak, Mich., has been picking up its Thursday night business by promoting it as Love Night. At least its Facebook post brought me in when my gentleman friend asked, “Where should we go for dinner?”