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Traditional monetization channels are getting tougher and tougher for publishers to tap into. The reason? Consumer behavior is fundamentally changing, and now more than ever before, attention spans are scatterbrained.

With every moment spent on smartphones, tablets, or computers at work, readers find themselves exposed to more content options that they have time to process. That’s why it’s critical that media companies invest in quality vs. quantity: if you want to attract a high-value audience, your content needs to be high-value too.

This perspective is the ‘smoking gun’ that publishers need to build new, high value revenue channels. Just as much as you don’t like fighting against noise for your audience’s attention, your audiences don’t like to deal with media brands that are clamoring for their time.

That’s where personalization enters the picture. When your content is tailored and relevant to the audiences you’re trying to reach, you’ll see a strong lift to your media brand–and you’ll be well-positioned to provide value to your advertisers too. Here’s how personalization can help media companies carve out new, lasting monetization channels.

>> Download our latest Media Ebook – Personalize or Perish >> 

More Engaged Email Lists

Personalization will open doors to a wealth of email marketing and monetization opportunities 

When audiences like what you have to offer, they’ll find a way to keep your company on their radars. They’ll ‘like’ your content on Facebook, follow your account on Twitter, or subscribe to at least one of your targeted newsletters. 

But many newsletters are irrelevant to audiences, which is why subscribe rates for companies are often low. The best way to change this behavior? It’s to change yours—create email campaigns that are tailored to what your audience wants to read about and learn. 

The chain of events is clear: personalization of a strong value proposition will yield higher sign-up rates to your newsletters. And with higher sign-up rates for your newsletters, you’ll have more engaged lists of subscribers. In turn, you’ll be able to deliver more value to your advertisers.

Invest in your email marketing strategy, and your value as a media brand will grow, overall. You can send more targeted email campaigns, on behalf of your advertisers, to your readers, for instance—the possibilities are truly limitless.

Personalized Calls to Action (CTAs)

Want your readers to take action on the ads and offers that you’re sharing with them?

The most efficient path forward is to optimize your CTAs: choose value propositions that speak to their unique interests, needs, and goals. The answer is personalization.

As a media company, you’re in a unique position to become a true innovator in the personalization space. You’re likely already collecting a wealth of audience data in terms of the content they’re reading and taking action upon.

Why not align your CTAs to this data that you’ve been generating?

The B2B, corporate world has been creating what it calls ‘smart CTAs’ for years. The idea is simple: rather than communicating a one-size-fits all cue, craft value propositions for the specific audiences that you’re reaching. Speak to their needs and pain points. You’ll see higher conversion rates and position your media brand to provide higher value to advertisers, too. 

For a step-by-step guide to creating personalized CTAs, check out this guide from 2013.

Getting Started 

The first step to getting started is to organize your database: you need to make sure that your customers’ information is in the right place (so you can take action upon it). As you build your lists, give careful thought to the data you’re collecting and whether you have the right form fields in place to keep this information organized. This unified data perspective will help you shortcut the process of and increase the impact you make when you target your audiences on an individual level. Here’s how to collect information for personalization:

• Define what exactly you should be collecting and how this information aligns to your overall campaign goals
• Understand what information will be available on a personal level and what may remain anonymized
• Figure out how you’re going to collect information (through lead gen landing pages, for instance)

Once you have your ducks in order and you start gathering data, start fueling your personalization engine:

• Create audience segments based on areas of interest, subscription type, or geographic location, so you can personalize reader experiences at different levels
• Build out content and conversion paths to match each customer segment. Use a blend of qualitative and quantitative research to guide your early decisions (Don’t worry about being perfect, as your strategy will likely continue to change over time)
• Test out your ideas with the expectation that you’ll refine and iterate upon your results
• Iterate on your personalization strategy by reinvesting your learnings into new campaign ideas.

Any media company, of any size, can get started. Just start doing some research into the systems that already exist, so that you can develop a strong sense of your company’s assets. Use this platform as a starting point to explore the world of opportunity that awaits. Instead of seeing personalization as a daunting, far-fetched task for your team to accomplish, take smaller steps instead.

Think about your best friendships: they’ve been strong because you’ve learned about one another over time. A relationship with your best readers should be no different. The more you learn about them, the more effective your marketing programs will be.

When planning giveaways, discounts, coupons, promotional events, and any other special pricing for your ecommerce company, you’re probably already counting your profits in your head. Then, you run across a blog like this one that says ecommerce promotions just don’t work. What are you supposed to believe?

Well, let’s first consider what you want to get out of your latest promotion. If you’re just looking for a high number of sales conversions, then you’re set. If you’re looking for loyal customers who will come back time and again, then you’re setting yourself up to fail. Why? Let’s consider a few facts.

Lowering the Perceived Value

When you can lower the price of a product just to get it out the door, your customers start to wonder just how valuable that item is. For instance, if you can slash your prices to 50% on a particular handbag design, only to jack the prices back up two days later, anyone who encountered the lower price will forever more believe that’s what your product is worth. 

If you can’t show that your products are worth the price tag, then you haven’t done your job. Discounting just to get those items out the door will only confirm to consumers that your products were never as valuable as you said they were.

Bad First Impression

Once you’ve tanked your own prices, there’s no going back. You may not lose all those customers who made a purchase at the lower price, but they won’t buy again until you have another sale. Anyone who wasn’t swayed by your lower prices the first time may keep an eye out for special deals, but they certainly won’t be fool enough to pay full price once the specials are over.

If no one’s buying until you lower your prices, then you might as well set the prices lower to begin with. But if you start with lower prices, what will you do when it’s time to run promotional deals?

Poor Substitute for Service

If you’re counting on lower prices or discounts on future purchases to keep your customers happy, then you’re missing a big piece of the ecommerce puzzle. Service after the sale is what makes a buyer loyal to your brand. The problem with running promotions all the time is that you’re too busy counting conversions to worry about who needs your help.

Instead of constantly slashing your prices, spend some time with your buyers. Provide the information they need to make their choices, and guide them toward smart purchasing decisions. They’ll return next time, full price in hand, and ready to make their next purchase. 

Breeding Mistrust

So, yeah, you’ve gotten quite a few new customers through the door with your big price cut. Those buyers may hang around for the next time you lower your prices, so you’re cool there. Maybe you’ll catch a few more people after you raise the prices again—you know, the ones who didn’t know you offered a discount yesterday. Everything sounds great, right? 

Well, what about those customers who bought your product at full price just before you bottomed the price out? Are you willing to go back to everyone who bought at full price and offer them a refund on the difference? If you’re not, then you’re going to have some pretty angry people on your hands. No one wants to feel like a fool after buying into your full-price items, only to discover later that you don’t really think they’re worth that much after all. And that’s what you tell them when you slash your prices.

No Place for Sales and Discounting in Your Marketing?

No. But you should think wisely about how you’re using these types of promotions. If you’re only trying to get the conversion, you should be hesitant. You’ll be undercutting yourself and risk running to the bottom on discounting if you aren’t careful. If you’re hoping to build lasting relationships with your buyers, to build a brand that invokes trust and fuzzy feelings, then be careful with those promotions. There’s are smarter ways to build loyalty. 

As the hub of your business presence on a (nearly) 1.6 billion-person social network, your Facebook Page has the potential to be a valuable marketing asset. From educating prospective customers to sharing company updates and educational resources with your existing customers, you can use your Facebook Page to target nearly every stage of your marketing funnel.

But in a world where 40 million+ small businesses have Facebook Pages, simply creating a Page won’t guarantee you much in the way of results.

In order to attract and engage your target audience, you need your Facebook Page to stand out from the sea of sameness.

Download our free guide here to learn more about how you can customize your Facebook Page.

To help you get started, we put together this list of seven tips and tricks you can use for customizing your company’s Facebook Page.

7 Ways to Create a Custom Facebook Business Page

1) Claim Your Custom URL

First things first: If you haven’t already, head to the URL http://ift.tt/nkGzdY and create a custom URL for your Facebook Page that’s short and easy to remember. HubSpot’s, for example, is facebook.com/hubspot. Not very imaginative, but the goal is to create alignment between your brand and the Page.

As you can see in the screenshots below, you first need to choose your Page from a dropdown menu, then you’ll be able to see if the URL you want is available.

Keep in mind that you’re only allowed to change your Facebook Page URL once. So if you’re going to update it, choose your new URL wisely.

2) Control Who Gets to See Your Page

Head to the Settings menu (via the link on the right side of your Page’s top nav), and you’ll be able to unlock a host of customization options. Perhaps the most important: The ability to restrict the visibility of your Page, which you can control under the “General” settings tab.

Are there certain countries your company doesn’t sell to? You can prevent your Facebook Page from appearing there. Sell a product (e.g., alcohol) that has legal restrictions and/or that is otherwise geared toward an adult audience? You can restrict the visibility of your Facebook Page according to age.

By fine-tuning these visibility settings, you can help make sure your Page is reaching the right audience.

3) Control What Content Appears on Your Page

While you’re in the General Settings menu customizing your Facebook Page’s visibility settings, you might also want to consider customizing what content will be allowed to appear on your Page. Specifically, you can control who’s allowed to post content to your Page, as well as what types of content (e.g., videos and/or photos) people are — or aren’t — allowed to post.

Worried about bad language or inappropriate topics popping up in posts and replies on your Page? Adjust your Page Moderation settings to block the use of specific words, and turn on (or increase) your Page’s Profanity Filter. FYI: There are three Profanity Filter settings, “Off,” “Medium,” and “Strong,” which are based on the words and phrases that Facebook users have most frequently deemed offensive.

4) Add a Call-to-Action Button

It’s a little tweak that can make a big impact: Setting up a call-to-action (CTA) button on your Facebook Page. The best part is that it only takes a few seconds to do.

If you haven’t already created a CTA for your Page, you’ll see an “Add Action Button” button where your future CTA will appear. (And yes, I realize how meta it is to be clicking on a CTA that’s telling you to create a CTA. Welcome to the weird world of online marketing.)

Once you click that button, you’ll be taken to a menu where you can select the CTA you want and preview it across different devices.

The CTA you choose should depend on the specific goals you’re trying to accomplish. Facebook gives you 11 different options:

• “Contact Us”
• “Book Now”
• “Call Now”
• “Send Message”
• “Use App”
• “Play Game”
• “Shop Now”
• “Sign Up”
• “Watch Video”
• “Send Email”
• “Learn More”

In addition to having your Page CTA redirect to a webpage, you can specify that it sends mobile visitors to your app or a mobile version of your site. Sure, it’s a minor adjustment, but the end result is a better experience for your visitors.

However you end up configuring your CTA, remember to use tracking links when redirecting people to one of your other properties. That way you can monitor how successful your CTA has been at generating traffic and leads.

5) Customize Your Page’s Tabs

You can customize your Facebook Page’s tabs at a basic level by navigating to the “More” tab and selecting “Manage Tabs” from the dropdown menu. From there, you’ll be able to re-position the order in which your Page’s tabs appear.

Clicking that “Add or Remove Tabs” link at the bottom of the Manage Tabs menu will take you to Facebook’s Apps menu, where you can install new apps. Once you install the app — like the Notes app, for example — you’ll be able to feature it as a tab on your Page.

To create an entirely unique, non-Facebook-app-related tab for your Page, there’s a bit of a development rabbit hole you’ll need to go down. While it’s not impossible to do, it’s definitely tricky.

The good news: A coworker wrote a post that walks you through steps in excruciating detail: “How to Create Custom Tabs for Your Facebook Business Page.” 

6) Use Custom Images

Facebook recommends “adding big, beautiful photos and images” to your Facebook Page. In a perfect world, this would entail having a photographer take some high-quality shots — or having a graphic designer create some custom images — that highlight your company’s products, services, branding, culture, and so on.

You could also go the Patagonia Facebook Page route and combine photos with design work, like you see in the examples below.

If resources are limited, you can always turn to our collection of free stock photos to find the perfect visual.

Regardless of the types of images you end up using, make sure you stick to Facebook’s recommended image dimensions. Here they are:

• Profile picture: 180 x 180 pixels (at least)
• Cover photo: 851 pixels wide x 315 pixels tall (JPG file format / less than 100KB file size)

(Check out this post for more recommended social media image dimensions.)

7) Add Ratings & Reviews to Your Page

Know how some Facebook Pages have those little rating and review widgets with the stars?

Those will only appear if you’ve designated your Page as a local business during setup and have entered your full business address. If you’re creating a new Page, don’t worry: this option is hard to miss.

If you already have a Facebook Page and want to make the switch to the local business setting, head to the About tab, choose Page Info, and then hover over the Category section. Click on the little pencil icon that appears and you’ll be able to switch your page to the “Local Businesses” category.

Assuming you have your business’s full address already entered in, Facebook’s Ratings & Reviews functionality should soon become available on your Page.

Know of any other Facebook Page customization tips and tricks? Share them in the comments section below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2011 and has been updated and for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

You know what an “average” speech looks like. You’ve seen tens, maybe hundreds of them in your lifetime. Chances are, you’ve given a few of them yourself. They’re good, and they’re useful, but they’re not awe-inspiring.

You might also know what an amazing speech looks like — one that’s engrossing, captivating, and inspires action. These speeches grab your attention from the very beginning and imprint us with something memorable by the end. Sometimes, they feel like magic.

While a lot of credit should go to a person’s oratory skills, there are elements of great, memorable speeches we can bring into our own practice.

Want to create a truly memorable, persuasive speech of your own? Check out the infographic below from PapersMaster to learn the elements of a great topic, how to structure your speech to achieve the best response, how to construct the body to support your claim, how to prepare to give your speech, and tips for a successful delivery. (For more detailed public speaking tips, read this blog post on the science of a great TED talk.)