SearchCore has put together an extremely powerful tech engine for driving their internet marketing and services business. The company has executed, with great success, such high-value finder-site domains as ManufacturedHomes.com, Sportify.com and Tattoo.com, which focus on a specific market, aggregating and monetizing traffic on the basis of a proven model.
By focusing squarely on fragmented, disjoined, and niche markets that have a market cap upwards of $250M, SRER’s model for developing internet real estate has proven to be very accurate, with SearchCore able to become the #1 or #2 technology-based finder site in a given category. This is the company that took medical cannabis portal, WeedMaps.com, from nothing to total annual revenue of $16M in just 3 years (page visits from 500k to over 4M per month). Before eventual sale in 2012 for roughly $12M, SRER was able to grow the brand on the strength of a subscription-based revenue model and multi-faceted traffic monetization, ultimately owning some 80% of the online alternative medicine market.
The core engine SRER has developed can be replicated and farmed out to any target industry and the robust back-end technology not only aggregates content around clearly defined sets of market criteria but affords an unparalleled monetization framework. ManufacturedHomes.com (official launch, Sept 18) is a perfect example of how SRER executes their brands and the domain stands poised to become the de facto standard for bringing together buyers, contractors, dealers, lenders, and manufacturers in the space. The domain will offer the 1.2M-plus monthly searches currently done on manufactured homes in the U.S. an easy-to-navigate treasure trove of content-rich information on manufactured homes in an extremely concise and cohesive format.
It is a well-timed launch, as the manufactured homes space is really heating up, with prices that are 10% to 35% less per square foot than conventional site-built structures and modern productions being of generally outstanding quality/performance. By creating a high-traffic portal where retailers and manufacturers can do featured listings on top of a basic freemium model that allows a free basic listing for even ancillary providers, ManufacturedHomes.com will then be able to offer listed entities a monthly subscription-based showcasing that will include in-depth profiles, images, and video content. This domain will also provide advertising slots for lenders, as well as vendors, who will have first-hand access to a giant, interested consumer market. Bringing captivating and engaging lifestyle content that connects users with the brands that are right for them in a hyper-localized fashion is a winning template, and SRER has its sights set on becoming the primary consolidator for all ancillary services in the roughly $3B manufactured home space.
With a massive and constantly growing database of over 150 current articles, as well as blogs that specifically relate to manufactured homes, all of which are designed to educate the consumer on the advantages of modern manufactured housing, ManufacturedHomes.com stands to become the definitive resource for buyers while also greatly enhancing the industry’s overall brand penetration into consumer markets. The domain provides users with an unprecedented ability to search for and review retailers, as well as compare complete floor plans across retailers nationwide and they can even get custom pricing quotes. Users will also be able to go into retailer profiles, look at construction comparisons, and research home amenities or other features. Additional monetization of the audience in this case, in the form of inventory financing options for the clients, is a juicy morsel indeed and it really highlights the profit generating capacity of SRER’s technology platform.
The March re-launch of Tattoo.com represents another amazing blend of optimized user experience and interface design from SRER, bringing together easy-to-navigate photo galleries of designs from both users and artists, as well as video from inside the shops, with tight social media integration, blogs, and consistent newsletters to help create a real community backbone. This is a roughly $2.3B per year industry where some 45M Americans (21%) had tattoos back in 2003 alone. A subject on which 16.6M searches are done each month in the U.S., as people look to the some 30k tattoo shops across the country to get inked, roughly 20% of whom will statistically also be looking for removal services later on in life. Earlier this month (Sept 9) SRER completed a geo-target enabled video marketing program for Tattoo.com that lets industry shops and artists land their products with localized accuracy. The first geo-targeted video marketing order, for ABT Tattoo in McDonough, Georgia, is expected to be shot, edited, and online by late this October and clearly shows off SearchCore’s nose for the importance of advertising with video, especially in a market like this.
The company has a solid portfolio of diversified vertical finder sites based on their core engine and is aggressively building out into identified target industries, eager to capture more of the $43B/year online marketing space, a space which is expected to grow over 79% by 2016 alone to some $77B (an incredible 35% of all ad spending). The company manages their own in-house sales staff and diligently works to cultivate direct relationships with the clientele (small business owners in the given industry seeking to market their goods and services), granting powerful connectivity with the hard-to-reach niche market consumer via an engine that is optimized for every platform, from web, to mobile, and even tablet, boldly leaping over the mobile screen monetization issues in a single bound. These finder sites have rapidly emerged as a way for small and local advertisers to gain top positioning in their categories, driven by the granular nature of paid search (Google AdWords) and display ads (banners), which are absolutely destroying print.
Demonstrated success is the hallmark of future success and SRER’s current crop of brands is low-hanging fruit at this valuation, especially considering how easy it is for the company to develop more domains on their empirically validated model/technology platform.
For more information on SearchCore, visit www.SearchCore.com
Let us hear your thoughts below:
