At AWeber, we’re always working to deliver powerfully-simple features for you. Our goal: to remove the complexity of email marketing so you can concentrate on making your business more awesome.
The 3-minute video below introduces you to the latest AWeber features that simplify how you send emails to your prospects and customers.
You’ll learn about Smart Designer, a free, intelligent design assistant that lets you automatically create an amazing-looking, branded email template in seconds. You’ll also see how Team Hub enables multiple users to collaborate around a single account. And you’ll discover all the ways we’re innovating our easy-to-use, industry-leading drag & drop email builder.
Click below to watch the video!
More exciting updates from AWeber!
In addition to the features in the video above, we’re also excited to announce that we’ve added the following updates to our platform:
AWeber’s Wordpress plugin was just completely revamped to make it even easier to grow your email list quickly.
Broadcast stats have gotten a visual refresh to make it easier to understand who is opening and clicking your emails.
The default email template in the drag-and-drop editor has been updated with some new, modern styles that render beautifully on all devices.
The tag dashboard now gives you a complete view of your tags, so you can better segment your audience and automate your emails.
The campaigns list page lets you now easily see how many people have received each of the messages in an automated email series.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about these amazing new features. Go test them out and let us know what you think! Log in to your account now.
These days, we live in a world of infinite supply…
In just a few clicks, anyone can start a business. Anyone can create products, build an online store, publish ads, and reach an audience online. This means that every market is becoming flooded with businesses offering similar products, features, and solutions.
So to stand out you need to have a brand that your customers connect with, and care about deeply.
Before we jump into some strategies and tactics for creating a brand your customers will truly care about, let’s first look at what exactly a brand is.
The word “brand” is used a lot in marketing today. But what exactly does brand mean? That question that might sound simple… but is actually pretty complex, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.
David Ogilvy describes a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.”
Marty Neumeier, an author and speaker who writes about branding and innovation, says “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”
And Camille Baldwin, one of the Pattern Brands founding team, and star of Breaking Brand, says “brand to me is identity. It’s all of the things that make up identity, your values, your principles, who you are, your characteristics and your intention.”
Brand to me is identity. It’s all of the things that make up identity, your values, your principles, who you are, your characteristics and your intention.
Camille Baldwin, VP of Brand, Pattern Brands
So to summarize… Your brand is the identity of your business, and how it makes people feel.
Now, let’s dive into some takeaways from Breaking Brand to help you build a buzzworthy brand that stands out against your competitors.
4 Ways to build a memorable brand
1. Know what your consumers care about
Most people are really good at explaining the “what” and the “how” of their business. For example, say you’re an accountancy company, describing the what and the how is pretty simple…
What you do is you help individuals and businesses to ensure their finances are in shape.
How you do it might vary, but it tends to involve some form of account management where you assist with invoicing or balance the books every month or quarter.
And the thing that will help one accountancy company stand out from its competitors is moving from the what and the how to the why.
The “why” is what will make a potential customer choose your business over another. The “why” is your differentiator.
In general, consumers aren’t too fussed about how you do your work — the tools you use, your internally processes, and things like that. What consumers care about is “why does this business matter in my life?”
And to go back to the accountancy example — we already explained the what and the how — but the “why” might not be so obvious. For example, if an accountancy company mostly serves small businesses, the “why” might freeing up time for the business owner to spend with family and friends.
So how do you find your why?
Customer research is a great place to start.
At Buffer we often do research interviews with customers to learn how our product helps them, and to better understand how they describe the benefits of Buffer. We’ve even had teammates spend the day with customers at their offices to see first-hand how Buffer fits into their routines and workflows.
And in Breaking Brand, Emmet Shine, co-founder of Pattern Brands, talks about the importance of knowing the customer when it comes to building a brand consumers will care about.
Before starting Pattern Brands, Emmett helped over 50 businesses launch to market, and one of those businesses was Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain selling healthy salads and grain bowls.
When working on the Sweetgreen brand and trying to understand its customers, Emmett and his team spent countless hours at Sweetgreen restaurants. They would watch how the staff would prepare salads, listen to how customers would place orders and immerse themselves in how the company works.
Essentially, they were trying to understand every tiny detail about what made Sweetgreen unique and special.
This enabled the team to craft a brand that really emphasised what customers were looking for from Sweetgreen and helped them to find their “why”.
Now Sweetgreen has over 75 restaurants and reportedly generated in excess of £100 million in 2018. So they clearly have a brand that fits what consumers are looking for.
2. Find the technical, functional, and emotional benefits of your business
Once you’ve done your customer research, you can begin to think about the various types of benefits your business offers consumers.
In episode one of Breaking Brand, Pattern’s VP of Brand, Camille Baldwin shares how the brand pyramid framework can help you to define those benefits.
Brand pyramids have been around since the late nineties, but still play a key role in brand strategy. Pyramids help you to answer fundamental questions about your business and its place in the market. Here’s an example brand pyramid from Insead Knowledge:
Three of the key elements of any brand pyramid are the technical, functional and emotional benefits your business offers consumers.
Technical benefits
At the bottom of your pyramid, you’re thinking about the technical benefits of your brand (labeled ‘Features and attributes’ in the above image). Essentially this will help you to define what you do as a company. At this stage you’ll want to ask questions like: How is this business benefiting the consumers? How will it make money? What are we offering?
For example, at Buffer we might say the technical benefit of our product is to manage all of your social media content and profiles in one place.
Functional benefits
Then, with the technical benefits of your brand defined, it’s time to look at the functional benefits you can offer consumers. Functional benefits are essentially what your customers get when they buy your product or service.
Functional benefits tend to focus on things like how a product can improve your life, help you stay connected to others or help you to make forward progress.
At Buffer, a functional benefit might be not having to hit publish manually every-time you want to share to social media. Or in the case of a car: a big, spacious family car will offer the functional benefit of space for your whole family to travel in comfort.
Emotional benefits
Next up, are emotional benefits. And these are really what makes one brand stand out from another.
Emotional benefits are how your brand makes someone feel based on the stories you tell consumers.
One emotional benefit of Nike, for example, is that its equipment will make you feel like a professional athlete. And at Buffer we might say the emotional benefit of our product is peace of mind knowing that your content will be posted to social media platforms at exactly the right time every time.
As you go through everything you’ve learned during your customer research phase, start looking out for emotion-based words your customers, or potential customers, use to describe your company or the problem you’re solving.
Whenever someone says “I feel” or “it made me.. happy, relaxed, proud, or healthy”, for example, this helps you to identify the emotional benefits your company delivers.
3. Craft a simple tagline and message
Just Do It, Think Different, I’m Lovin’ It…
Those are all examples of great brand taglines. By saying just two or three words, I bet you knew exactly which businesses I was talking about. And that’s the power of being able to boil your message down to something simple, and memorable.
In episode three of Breaking Brand, Emmett Shine, co-founder of Pattern Brands explains: “The thing about branding and marketing, is you can do years worth of research. But if you can’t boil it down to this thin sliced tagline it doesn’t matter.”
The thing about branding and marketing, is you can do years worth of research. But if you can’t boil it down to this thin sliced tagline it doesn’t matter.
It took the Patten Brands team months of ideating and back-and-forth to land on their tagline “Enjoy Daily Life”.
But now that simple statement acts as a guiding light for everything they do. From the content they post on social media to the products they sell.
Boiling your whole business down to one sentence, or even just a couple of words can be very tough. And you can’t force it. One of the best ways to craft the perfect tagline is to facilitate brainstorms and create space for idea sharing. Another thing the Pattern Brands team has done was to journal about their business and riff on ideas in private too.
And sometimes the best ideas will come to you outside of the office. So don’t be afraid to think outside the box, and away from your desk.
Communicating a clear message in just a few words is very difficult. One way we’ve found to come up with taglines at Buffer is to start long and edit down.
So to begin with, write exactly what your business delivers for customers in as many words as it take — this could be a paragraph or two, maybe even longer. And remember to think about the emotional benefits here too, not just the technical and functional benefits you offer.
Next, you’ll want to take what you’ve just written and edit it down to just one or two sentences. Repeat that process to make it one sentence, or just a few words. Then take that final piece of copy and play with a number of different versions: Rewrite it, change out words, and experiment with different lengths. This process will help you to distill all of the thoughts you wanted to share about your business into a short, memorable tagline.
Now you might be wondering: “Why is a tagline so important?”
From personal experience, I know I’ve never bought a Mac because their tagline is “think different.” But having that tagline in places means that Apple has a clear mission, and everything it does — from the adverts it makes, to its keynote launches — is guided by that vision.
4. Ensure your business lives and breaths your brand
To be successful, and for consumers to trust your message, you have to live your brand.
For example, Nike says its mission is to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” And the company sees every single person as an athlete, not just the pros.
But Nike doesn’t just say that, it lives by it.
That’s why the company focuses on creating the most innovative clothing and footwear, and why its advertising revolves around inspirational messages and stories.
Nike’s brand is reflected in every piece of content it puts out on social media. Just before writing this, I jumped over to Nike’s main Instagram account, here are just a few posts I spotted:
An IGTV video with Saquon Barkley sharing where his NFL dreams started.
A photo of women’s marathon world record holder Brigid Kosgei with former record holder Paula Radcliffe.
A photo of Rafael Nadal sharing his ambitions as a child.
Of course, not all businesses will have the resources of Nike, or the access to global superstars for that matter. But it still serves of a great example of ensuring the essense of your brand shines through on every platform.
To go back to the accountancy example I mentioned earlier. If your “why” or emotional benefit is giving small business owners more free time to spend away from work, you could ensure all of your messaging and content supports this mission. This could mean Instagram posts with clients enjoying themselves away from the office or blog posts about disconnecting from work. It could even mean you rethink the imagery and copy you use on your website.
As I mentioned right at the start of this post, your brand is the identity of your business and how it makes people feel. So every single touchpoint where someone can interact with your business should represent what you want your brand to be, and how you want people to feel.
Twitter is taking steps to clean up inactive accounts on its platform and make the usernames of those accounts available again. The social network is sending out emails to holders of inactive accounts, with the subject line, “Don’t lose access to @(username),” reading: “To continue using Twitter, you’ll need to agree to the current terms,…
At AWeber, we’re always working to deliver powerfully-simple features for you. Our goal: to remove the complexity of email marketing so you can concentrate on making your business more awesome.
The 3-minute video below introduces you to the latest AWeber features that simplify how you send emails to your prospects and customers.
You’ll learn about Smart Designer, a free, intelligent design assistant that lets you automatically create an amazing-looking, branded email template in seconds. You’ll also see how Team Hub enables multiple users to collaborate around a single account. And you’ll discover all the ways we’re innovating our easy-to-use, industry-leading drag & drop email builder.
Click below to watch the video!
More exciting updates from AWeber!
In addition to the features in the video above, we’re also excited to announce that we’ve added the following updates to our platform:
AWeber’s Wordpress plugin was just completely revamped to make it even easier to grow your email list quickly.
Broadcast stats have gotten a visual refresh to make it easier to understand who is opening and clicking your emails.
The default email template in the drag-and-drop editor has been updated with some new, modern styles that render beautifully on all devices.
The tag dashboard now gives you a complete view of your tags, so you can better segment your audience and automate your emails.
The campaigns list page lets you now easily see how many people have received each of the messages in an automated email series.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about these amazing new features. Go test them out and let us know what you think! Log in to your account now.
Diehard fans of Taco Bell have already shown their propensity to drape themselves in branded swag, from Forever 21 swimsuits to fire sauce-inspired board shorts. That fair-weather merch is packed away, though, along with the “7-layer burrito baby bunting” that some people wrapped their infants in for Halloween (you know who you are). It’s time…
Diehard fans of Taco Bell have already shown their propensity to drape themselves in branded swag, from Forever 21 swimsuits to fire sauce-inspired board shorts. That fair-weather merch is packed away, though, along with the “7-layer burrito baby bunting” that some people wrapped their infants in for Halloween (you know who you are). It’s time…
If you feel like the app TikTok came out of nowhere, you’re not wrong.
Since launching in early 2018, TikTok’s been covered by seemingly every major news publication and racked up millions of downloads globally.
Despite TikTok’s major early success, the app still feels like a bit of a mystery, especially to marketers. In fact, until recently, its parent company, ByteDance, hasn’t disclosed many metrics at all.
In TikTok’s first year, all we really knew was that an odd-ball video app was going viral, topping global app store charts, and gaining a huge fanbase from Gen-Z.
But now, shortly after TikTok’s first birthday, we know a lot more about it as sites like Digiday, AdWeek, and our own Marketing Blog regularly cover it.
Even if you still aren’t quite sure what TikTok is, you’ve probably seen a video meme on social media that was created and published in the app first. Here’s one for example of a TikTok post which went viral on Twitter:
— 🌸 Alexandra Daniels 🌸 (@alexdanielsxo) July 11, 2019
When making decisions about your social strategy, you’re probably more interested in numbers than virality as proof of an app’s staying power.
As someone who’s gotten sucked into the app, blogged multiple times about it, hearted hundreds of posts, and even made a few embarrassingly mature videos of my own, I’m fairly certain that this platform will stick around for quite some time. But, luckily, with mounting data on TikTok, you don’t just have to take my word for it.
To help you make informed decisions about your strategy and whether TikTok is right for your brand, I’ve compiled a list of 26 interesting stats and facts to know before venturing on to the app.
26 TikTok Stats to Know in 2019
Userbase, Downloads, and Growth
Within TikTok’s first year, it reportedly reached 500 million monthly active users. Wondering if this was just a fluke or a viral trend that will simmer down? Think again. According to TikTok and its company heads, the audience might be larger and more promising than we think.
According to a leaked advertising pitch deck from October 2019, TikTok reports having 800 million monthly active users worldwide. (AdAge)
And, although it might feel like TikTok is huge in the U.S., the app’s biggest audience actually comes from China, where the platform is called Douyin.
Here’s a breakdown of TikTok’s major demographic stats.
Roughly 50% of TikTok’s global audience is under the age of 34 with 26% between 18 and 24. (MarketingCharts)
Just over one in eight adults have joined TikTok. (MarketingCharts)
From my own experience, I’ve found that TikTok can easily cause you to spend more time than expected watching an endless stream of often comedic videos. Since these videos are usually between 15 seconds and one minute, it makes the app ideal for people who need quick entertainment on their morning commute or when they’re bored at home.
Because of TikTok’s quick pace and entertainment factor, the stats below aren’t that surprising:
The average user spends 52 minutes per day on TikTok. (BusinessOfApps)
90% of TIkTok users visit the app more than once per day. (GlobalWebIndex)
Users open the app eight times per day on average. (Digiday)
TikTok claims that the average session is nearly 5 minutes, which is longer than Snapchat or Instagram’s. (Digiday)
Viral Trends and Influencers on TikTok
Like YouTube, Vine, Instagram, as well as other past and present video apps, TikTok has opened doors for influencers, comedians, meme creators, and even some brands. While it’s still a bit too early to see how successful its influencers and trends will be in the long run, here are a few interesting tidbits:
The most followed individual on TikTok is a comedic poster and influencer named Loren Gray. She has 34.4 million followers. (TikTok)
One of the earliest branded hashtag challenges was Guess’ #InMyDenim challenge. According to TikTok, videos marked with this hashtag have received a grand total of 38.8 million views. (TikTok)
Rapper Lil Nas X credits the success of his song “Old Town Road” to TikTok. The song was propelled to #1 on the Billboard Top 100 in 2019 after the artist uploaded it to TikTok. (BuzzFeed News)
Here’s a compilation of TikTok’s #CowboyChallenge where people wearing normal clothing cut to themselves in cowboy costumes to the song “Old Town Road.”
Business, Revenue, and Competition
The launch of TikTok not only put its parent company, ByteDance, on the map, but it also resulted in competition from apps like Facebook, which launched a very similar app called Lasso shortly after TikTok went viral. While TikTok and ByteDance are less transparent about revenue and other major details, here’s what we know:
TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands. One of which, a branded hashtag challenge, reportedly costs $150,000 per day. (TikTok Pitch Deck Notes First Reported by Digiday)
TikTok’s revenue more than tripled between 2017 and 2018. (Sensor Tower)
In 2018, TikTok made $3.5 million on in-app purchases from users. (Sensor Tower)
TikTok has a 4.7-star rating in the Apple App Store with over 2.1 million reviews. (Apple App Store)
Lasso, a competing app launched by Facebook in November 2018, has been downloaded by over 70,000 users. (Sensor Tower)
Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company is valued at $75 million, making it the world’s most valuable startup. (CBInsights)
ByteDance’s collection of apps, including TikTok, has a total of 1 billion monthly active users. (CNN)
The Mysteries of TikTok
Although TikTok is a top social platform and is ramping up its options for advertisers, it’s still rather new. When a company or startup is new, it’s not uncommon for leadership to hide early numbers, even when a brand is successful. In fact, we’ve seen this with other major companies like Snapchat and Netflix.
There’s still a lot more to learn as TikTok’s global teams and ByteDance continue to remain hush-hush about major metrics. In the coming years, as TikTok tries to woo advertisers, it wouldn’t be surprising if we started to see more transparent information about the app and its user base.
If you feel like the app TikTok came out of nowhere, you’re not wrong.
Since launching in early 2018, TikTok’s been covered by seemingly every major news publication and racked up millions of downloads globally.
Despite TikTok’s major early success, the app still feels like a bit of a mystery, especially to marketers. In fact, until recently, its parent company, ByteDance, hasn’t disclosed many metrics at all.
In TikTok’s first year, all we really knew was that an odd-ball video app was going viral, topping global app store charts, and gaining a huge fanbase from Gen-Z.
But now, shortly after TikTok’s first birthday, we know a lot more about it as sites like Digiday, AdWeek, and our own Marketing Blog regularly cover it.
Even if you still aren’t quite sure what TikTok is, you’ve probably seen a video meme on social media that was created and published in the app first. Here’s one for example of a TikTok post which went viral on Twitter:
— 🌸 Alexandra Daniels 🌸 (@alexdanielsxo) July 11, 2019
When making decisions about your social strategy, you’re probably more interested in numbers than virality as proof of an app’s staying power.
As someone who’s gotten sucked into the app, blogged multiple times about it, hearted hundreds of posts, and even made a few embarrassingly mature videos of my own, I’m fairly certain that this platform will stick around for quite some time. But, luckily, with mounting data on TikTok, you don’t just have to take my word for it.
To help you make informed decisions about your strategy and whether TikTok is right for your brand, I’ve compiled a list of 26 interesting stats and facts to know before venturing on to the app.
26 TikTok Stats to Know in 2019
Userbase, Downloads, and Growth
Within TikTok’s first year, it reportedly reached 500 million monthly active users. Wondering if this was just a fluke or a viral trend that will simmer down? Think again. According to TikTok and its company heads, the audience might be larger and more promising than we think.
According to a leaked advertising pitch deck from October 2019, TikTok reports having 800 million monthly active users worldwide. (AdAge)
And, although it might feel like TikTok is huge in the U.S., the app’s biggest audience actually comes from China, where the platform is called Douyin.
Here’s a breakdown of TikTok’s major demographic stats.
Roughly 50% of TikTok’s global audience is under the age of 34 with 26% between 18 and 24. (MarketingCharts)
Just over one in eight adults have joined TikTok. (MarketingCharts)
From my own experience, I’ve found that TikTok can easily cause you to spend more time than expected watching an endless stream of often comedic videos. Since these videos are usually between 15 seconds and one minute, it makes the app ideal for people who need quick entertainment on their morning commute or when they’re bored at home.
Because of TikTok’s quick pace and entertainment factor, the stats below aren’t that surprising:
The average user spends 52 minutes per day on TikTok. (BusinessOfApps)
90% of TIkTok users visit the app more than once per day. (GlobalWebIndex)
Users open the app eight times per day on average. (Digiday)
TikTok claims that the average session is nearly 5 minutes, which is longer than Snapchat or Instagram’s. (Digiday)
Viral Trends and Influencers on TikTok
Like YouTube, Vine, Instagram, as well as other past and present video apps, TikTok has opened doors for influencers, comedians, meme creators, and even some brands. While it’s still a bit too early to see how successful its influencers and trends will be in the long run, here are a few interesting tidbits:
The most followed individual on TikTok is a comedic poster and influencer named Loren Gray. She has 34.4 million followers. (TikTok)
One of the earliest branded hashtag challenges was Guess’ #InMyDenim challenge. According to TikTok, videos marked with this hashtag have received a grand total of 38.8 million views. (TikTok)
Rapper Lil Nas X credits the success of his song “Old Town Road” to TikTok. The song was propelled to #1 on the Billboard Top 100 in 2019 after the artist uploaded it to TikTok. (BuzzFeed News)
Here’s a compilation of TikTok’s #CowboyChallenge where people wearing normal clothing cut to themselves in cowboy costumes to the song “Old Town Road.”
Business, Revenue, and Competition
The launch of TikTok not only put its parent company, ByteDance, on the map, but it also resulted in competition from apps like Facebook, which launched a very similar app called Lasso shortly after TikTok went viral. While TikTok and ByteDance are less transparent about revenue and other major details, here’s what we know:
TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands. One of which, a branded hashtag challenge, reportedly costs $150,000 per day. (TikTok Pitch Deck Notes First Reported by Digiday)
TikTok’s revenue more than tripled between 2017 and 2018. (Sensor Tower)
In 2018, TikTok made $3.5 million on in-app purchases from users. (Sensor Tower)
TikTok has a 4.7-star rating in the Apple App Store with over 2.1 million reviews. (Apple App Store)
Lasso, a competing app launched by Facebook in November 2018, has been downloaded by over 70,000 users. (Sensor Tower)
Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company is valued at $75 million, making it the world’s most valuable startup. (CBInsights)
ByteDance’s collection of apps, including TikTok, has a total of 1 billion monthly active users. (CNN)
The Mysteries of TikTok
Although TikTok is a top social platform and is ramping up its options for advertisers, it’s still rather new. When a company or startup is new, it’s not uncommon for leadership to hide early numbers, even when a brand is successful. In fact, we’ve seen this with other major companies like Snapchat and Netflix.
There’s still a lot more to learn as TikTok’s global teams and ByteDance continue to remain hush-hush about major metrics. In the coming years, as TikTok tries to woo advertisers, it wouldn’t be surprising if we started to see more transparent information about the app and its user base.
