Blogs – A Website’s Best Friend

Many businesses don’t understand that having a website doesn’t mean having a relevant presence in the Internet. If no one goes to your website, is the same as not having a website at all!

So, how do we get people to visit our website?

Last week Todd Giannattasio, the CEO of Tresnic Media went to NYU and talked about his personal success case. Tresnic Media needed traffic in their website, and they decided to do an experiment: they will start a blog, but not only that, they will post 50 blog-posts in 25 days.

The results were eminent. Within 5 weeks they increase their website traffic 483% and after their blog went viral it showed an increase of 1064%.

 What can we learn from their success?

Content is the King, but the right content – Content marketing has become popular, however, not everybody knows how to do it properly. Tresnic Media has it a little bit easier in terms of content, as their business model is around information and content, so they leverage an asset they already had to create the blog posts. But this is not the only way to do it. If you are out of ideas, or have a blocked mind that day, you can always curate content. No matter what type of content you are using, the number one rule is to be relevant, relevant to the industry, business, or prospect clients. Actually, Todd described it in a very simple way: Blog as if you were writing an e-mail to a very important prospect client.

Frequency can take you places – They decided to write 50 post, as it seem to be the magic number for a lot of bloggers (enough content to engage readers at your blog), but notice that they added another variable; in 25 days! They set a timeline and a goal. Decide what your timeline is going to be, is it going to be once a month? Once a week? 2 times a day? Your readers are asking for consistency so they know what and when to expect something from you.

Sharing is caring – One thing we’ve learned from social media is that we are shareable beings. If we like something we share it with friends, family, colleagues. But don’t wait for people to share your blog post, make it available to them in platforms they use normally. Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, even Facebook, will help spread the word and drive more people to your blog and website.

Content on Email Marketing

I think almost everybody with an active digital live have more than 2 email accounts, one for your personal emails, and the other one for “junk”. In the junk bucket there’s a mix of spam emails, unwanted subscriptions, and marketing efforts from companies trying to selling us something or engage with us to eventually buy something.

As a marketer is very difficult to stand out from the clutter and make people actually open and read the emails, but funny enough, sometimes when they do open and read the emails, the often don’t take action. But what does this really mean?

Well, sometimes marketers are not clear in the messaging, and even when they had a compelling subject title, or graphics; they don’t have a clear call to action. And call to action not only mean sales, it could mean: read this article, go to this website, download this article…

For example, Marketing Profs does a good job by using content marketing to approach to its prospect clients. They know that as a marketing professional I might be interested in articles or e-books of the industry.

The mobile version is exactly the same. It has to be responsive as it adapts to the screen of my mobile device. Responsive could be good and bad, in this case, it is not a good idea. First, there’s too much text! nobody has the time to read all that. Second, the text is so small that I have to zoom in to read, and then scroll up-down-right-left to read through it.

 Companies need to realize the importance of simplicity. We are busy people with a very low attention spam, and even though is “Content Marketing”, the content has to be relevant and concise. And if the content has to be download or viewed in another landing page, then your clear to action has to be clear and very straightforward.

Location Marketing in Mobile Payments – LevelUp

It is not a secret that our generation is going mobile. To be specific, according to a study published this year by the mobile measurement and advertising platform Flurry, the average American spend 162 minutes on their mobile device per day, and 86% of that time on mobile apps.

We do everything in our phones, and companies have noticed. One industry that has been trying to go mobile for some years now is the payments industry. Only last month one of the biggest brands announced its participation in the payments industry, and yes, I’m talking about ApplePay. However, I don’t want to talk about mobile payments per se, I want to talk about an app that has integrated location based marketing with mobile payments.

LevelUp launched in 2011 as a “daily deals” app, but after 3 months it evolved to a mobile payments platform free to download for iPhone, Android and the Windows Phone. LevelUp make profits out of payment transactions. This means that for every user that pays with LevelUp in a store, the company gets a percentage of that transaction. This also means that LevelUp have two customers: Users and merchants.

The Users are the people that download the app in their phones. The app is totally free for them to download and use. The Merchants are the businesses that have the hardware and software to accept that payment. For Merchants there is a transaction fee. Currently this fee is 1.95% of the total transaction if they use LevelUp.

But payments are not the only functionality of LevelUp. The company realized that there was a need to engage the customers to come back to the merchants (their other users), and pay with the app. To do that, LevelUp offer merchants the ability to track loyal customers, and approach new customers that are close to their business.

How does this work?

Well, if the merchant agrees to be part of the LevelUp loyalty program, every time the users pay in the store, the app saves the information and after certain money spent in the store they would get some money for free for the next purchase (i.e. spend $50, and get $5). On the other hand, users that have never been to that specific store can find a new location using the app.

For example, if I’m not familiar with the Financial District in New York and I’m starving, I can go to the app and it will show me all the restaurants that accept LevelUp. It will also show me the deals I can get if I go to that restaurant.

Even if the mobile payments industry is in a confused state right now, it is interesting to see how technology is changing the way we to interact with businesses. We have been paying the same way for decades, maybe is time for something new!