Matrix Group International

Category: Content Marketing and Social Media

Intentional Marketing: Who Should Attend Your Next Conference or Convention?
Earlier this week, I hosted a roundtable discussion with a group of select clients to discuss the future of trade shows. Instead of sending a blast email to our entire list, my marketing team sat down with me to discuss who we wanted at the discussion. We only wanted clients that have trade shows and wanted a mix of trade associations and professional societies. We also wanted Director level or higher. We sent out the first email. We got one response.

Rather than continue to send emails, we decided I should make phone calls to the Directors, VPs and CEOs who we most wanted at the event. I called, left messages and spoke with a few people. And then I re-sent the promo email. The response was terrific. Nearly all of the organizations we targeted sent a representative.

When clients ask us to help them increase meeting registrations and/or exhibit sales, we ask: Who do you want at the meeting? Anyone? A specific slice of your membership? Or do you want members that meet certain criteria, like members in a specific geographic area or members at risk of canceling? And then we ask: how we can let this group of companies or individuals know that you want them at your meeting?

No, I don’t believe sending a generic, blast email is enough. In our experience, a mix of blast emails, personal emails, phone calls, and direct mail works best.

When Matrix Group is planning its webinar series, I sit down with my team and ask them: Which clients should attend this webinar on Sitefinity, cybersecurity, design, Twitter or x topic? If my marketing team is doing its job right, they will have a list and that list gets a personal email from me, a Director or a Project Manager, or a phone call from my Cultivation Manager, in addition to getting the blast emails. We get the best response from the personal emails and the phone calls and I bet you’re not surprised by this finding.

The next time your organization is planning a campaign to promote a meeting, publication or show, ask your team these questions:
- Who do want to target and why?
- What is the best way to reach them and why?
In the end, it’s easy to just send another set of emails to your entire list but I believe you must be intentional with your marketing to get the best results.
November 19, 2014
Want More Views and Clicks In Your Emails? Make Your E-Newsletters Responsive!
As marketers, we’re obsessed with metrics. And since email is a primary means of communicating with our members, customers, prospects and partners, it only makes sense that we track open rates (the number of people who actually open and read our emails) and click rates (the number of people who click on a link). Here at Matrix Group, we’ve been working with lots of clients to make their emails responsive because in most industries, more email is read on a mobile device than on a desktop email client.

Responsive design refers to the practice of designing and implementing a website so that it “responds” to the user’s device. Looking at a website on a wide screen over broadband? You might get a full screen, 4-column layout with high resolution images. Surfing a website on your phone? You should get a slimmed down version of the site with a single column of content, text that is large enough to read without pinching, and lower resolution images.

But what about emails? Responsive email pretty much works the same way as responsive websites. Reading an email through Outlook on your desktop? You might see a nice layout, with 2 columns, images aligned to the right and left of content, a nice header, yada, yada. Browsing the mail on your phone? That same email gets simplified. It goes to 1 column, images are center aligned, content is shorter.

Why bother making your emails responsive?
- Users are more likely to delete an email they cannot read easily on their phones. Source: ExactTarget
- There is a growing segment of the population that is mobile only, that is, they access the Web and email only through mobile devices.
- Responsive emails are more readable on a phone. Period. End of story.
We’re tracking the results of responsive e-newsletters for our clients and so far, the statistics are promising. Clients are increasing open rates in absolute terms by 1-4%, and clickthroughs an average of 2%. A few percentage points doesn’t sound like much but when you consider that most organizations get a 20% open rate and a 2 or 3% click rate, these numbers are significant. Consider this: one Matrix Group client saw an increase of 4% overall; since they have an email list of 100,000, an extra 4,000 people are now reading their emails!

I think it comes down to this. Your emails are getting looked at on a phone. Your customer’s decision to open and click is influenced by many factors, including subject line, who the email is from, and whether or not the email is mobile-friendly. It only makes sense to make your emails mobile-friendly. And if in doubt, do some testing and learn more about your customers’ email preferences.
April 16, 2014
When Is It Time to Implement Responsive Design?

A few weeks ago, I conduced a webinar on implementing a “Mobile First” strategy. By mobile first, my co-host Alex Pineda and I mean a strategy where you consider the needs of mobile users first. Why? Because mobile usage is growing faster than desktop usage, because mobile usage is greater than desktop in some countries (like India), and because designing for mobile (especially smartphones) is harder than designing for tablet and desktop. During the webinar, a big topic of discussion was, “When is it time to implement responsive design?”

My answer to this question is: NOW. Here’s what I usually hear from prospects and clients.

Objection #1: “My mobile traffic is tiny.” This might be true today but mobile usage is growing really fast. More importantly, every single one of our client sites that went responsive is now seeing huge increases in mobile usage, with mobile now representing double digits. This tells us that visitors keep coming back when you reward them with a great mobile experience.

Objection #2: “Responsive is expensive to implement.” It’s true that responsive can add up to 20% more to the overall design and implementation budget. Whenever we can, we use wireframes and designs to explore ways in which websites should look and behave differently on different devices, based on the tasks we believe users need to accomplish on said devices. These discussions, the development work and the testing are often labor-intensive. The good news is that most CMS platforms (we like Sitefinity and WordPress) make it much easier to implement responsive design. In fact, if budget is limited, we can implement default responsive templates. So please don’t let budget stop you from going responsive with your website.

Objection #3: I’ll wait until our next redesign.” While it’s tempting and certainly easier to embark on responsive when you’re in the thick of a redesign, unless your redesign is happening right now, I don’t think you should wait. Can you really ignore the needs of the 25% mobile-only audience and the 22% market share of mobile devices for overall traffic?

Objection #4: Search isn’t that important to my online strategy. Even if you think your target audiences won’t look for your products and services via search, you can’t ignore this statistic from Search Engine Journal: 93% of all Internet traffic starts with search. Further, Google is demoting sites that aren’t mobile-friendly because 25% of search clicks are from mobile devices, and climbing.

If you’re still not convinced, just look at your own mobile device usage and think about how wonderful it is when your favorite news or retailer site has a great mobile site and you can do what you need on a phone or tablet.

It’s time to go mobile. It’s time to go responsive.

October 23, 2013
Answer Customer Questions On Your Website and Reap the SEO Benefits
A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of attending a powerful presentation on content marketing by Marcus Sheridan, CEO of The Sales Lion. His main message: Your customers and potential customers have thousands of questions about your product and industry. Answer those questions through your website and blog!

Here are some key takeaways from Marcus’ presentation.

What Makes Us Fall in Love with a Website?
- Good information
- Easy to find information
- Good aesthetic
- Fresh content
- Valuable information that saves time and money
It’s All About the Content
- Good content keeps visitors on your website because they are getting the information they want and need.
- Search engines love good, fresh, authentic content. Websites that get updated encourage the search engines to keep coming back.
- Quality content that gets clicked, shared and linked gives you better search engine rankings.
- Gone are the days of just talking about ourselves and our companies. Prospects and clients expect and demand rich, quality content that will answer their questions. For free, of course.
Answer the Questions People Type into Google

According to Marcus, there is usually a set of questions prospects always ask. These questions are often about price, scope, timeline, quality, comparisons with other products, etc. So why not answer those questions on your website so that prospective customers/members/partners can be educated and the search engines can get busy referring traffic to your site? Some examples:
- A florist might blog about what types of floral arrangements are appropriate for a wedding/funeral/baby shower/etc., how much one should expect to pay for flowers at a wedding/funeral/baby shower/etc., and how much in advance one needs to place an order.
- A pediatric orthodontist might have content about when a child needs braces, how much it generally costs, how long treatment takes, the different types of braces, talking to your child about braces, etc.
If You Invest in Content Marketing

According to Marcus, investing in content marketing has these benefits:
- Your company brand and voice will grow
- Sales cycles will go down
- Your prospects will solicit fewer competitive bids
- You will have stronger relationships with clients
- Certain individuals and talents within your staff will rise and shine
- Your team will grow stronger through the process of developing such great content
Marcus says “Content is the greatest sales and trust-building tool in the world. Period. End of story.” I have to agree.
September 11, 2013
What’s Really Behind Those Targeted Ads on Facebook?
I’m attending my high school reunion in a few weeks and I need a fabulous dress. So I’ve been spending time on various retailer sites to find the perfect outfit. Of course I visited Nordstrom.com and found some great dresses, including a stunning, little, black dress by Ralph Lauren. Imagine my surprise when I clicked over to Facebook.com and found a Nordstrom ad that featured the very dress I was looking at. I shrugged it off as coincidence; what retailer doesn’t advertise its fabulous black dresses?

A couple of days later, I found a gorgeous, purple dress on Nordstrom.com. Again, a Nordstrom ad on Facebook featured the exact same dress. Okay, now this can’t be coincidence. Purple, really? I had read about Facebook sharing cookies with retailers but I needed more info. We Facebook users have known for a while that any information we give to the social network can be used to send us targeted advertising. For a while, I was getting ads based on my age. Then I noticed that even my posts seemed to be getting indexed; I mentioned Downtown Abbey in a post; next thing I know, I’m getting an ad for a Downton Abbey-themed trip to England. It seems that earlier this year, Facebook branched out and expanded it advertising capabilities by merging its own data with data from third parties.
- Earlier this year, Facebook announced deals with Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom, consumer data companies, or companies that track consumer purchasing data from rewards cards, among other things. Facebook users are matched with data from these companies so that Facebook can present targeted ads. For example, if my Giant rewards card shows that I buy a lot of diapers, Facebook might show me ads for more diapers or other baby products.
- Through a partnership with BlueKai, retailers can add code to their websites to set cookies that Facebook can read. The cookies tell Facebook what you were looking at on the retailer site, for example, and display targeted ads based on your previous viewing history. (Aha! I bet this is what Nordstrom is using.)
- Last Fall, Facebook invited retailers to submit the email addresses of its customers. Facebook matched the emails against its database and then displayed ads on behalf of the retailers.
We all know this is going to get a lot worse. Facebook already knows who our friends area, where we go, what we watch, what we eat, who we love. If you’re creeped out by all this, what can you do?
- My friend and privacy expert Shaun Dakin recommends Abine, which lets you create disposable email addresses, phone numbers, and credit cards so that Facebook and retailers can’t match you based on your personal information.
- Matrix Group Network Administrator Rich Frangiamore recommends Ghostery, which is a browser plug-in that tells you about all the tracking elements on web pages that you visit. Ghostery also lets you block specific scripts.
- I like to browse in incognito mode in Chrome. When I do this, any cookies saved in my browser are deleted when I close my windows and pages I visit aren’t recorded in my browser history.
The thing about targeted ads is this: sometimes they feel creepy and an invasion of my privacy, while other times, I am grateful for the spot-on recommendations. I guess the trick for advertisers is to find the right balance so that customers like me welcome the personalization. What do you think of all this targeted advertising?
August 21, 2013
No Mobile Strategy? Your Website Could Face a Google Demotion!
Psst, want to know a secret? The world isn’t going mobile, it’s already mobile. Check out just a few statistics. In India, mobile traffic has surpassed desktop traffic. Google reports that 25% of paid search clicks are coming from mobile devices. The Pew Research Center reported this month that 34% of Americans aged 18 and older own a tablet computer.

So it came as no surprise to many of us when Google announced “Changes in rankings of smartphone search results.” In describing the most common configuration mistakes that companies make, Google let the world know that if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll get a demotion in search rankings. When you consider that mobile searches are an increasing percentage of total Google searches, and Google stays at the top of the search food chain by presenting good results, it makes sense that Google would demote sites that have faulty redirects, show blank mobile pages, aren’t optimized for a mobile device, etc.

In this article, Google describes the 3 ways to build smartphone-optimized websites: responsive design, serving different CSS based on the use agent (desktop, smartphone, etc.) and separate, mobile sites. It’s important to note that Google’s recommended configuration is responsive design. Why?
- Using a single URL for all content makes it easy for Google’s search algorithm to assign proper indexing properties for the content
- No redirects are needed
- Google crawlers need only visit a website once to index the content
Here at Matrix Group, nearly all of our designs and redesigns are responsive. We think it just make sense to change the user experience based on the visitor’s device. And because users never have to remember multiple URLs, visits across all types of devices are encouraged. In fact, across the board, we’ve seen mobile traffic to our client sites soar after the sites were redesigned and made responsive.

So, what’s your mobile strategy in 2013? And what are your plans for making your website responsive?
June 27, 2013
What Does It Mean to Have an Interactive Website?

Not so long ago, clients and prospects would call me and say, “Joanna, I want my website to be more interactive.” They wanted to move beyond a website that just had a lot of text to one where visitors could fill out online forms, make purchases online, register for meetings, etc. Today, I would say that an interactive website is one where:

Visitors can perform transactions via an online form. It’s 2013, we shouldn’t be asking our customers to download, print, fill out and mail/fax PDF forms.

Visitors can submit stories, photos, videos, comments, blogs. yada, yada. The most popular websites in the world are ones where users provide all the content. Shouldn’t YOU be harnessing the knowledge and experiences of your members?

Visitors can interact with the information and services that you offer. Let’s face it, interactive features like calculators, clickable maps and interactive timelines encourage exploration and suck us in because we get to control the experience and we’re rewarded with a little more data as we click, zoom, pan and swipe.

The content and experience is personalized based on demographics and history. I remember when Amazon first started offering recommendations; it was creepy. Today, I welcome the recommendations because they’re usually spot and they encourage us to explore authors, music and games that we would otherwise never be exposed to.

There is context-sensitive, user-friendly help. This help could take the form of a live chat feature, pop-up help screens and a helpful glossary.

Earlier this week, Matrix Group Creative Director Alex Pineda and I did a webinar on the “5 things you can do to make your website more interactive” and we touched on the tips and trends above. After conducting hundreds of user interviews, watching people test websites and hearing what users have to say about their wants and needs, it’s clear that the top websites are personalized and encourage exploration through a rich, immersive experience. Creating this type of experience is quite a challenge but it’s what our visitors want and expect.

June 5, 2013
How Can Your Organization Use Crowdsourcing To Increase Member and Customer Benefits?
My family went to New York for Spring Break. During the obligatory visit to the flagship FAO Schwarz store, my husband caved and bought our 8-year old a LEGO Minecraft kit. Don’t know about Minecraft? As far as I can tell, Minecraft is THE hot game for boys, who play it on computers, tablets and phones, basically any device they can get their hands on. Minecraft is a game that allows players to build anything out of blocks (buildings, lakes, plants, etc.). At night, the zombies come out so your house or castle better be safe. Anyway, back to my story. We shelled out $44 for a LEGO Minecraft that wasn’t designed by LEGO.

For the past few years, LEGO has been accepting models from amateurs through their Cuusoo crowdsourcing platform. The model is simple enough: anyone can build and share a model. If your model gets 10,000 supporters, LEGO HQ reviews it and decides if it should become an official product. If your model goes into production, you get 1% of total net sales. Is that crazy or what? LEGO has managed to tap into the creative consciousness of its loyal fan base, who will undoubtedly bring their knowledge and interests to LEGO, at nearly zero cost to LEGO. Think of the buzz that a new kit has already generated by the time it reaches 10,000 supporters. That’s 10,000 nearly guaranteed sales! More craziness: my 8-year old has already brought his Minecraft kit to school for show and tell and he’s made a YouTube video that will join the thousands of other YouTube videos on Minecraft.

The question is, how can non-manufacturers use crowdsourcing to generate new product ideas, generate customer and member love, and increase revenues? Here are some ideas:
- Many professional societies accepts submissions to speak at a conference. These submissions get reviewed and voted on by an elite panel of members. What if the society blew open the submission process and let the entire membership vote? The top submissions would then get to speak at the conference.
- How about a soliciting ideas for publications and research to be funded by your Foundation? And then let the membership vote and you fund the top vote getters.
- Want to connect with your members? Ask them what topics they’d like your CEO to address during a live chat or in blog posts, then get the membership to vote on the topics. Your CEO would then address the top topics during a meeting, call or in blog posts.
- Thinking about staff retention? Ask your staff for their best non-financial benefits and rewards and then get the entire staff to vote.
It’s easy to associate crowdsourcing with websites like KickStarter, where entrepreneurs submit their ideas and people support the ideas with their money. But I think crowdsourcing can be a powerful engagement tool for organizations of all sizes, in all industries.
April 3, 2013
How To Get Your Brand Pages Ready for the New Facebook News Feed
Earlier this month, Facebook announced that users’ home page will soon be transformed into a revamped newsfeed. If you’re the administrator for a brand page, here are some things you should know about the new News Feed.

Facebook Will Let Users Choose the Feeds They Want To See. Today, Facebook tries to guess what posts, images and links will most interest you. It’s called EdgeRank and it’s based on a complex algorithm that’s based on four factors: whether you’ve interacted with a friend or brand before (including frequency), other people’s reactions to a post (i.e., if lots of your friends are commenting on a post, chances are you’ll see that post in your feed), your interactions with posts of that type in the past (i.e., if you seem to like photos, you’ll see more photos), and whether or not a post has received complaints. With the new News Feed, Facebook will let you choose the feeds you want to see: Friends, Photos, Music, Following, Games, etc. So is EdgeRank dead? At least a few Facebook experts think so.

Images and Video Will Rule. The Facebook News Feed will be all about photos and videos. Newsfeed will be bursting with large images and videos, including videos from third party sites. As I’ve noted above, Facebook will let users view just photos from friends and pages they like. So what happens if your organization tends to post Facebook updates with no images? Your updates will probably be largely ignored. Bottom line: think big, bold images because they will dominate the News Feed.

Third Party Content Regains Status. If you’ve got great content on a blog, community site, YouTube, Pinterest or Instagram, for example, Facebook will let you feature those links and posts prominently, especially if they have nice images.

How to get ready for Newsfeed?
- Read more about the new Facebook News Feed
- Join the waiting list so you’ll be one of the first to get Newsfeed. Go here and scroll to the bottom of the page.
- Have a photo strategy for your website and your Facebook posts.
Are you ready for the new News Feed? It’s coming and you want to be sure that your followers continue to WANT to read your posts and allow your posts to be featured in their feeds.
March 20, 2013
Why Rebranding Is Really Hard and Takes a Really Long Time
A couple of days ago, a Matrix Group client, a major trade association was quoted in a a major news story. The news organization quoted a statistic that the association promotes through its website, about the benefits of working with its members. The trouble was this: the name of the organization was wrong in the news story. You see, the organization had rebranded with a new name five years ago, but the news story still used the old name. This, despite a major effort to educate the industry, the press, trade publications, yada, yada. Ugh.

For many years, I chaired a benefit auction for a local non-profit. The benefit was successful and well-known but one year, we were close to panic when ticket sales were much lower than anticipated. We quickly organized a phone campaign and found out something startling: many longtime benefit attendees did not recognize the name of the organization on the envelope. You see, the organization had rebranded with a new name three years earlier and we figured it was time to use the new name (on its own, without the “formerly” name) on the return address. Guess we were wrong.

These stories point to the difficulties and challenges associated with rebranding campaigns, especially campaigns that involve a name change. Most organizations do a fine job communicating the changes via their websites, letters, postcards, emails, email signatures, voice on hold messages, advertisements in trade publications, and on and on. Trouble is, people aren’t necessarily paying attention. The letter, ad or postcard doesn’t register until your customer, partners and prospects decide they want to interact with your organization, on their terms, on their timeline.

So what are the lessons here?
- Know that rebranding is a long-term effort, it’s going to require constant and intense communications, and some people are still going to miss the message.
- Use every communications vehicle possible to communicate the changes: website, email, letter, postcard, magazine article, magazine ad, banner ads, voice on hold message, email signature, video, news stories, etc.
- Renew the old domain name and point it to the new site for as long as you can bear.
- Make sure there are plenty of references to the old name on your website so that search engines will associate your new name with the old one.
- Keep reminding your audiences of the reasons for the rebranding and reinforce the new name and images.
How about you? Has your organization rebranded? What communications challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
March 7, 2013