Blogging As a Path to Branding Excellence

Branding is the most effective and most rewarding type of marketing a small business can perform. Once you embed your brand into the consciousness of your customer, it tends to stick around. Blogging is one of the most effective and enduring tools available to assist the small business owner in achieving top-of-mind awareness, aka branding.
What makes blogging such a useful tool for branding? A number of things, so let’s talk about some of them.

• The Conversation – You can’t control the conversation in most venues online. Forums, social media, other off-site platforms are usually controlled by someone else. But your blog is yours. You can initiate the conversation and control the conversation. It’s the perfect branding tool.
• Customer Interaction – Besides being in control, you can interact with your customers and maintain a level of positive engagement. That is much harder to do in social media.
• Your Hub On The Web - Everyone needs a home base. I’m not saying don’t use social media or off-site platforms. You should use them, but you should use them to drive traffic back to your hub – the place of conversation that you can control, your blog.
• List Capture – As you direct traffic to your blog, get people to go deeper by joining your mailing list. This is where the money is and your blog is the gateway.

Branding begins with the conversation. Instead of throwing out bland marketing messages, interact with your customers and drive them to a deeper relationship with you through your blog.

Zuckerberg Debunks the Biggest Myth About Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook’s third quarter earnings call to clear up what he sees as the biggest myth about the company: that Facebook can’t make money on mobile.

Early in the call, Zuckerberg referred to Facebook’s “opportunity on mobile” as “the most misunderstood” aspect of the company right now. “I want to dispel this myth that Facebook can’t make money on mobile,” he said during the call on Tuesday. “This might have seemed true earlier this year because we hadn’t started trying yet.”

Facebook released its first mobile ad product just a few months ago and now mobile revenue makes up 14% of the company’s total  ad revenue. As Zuckerberg put it, “We’re just getting started.”
In fact, Zuckerberg argued that the company will end up reaching more users on mobile than desktop and will see better monetization from mobile users than desktop users. Part of the reason for this, he says, is that mobile users are actually more engaged with Facebook than desktop users. Facebook has found that mobile users have a 70% likelihood of logging onto Facebook on a given day, compared to a 40% likelihood for desktop users.

Zuckerberg also noted that engagement on iOS devices in particular has improved since Facebook overhauled its iPhone and iPad apps in August, improving speed. Facebook has apparently seen an 80% increase in News Feed loads and a 20% increase in likes, comments and other forms of user engagement within those apps in the past two months.

It’s no surprise that Zuckerberg spent so much time talking about mobile, as concerns about mobile monetization have plagued the company’s stock to date. In fact, Zuckerberg revealed that monetization has become such a big focus for the company that each of Facebook’s product teams are now tasked with coming up with a revenue strategy for their products. This is a marked shift for a company that has traditionally been very user-focused, rather than monetization-focused.

Overall, Facebook’s third-quarter earnings came in slightly ahead of Wall Street estimates, posting an adjusted earnings per share of $0.12 on revenue of $1.26 billion. Analysts had expected Facebook to report earnings per share of $0.11 on revenue of $1.23 billion. Shares of Facebook rose by more than 11% in after hours trading following the earnings report and call.

Aside from debunking the myth of mobile monetization, Zuckerberg also tried to put a positive spin on the impact of declining revenue from Zynga, another big concern of investors ever since Zynga pre-announced some particularly lousy earnings results earlier this month. According to Zuckerberg, payment revenue from Zynga did decline 20% in the third quarter year-over-year, but revenue from the rest of Facebook games increased 40% year-over-year.
Nevertheless, Zynga continues to make up a significant portion of Facebook’s total revenue. Zynga accounted for 7% of Facebook revenues in the third quarter, down from 10% in the previous quarter and 12% in the third quarter last year.

Facebook’s earnings call got off to a sloppy start, as someone apparently forgot to press mute on the phone. As a result, listeners could hear Facebook executives fumbling and saying, “Oh my god.” The issue was fixed quickly enough and the rest of the call went relatively smoothly.

5 Tips to Empower Your Email Marketing

Email is has proven to be a very effective way to drive engagement with consumers. Here are five things to ask yourself in order to create an email campaign that will drive maximum engagement.

1. Is it Easy on the Eyes?
Make sure that you have less text that is spaced out and that your content is highlighted. Reduce the fine print to what is required and put in pictures that are relevant. Pictures help break the monotony of reading and help with cognition. Design your email well — think about putting pictures in a frame, they need to look pleasing. But don’t stop with the email. Create a mobile version, and do not forget about your landing page.

2. Is Your Subject Line Compelling?
The goal of your subject line is to draw in the consumer. Use powerful words and sentences that inspire action. These types of words and phrases include, “proven,” “exclusive,” “limited number,” “two more days,” “for our platinum segment” and “advanced tips.”
Remember to test your subject line — first with your team, then conduct an A/B test before launching to the entire list.

3. Will it Find the Inbox?
Marketers should monitor deliverability to ensure that the message is getting through to their consumers. Start by checking the spam score, include multi-part messaging, avoid spam traps and spam words, and keep checking your bounces. Make sure that you are honoring the subscribe and un-subscribe process. It is also important to ensure that the reputation of your IP addresses is aboveboard.

4. Are You Looking at Your Numbers?
Make it a habit to check the results of a campaign before scheduling the next campaign. Opens, clicks and conversions can be improved by looking at other factors. Monitor the time between an email being sent and the email being opened. Look at the quality and length of your subject lines. One of the best things you can do is to predict your results and then evaluate the difference to improve.

5. Does Your Consumer Trust You?
Every message you send and every open (and click) is a way for you to build up on your value proposition. Continue looking at branding, the consumer’s attention span, and your ability to convert the consumer to a customer. Your biggest success would be driven by focusing on getting the consumer to trust you — they need to learn to depend on you for important and relevant messaging.