Matrix Group International

Tag: Content Strategy

  • How Do You Create a 7-Star Member Journey? Lessons from Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb

    How Do You Create a 7-Star Member Journey? Lessons from Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb

    A couple of months ago, I listened to an interview with Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. Brian talked about how he and his team did a brainstorming exercise where they imagined what a 7-star, 10-star, even a 12-star experience on Airbnb would be like.

    Wait, aren’t star scales always five stars? What the heck is a 7-star or 10-star experience? That’s exactly what Brian and his team set out to explore. Some of their advice includes:
    • Talk to your customers. User feedback keeps you honest and helps prevent costly mistakes in product development that customers won’t want.
    • Ask your customers about the product or service of their dreams. Ask “what would it take for you to tell every person you know about this product?”
    • Imagine what a 1-star or 3-star experience looks like and then try not to create just a 3-star experience.
    • Imagine what a 10-star experience looks like. For example, a 10-star experience is a “Beatles experience” with hundreds of people waiting for your plane and tickets to the most exclusive restaurant in town.
    • Imagine what a mind-blowing, 10-star experience looks like and then talk to your staff and partners to see how much of that experience they can make happen.  

    In essence, you first need to design an extreme experience in order to scale back and create an amazing, affordable, possible experience.

    The next time you’re designing your website, store, conference or new member onboarding campaign, instead of designing just an acceptable and affordable, experience, trying imagining a 7-star experience and then see what’s possible.

  • Make These Your 2019 Resolutions for your Website and Web Marketing

    Make These Your 2019 Resolutions for your Website and Web Marketing

    strategy planning in notebookIt’s the start of a new year. Did you accomplish all of your digital goals from 2018? Did you complete every project? If you like Matrix Group, or most of my clients, you didn’t meet all of your goals, but you gave it a good try. As you ponder the new year, I hope you’ll think about adding these resolutions to your digital to do list for 2019.

    Evolve Your Website.

    If the idea of a full website redesign scares you, why not consider evolving your website instead? Here at Matrix Group, we tackle a section or feature of our website every quarter. We might redesign just one page, redo a form, or update the language on a bunch of pages. Last year, we:

    • Updated my blog home page
    • Updated our Contact Us form
    • Redesigned our Recent Projects page
    • Updated our presentation template
    • Refreshed our About Matrix Group blurb, and
    • Changed our webinars to have co-presenters from outside the company.

    Because we tackled these initiatives in pieces, it didn’t kill us and we got a lot done.

    Tidy Your Website Content.

    If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you know that two years ago, my husband and I read “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo. If you haven’t read the book, watch the show on Netflix. And this year, resolve to declutter your website so that only the content that will spark joy in your members and customers will be on your site AND your search will work better.

    Look at Your Analytics!

    I know, seems obvious, but many organizations don’t look at their analytics regularly. If you don’t, how do you know what content is connecting with your audiences? To get started, just do these three things:

    • Look at your analytics once a week
    • Never, ever send out a link without Google UTM codes so that traffic on your site can be attributed to your campaigns
    • Put in annotations and note when you send out mass emails, mailed out your magazine, or ran an AdWords campaign.

    Get Started with Marketing Automation.

    Marketing automation refers to software and technologies that automate the often repetitive tasks involved in cultivating prospective and current customers and members, and do it in a way that allows for personalization based on time, an individual’s demographics, and/or an individual’s actions. Marketing automation can be used to create personalized members journeys via email and on the web for new members, new primary contacts, prospective members, etc. If you’re not already using marketing automation in your organization, make this the year you explore how it can benefit you.

    Revamp Your Content.

    If your content strategy hasn’t changed in the last decade or even half decade, it’s time for an overhaul. Your customers are mobile, they are time constrained, they are busy, they are distracted, and what you’re offering is probably available for free somewhere on the web. Take one thing and redo it. Change the format of your webinars, rethink your e-newsletter strategy, convert text to video, consider a nano learning format, get rid of your paper directory.

    2019 is the year to test new ideas, be bold, and learn. What are YOU going to do differently in 2019?

  • What REALLY Matters for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

    What REALLY Matters for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

    I do a lot of SEO consulting for clients. Clients want to know: how to optimize their websites for Google, how to drive more organic traffic to their sites, and what keywords they should focus on for optimization.

    At Matrix Group, we spend a lot of time on the mechanics of our client sites so that search engines can easily find them and index content.

    But here’s the single, most important question I ask clients to ask themselves when developing their content and SEO strategy:

    What are people typing into Google where YOU and YOUR SITE are the answer?

    Because most people want to go direct to content AND because Google is so darn effective, a huge chunk of your members, customers and potential customers simply type a natural language query into Google. They will type questions like:

    When is the ABC conference?
    What do I need to do to become a ….?
    What is the best training for (fill in the blank) professionals?
    How many credits do I need to become a ….?
    How much does it cost to…?

    If you don’t know what your members and customers are typing into Google, find out by:

    • Looking at the incoming organic search terms driving traffic to your site. Most of this information is blocked by Google, but it’s worth looking to see what’s available in your Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
    • Looking at the search terms and phrases people type on your site search. If you aren’t logging this, start now and look at the report monthly.
    • Asking your customers what they typed into Google recently where they either expected to find a link on your site or expected a resource related to your profession or industry.
    • Going to https://trends.google.com and researching the top queries related to your business.

    Once you have a collection of these valuable search queries, make sure you have content (and lots of it) that matches those queries. Heck, you should be writing blog posts, news items and FAQs that perfectly match your most important queries.

    Yes, your website should also be mobile-friendly, be well structured, have clean CSS, have permalinks, have alt tags, yada, yada. But all of these technical requirements mean nothing if you don’t have the content your target audiences are looking for. Give it to them and make it easy for Google to match your content with your customers.

  • Tips for Increasing Email Deliverability

    Tips for Increasing Email Deliverability

    Guest post by Leah Monica, Director of Marketing

    Sending EmailsWe all constantly hear about email marketing best practices to help increase our open and click rates – subject lines, concise copy, clear calls-to-actions – but what good are those best practices if our emails aren’t even reaching your contacts’ inboxes?

    Why do your emails sometimes get blocked? Here’s a quick rundown on some things that can affect email delivery:

    Email delivery is best for personal emails sent from one person to another person. Not surprising, right? From there, delivery rates start to go down when you send to larger groups of people, specifically when you’re sending to 20+ individuals per email, or when you use any type of list or bulk email platform.

    On top of that, there are also a variety of filters that catch or reject mail, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s because people are marking your email as spam (more on that another time!), but sometimes corporate filters simply decide that too much mail has come from one particular group/IP and they cut it off for fear of spam or malicious intent. For example, if you sent a message to 100 people at one of your member companies, 20 of them may get it while 80 do not.

    So what can you do? Here are some immediate solutions that may help:

    • Ask your members to ask their IT groups to whitelist your organization, either by domain (including anything from any of your subdomains) or by IP address.
    • Remind your members to not mark your messages as spam or junk, but to simply unsubscribe or contact you if they want help getting off some of your lists.
    • Watch the amount of email you are sending out. Don’t make them want to press the ‘junk’ button. Also be careful not to make your subject lines sound spammy.
    • Beware of attachment sizes! Some corporate groups block emails with attachments as small as 5MB.

    One of our biggest tips is to have someone on staff look at your email delivery reports each week, and follow up on a few email addresses that are marked as hard or soft bounces. i.e., call that person or the primary contact of that organization, and confirm people/email addresses. This is also a good time to ask if they can whitelist you! A couple of our clients systematically do this, and they report it is a good way to chat with the members casually, in addition to keeping their database clean. Wins all around!

     

  • Does Your Website Need Web Push Notifications?

    Does Your Website Need Web Push Notifications?

    alert bell on desktop computerLet’s face it. As marketers, we’re always wondering how to reach more people, get more opens and clicks, drive traffic, and get more conversions.

    Mobile apps have been terrific at generating visits and conversions because of their ability to send push notifications to users. We’ve all gotten used to the notifications on our phone, as well as the numbers next to apps that tell us we’ve got announcements to read.

    What if you don’t have a mobile app? You can now use web push notifications to send reminders and announcements! How does it work?

    • Websites that have web push notifications ask you for permission to send you notifications when you visit the site. You can either accept or block notifications.
    • If you accept notifications, you’ll get little messages that pop-up in your browser when a new article, video or product has been posted AND notification has been enabled for that update.
    • You’ll get the notifications no matter what website you’re currently visiting at the time the notification goes out.

    To see web push notifications in action, visit www.fmi.org or my blog at TheMatrixFiles.net. If this is the first time you’ve visited the site, you’ll see a red bell icon in the bottom right corner. If you click it, you’ll be given the option to subscribe to browser notifications. It’s that easy!

    If you subscribe to notifications on my blog, you’ll get a reminder whenever we publish a new post, regardless of what site you’re surfing at the time. It’s remarkably effective and yet surprisingly not annoying. If you use Google Calendar, you can enable notifications via your browser so that Google can send you reminders about upcoming meetings.

    I see more websites employing web push notifications for these reasons:

    • They represent another way to get people to convert and give you permission to send them updates.
    • Web push notifications are easy to opt in to because they don’t require an email or contact information, just a click.
    • Subscribing and unsubscribing is very easy.
    • The notifications services can give you good analytics about number of subscribers, delivery and clicks.
    Here’s the bad news about web push notifications: they are not currently supported in IE or iOS. They are supported in Chrome, Safari and Firefox, so a good percentage of the web is covered. Apple has announced the web push notification support is in development and the same thing is likely happening at Microsoft with IE and Edge.

    Adding web push notifications to your site is inexpensive and easy to do. Contact my team if you want more info. I hope you’ll consider this valuable tool for reaching your target audiences.
  • The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Your Website: Keep Only What You Love

    The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Your Website: Keep Only What You Love

    I’ve blogged in the past about Marie Kondo’s best-selling book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Last year, my husband and I set about tidying our house, with great success. While I wouldn’t exactly call my house neat and sparse, I am definitely more in control of the clutter.

    So what’s all this got to do with your website?

    Marie Kondo’s number one rule for deciding whether to keep something is pretty simple: Does it spark joy? In other words, does that article of clothing, book, or memento spark joy and love?

    I think we can apply the same rule to the content on our websites. The next time you conduct a redesign, or engage in an inventory of your content, ask yourself this about each page and document:
    • Is this content signature content, or content that one should find at the top of a search results page?
    • Is this content that members most want to find?
    • Is this content valuable?
    • Is this content of interest to lots of people? or your most important audiences?
    If the answer is no to specific content, consider removing it from your site — forever. Removing clutter from your site has all kinds of benefits:
    • Your navigation will be easier to navigate
    • Your search will return fewer, higher quality results

    If you find that you just can’t part with content, move it to an offline archive. Monitor the amount of traffic to the old URL and track requests for the archived data. Just like the dress you haven’t worn in x months or years, once a certain amount of time has passed, you should consider that content permanently removed from your site. Remember that 20% of your website pages will drive 80% of overall traffic, so why not focus most of your attention on that 20% and make it great?

    Just as our homes suffer from clutter, so too, do our websites suffer from digital clutter. Make 2018 the year your clear your website of unnecessary content that just doesn’t spark joy.

     

  • What is GDPR and What Does it Mean for My Organization?

    What is GDPR and What Does it Mean for My Organization?

    Guest post by Tanya Kennedy Luminati, MatrixMaxx Product Manager

    There is a new acronym taking the world by storm right now: GDPR

    If you’re in Europe, you’ve probably heard of this. If you’re here in the United States, you may not have heard it … yet. But the concepts of Privacy and Security that it champions are moving to center stage all over the globe, so it is important we all pay attention and start our process shift now.

    What is GDPR?

    The nations of the European Union (EU) take privacy very seriously, and each country previously had its own laws. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was approved by the EU Parliament in 2016 in order to unify the various data privacy laws across Europe.  The EU has a dedicated website where you can read the full GDPR details, and it is quite a long read.

    Who does GDPR apply to?

    If you hold and process any Personally identifiable information (PII) in any of your systems for anyone living in the EU, this impacts you.

    PII is any data that can be used on its own or with other information to identify a particular individual: name, phone, email, address, etc. Processing is just about anything you do with that data. Any type of marketing, for example, is considered to be processing. The GDPR states that you can’t process PII data unless you have lawful grounds to do so. The GDPR affects your systems, your processes, your data, your customers/members, your 3rd party vendors, and your partners.

    Doesn’t GDPR only apply to European-based Companies?

    No. It applies to any organization offering goods/services to EU residents. The EU refers to this concept as Increased Territorial Scope (extraterritorial applicability).

    When do these new regulations go into effect?

    GDPR actually started 2 years ago. However, enforcement doesn’t begin until May 25, 2018. So as the humans we are, everyone has waited until the last minute to grasp these new regulations with both hands.

    What are the key facets of GDPR?

    You must have grounds for the lawful holding and processing of data. These include:

    • Consent
    • Fulfilment of a contract
    • Legal obligation
    • Necessary for interests of the individual or for the greater public good

    Consent is getting a great deal of attention as marketing now requires explicit “provable consent” in order to be considered lawful under the GDPR. For example, if you haven’t explicitly asked an EU resident in your database if they’d like to hear about some of your upcoming events, you probably can’t lawfully market to this person!

    Other important facets beyond the concept of lawful processing and consent include:

    • An individual may request access to all of their personal data. This may include any information stored in your main database, including contact information, login tracking, clickthrough tracking in a 3rd party marketing system, transaction data, etc.
    • An individual may request that their personal info be removed. (a.k.a. The Right to be Forgotten), meaning that they can request that their records be deleted or anonymized in such a way that it is no longer personally identifiable. (This includes data in backups and in any 3rd parties systems that may have acquired the data from you.)
    • Data Breach Notification to certain authorities and individuals within particular timeframes.

    Are Membership Organizations (Trade Associations, Professional Societies), Not-for-Profits, and Non-Profits exempt from GDRP?

    No. They are not exempt.

    But … Wouldn’t someone joining my association as a member be implicitly giving me lawful grounds to process their data?

    Not necessarily. If they join as a member, it would probably be lawful processing to send them a confirmation of their membership, but you can’t start marketing association products and services to them without consent. This is an area where a GPPR consultant could be useful to you, if you have a lot of EU residents in your data or you actively market/appeal to persons living in the EU.

    How is GDPR going to be enforced?

    The penalties and fines, which will kick in starting May 25, 2018, are steep. There are obvious ways that EU-based organizations and foreign organizations with EU locations can be penalized. The question of how external organizations will be held to GDPR compliance is being discussed in a variety of articles and posts.

    Next up, we’ll discuss how to become GDPR compliant. Stay tuned!

     

    This is the first of severalMatrix installments on GDPR, Privacy, and Security. Please note: we at Matrix are not lawyers or GDPR consults; do not take this info as absolute. Use this information as a starting point in:

    • Gathering the documentation, processes and tools you need to assess and support your obligations under GDPR
    • Planning for a future where respect privacy and security are implicitly baked into our all our processes and systems, regardless of country

     

  • A New CMS Won’t Fix Your Broken Web Strategy

    A New CMS Won’t Fix Your Broken Web Strategy

    I read a lot of RFPs (Requests For Proposals) for website redesigns, and I sit through a lot of demos and presentations. What strikes me is the number of projects where the focus is on the content management system, and not the goals and strategy of the project.

    Why do we have such an obsession with changing platforms and technology when a “website isn’t working?”

    I believe this is because we think the problem all along has been the platform. And I believe that in most cases, this approach is wrong.

    As a technology vendor and implementer of technologies and platforms, this thinking might seem counter-intuitive. But the truth is this: web content management systems have come a looooong way and most systems do more than any organization can ever hope to use. Yep, there are differences between WordPress, Sitefinity, Drupal, Sitecore and Ektron for sure, but today, I think these differences are at the margins.

    Ultimately, the things that really matter are the strategy behind the website redesign, the ability of an organization to rally behind the strategy, a solid implementation that includes lots of training, and the quality of the technology vendor.

    If your website isn’t working for your organization, investing in a new CMS with a fancy WYSIWYG editor, drag and drop interface and complicated workflow won’t’ solve your problems. They will help, for sure, but if your content strategy isn’t in place, if you don’t make a commitment to fabulous images, you don’t have a plan for marketing your site, you don’t measure results, and you don’t have the right team in place, you’ll be replacing that CMS in a few short years.

    BTW, don’t confuse my being CMS-agnostic with the idea that once you invest in a CMS, you can let it sit as is — forever. Content management systems must be upgraded on a regular basis so you have benefit of the latest security patches, new functionality, and vendor support. I tell clients to use the upgrade process as an opportunity to reevaluate their businesses processes, get staff trained and retrained, and make optimization tweaks to the website.

    The next time you find yourself saying, “our website sucks, we need a new CMS,” ask yourself this: Is it really the CMS or does your strategy, process and/or training need the reboot?

     

  • Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Page Reach

    Top 5 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Page Reach

    Have you noticed that the likes and interactions on your Facebook page are decreasing? If so, you’re not imagining it – organic reach on Facebook brand pages fell by 52% last year alone, and Facebook has even admitted that only about 16% of your fans see your updates. Yuck!

    Why is this happening? With an overwhelming amount of content being published to Facebook every second and a limited amount of real estate in each user’s News Feed, Facebook tries to tailor each individual’s feed to deliver what it believes to be the most relevant and interesting for that person. It’s not too surprising then to hear that Facebook prioritizes posts from the friends and family that you interact with the most, and posts from your friends that are linked with your interests. All of this to say, it’s now harder than ever for updates from brand pages to be prioritized and seen.

    In addition, Facebook is a business.  They’ve found that many brands are willing to pay to boost their posts in order to reach more people, providing Facebook with a nice little (ok, large) revenue stream.

    But what if your budget doesn’t support boosting Facebook posts? Don’t worry – it doesn’t mean that you can’t improve your reach without getting out your organization’s AmEx card. Here are five things you can do to improve your Facebook page, reach more people, and get more likes and comments, without spending a penny:

    1. Always include an image with your link posts. The best way to make sure your link shares are prioritized and seen is to include a large preview image (1200 x 630 for the best display on high-resolution devices). The Facebook algorithm demotes links with low resolution photos or links with no photo at all, meaning your fans will probably never see the shared content.
    2. Know what’s even better than images? Video! Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Wow! When uploading videos to Facebook, make sure that it’s an original video that you upload directly to Facebook, not a YouTube embed. Facebook prioritizes posts with native video that it can auto-play and caption.
    3. @ mention people and organizations. Get people to tag themselves in your updates. Doing this gives your post more velocity because they will show up on other people’s and organizations’ timelines and feeds. Plus, people get notified when they are @ mentioned and tend to like those posts.
    4. Be original and keep a dialogue going. When sharing posts from other people or other organizations, make sure you are including an original comment. Facebook likes to display posts that have been personalized in some way by the poster, that encourage new thought and dialogue. Also be sure to respond to comments and engage your audience, because this is social media, and consistent, thoughtful responses and dialogue is what will keep them coming back for more.
    5. Encourage direct visits to your Facebook page, and ask your fans to turn on notifications. Direct visits, or visits where people went to your page directly, and not in a feed, indicate special interest and affinity. When people do this, Facebook will tend to prioritize your posts for those people. Encourage direct visits by promoting your Facebook page and specific posts on your website and in emails. Also be sure to ask your fans to turn on notifications for your posts, and even to select “show first in news feed” under the follow options on your brand page, so they never miss a post.

    Bonus tip: Always keep a pulse on the social media and search algorithm updates, but don’t let them rule you. Test, tweak, and test again to see what works best for your organization and your audience.

  • How to Have a Really Great Search on Your Website

    How to Have a Really Great Search on Your Website

    We hear this a lot from people who manage websites and navigate websites, “the site search sucks!” So what can you do to make search not suck on your site?

    Here at Matrix Group, we believe a good site search is the result of many things:

    • Good search technology. There are many products on the market, from the free Google custom search, to the very pricey Google Search Appliance, to commercial products like SearchBlox and open source products like Solr and Lucene. Your vendor can help you navigate the products and find one that is right for you. We like SearchBlox and here’s my Director of Software Engineering on the many reasons why we prefer to implement SearchBlox these days.
    • Effective site search setup. I’m working with a client on a search project and here are just some of her organization’s requirements: she needs her search to index multiple websites, allow filtering of the results by category and source website, index members-only content, support featured results, and allow some content collections to be prioritized over others. A good search solution supports all of these requirements and more. A good search partner helps you develop effective requirements and can implement the solution properly.
    • Good, deep content. Our association and nonprofit clients rarely lack good content, but it is important to take stock of your content, archive what’s outdated or redundant, and keep only the best online. I ask clients to meet as an organization and come up with the topics that they want to be known for on the web, and then audit their content to see if they have ample content on that topic. For example, if I ran Worldchefs and I wanted my site to be known on the web as the place to go if you want to be a culinary chef, I would make sure we have the following types of content:
      • How to be a chef
      • The training you need to become a chef
      • How it takes to become a chef
      • Training for chefs
      • The qualities of a great chef
      • Are great chefs born or made?
      • Etc.
    • Good content preparation. It’s not enough to have good content. Your content has to be optimized for search. Here are some example of best practices: descriptive and unique title tags and H1 headlines on all pages, properties populated in PDF documents, all content available to be crawled, and categories populated and displayed on the page and in metadata.
    • A good understanding of what good search results look like. Sometimes, clients tell me their search sucks. So I ask them to give me examples of 20 searches that people conduct on their site and what great search results look like. If they can’t tell me, we work together to define it. Only then can we refine the search technology, weight the content, and customize the results for the best results.
    • Search analytics. How will you know that your site search is working (or not working?) if you don’t have good analytics? Did you even know that you can have search analytics? Here are some examples: you can track the volume of searches, the search terms being entered, the number of results, and so much more. If you have analytics, be sure to look regularly at what people are searching for and then conduct those searches yourself. Are the results what you expect and want visitors to see?

    My biggest concern with site search is that people complain a lot about it but organizations are rarely willing to invest the time and money to have a really great search. Search is undervalued in that way. I hope that with this post, more organizations understand what goes into having a really great search.