• Marketing Jump Start Part II: Optimizing Your Digital Ecosystem

    Marketing Jump Start Part II: Optimizing Your Digital Ecosystem

    While the digital landscape has changed over the past few months, businesses are still looking to accomplish the same goals: generate leads/sales, drive awareness and/or engagement, and sustain or grow their leadership position. To do so, it’s imperative to focus holistically on optimizing your digital ecosystem. A consistent focus on the following programs will help your business continue to succeed: 

    • Optimize your website/landing pages. 
    • Consistently evaluate your paid, owned and earned media strategies. 
    • Nurture leads with effective email marketing/marketing automation strategies.

    When your digital ecosystem is a well-oiled machine, your marketing efforts will drive brand awareness and preference, as well as increased engagement and higher quality leads. 

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    Step 1: Optimizing Your Website/Landing Pages 

    Your media programs, social media channels and email marketing campaigns may be in good working order, but if you’re website isn’t functional or on-brand, you simply won’t succeed. At the center of a healthy digital ecosystem is a well-crafted company website. Here’s what you should focus on to ensure your website is ready to support your digital efforts: 

    Branding and Messaging:

    • Make sure your branding and messaging make sense. What is your website about? Does the tone and manner of the content match your brand? Is the brand identity consistent throughout the website? Is the design visually appealing, clean and straight-forward? Your brand positioning should be clear and obvious on your home page and your content should be easy to scan.

    Navigation & UX:

    • Do you have goals to track performance? What is each page trying to achieve based on your UX strategy? 
    • Keep your site or landing page’s main navigation simple and intuitive. Don’t get too carried away with bloated “mega-menu” designs unless they are necessary. Prioritize “above the fold” content that intrigues users to scroll down and further engage with your site. 
    • Make sure to incorporate CTAs to show the next steps. You want to take the user down a path that helps them make an informed decision. Be sure to add a CTA enticing visitors to follow your social networks, and include follow and share icons in header and footer. 
    • Don’t set it and forget it. Continuously test your homepage and be sure it’s helping you reach your goals.

    Search Engine Optimization:

    • Every page of your website is a potential search engine entry point, so assign a primary keyword topic to each. Placing that keyword in areas of emphasis like the title tag, main heading and even the URL helps Google identify the main topic. 
    • Don’t skimp on copy, especially for your most important or competitive keywords. Google typically won’t rank pages with “thin” content (one or two sentences) very highly. Images and video can help boost your standing, too. 
    • Mobile friendliness and page speed have become big parts of search algorithms. No matter how great your content is, if your webpage loads slowly on mobile devices, chances are Google won’t serve it up to searchers. 
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    Step 2: Evaluate Your Paid Media Strategies to Drive Traffic and General Leads 

    Consumer habits, business drivers and competitive landscapes have changed in this new business environment, so now is the time to reset or re-evaluate your existing digital programs to ensure you’re continuing to drive maximum effectiveness. Start by defining goals and budgets through one of these methods: 

    • Top down: What is my budget? At a reasonable cost per lead or cost per sale, what results am I likely to generate? 
    • Bottom up: What are my sales goals? At a reasonable cost per lead or cost per sale, what budget do I need to secure to reach these goals?
      • Next, identify your target segments and understand their media consumption habits and purchase influences. Detailed personas and journey mapping are the best practice tools for this job. 
      • Re-assess objectives, current results and KPI’s of all existing programs – The most effective way to evaluate your paid media campaigns are through the objectives set from launch. 
    • Consider or re-evaluate all valuable media vehicles – Aside from the traditional banner ads and search results, adjust to focus on high converting channels within your industry trends. 
    • Ensure you have relatable content that drives engagement – Providing viewers with valuable content in exchange for their information is a great way to drive traffic to your website and helps to generate more qualified leads. 
    • Utilize a dashboard that offers real-time results for consistent assessment – The most successful campaigns are the ones with eyes constantly on them. Evaluate, optimize and re-strategize based on the real-time results provided from dashboards. 
    • Consistently track and optimize until performance is steady – Digital campaigns need attention throughout each program. Weekly and sometimes daily changes are necessary to increase performance and stay on track to meet the established KPIs. Once a test channel is proven out, it can “graduate” to a proven place in your plan. 
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    Step 3: Are You Nurturing Leads with Emailing Marketing or Marketing Automation? 

    Whether it’s Constant Contact, HubSpot, Pardot or another email marketing system, strategically tracking and segmenting your leads with a nurture strategy is a huge driver in building relationships with your prospects and moving leads down the funnel. Here are five steps to ensuring a successful start: 

    • Attract: Capture leads with a compelling and concise lead capture form that is personalized enough to sustain interest 
    • Personalize: Promote an offer or content that is attractive enough to motivate your customer segments. 
    • Engage: Create a workflow strategy for each segment that will nurture the relationship and drive prospects down the funnel. 
    • Create: Design and develop emails that are attractive and well-crafted, utilizing graphics and imagery where possible. 
    • Test: Once you’re up and running, continue to optimize your strategy! 

    Is your digital marketing ecosystem driving high quality leads? Fill out the form below and let’s talk about what optimizations you can make today.

    Jeff Tahnk

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  • Finding Your Corporate Social Voice

    Finding Your Corporate Social Voice

    I’m sure you’ve researched successful corporate social accounts, and discovered some fun ones. There are many round ups that include memorable content such as Taco Bell (@tacobell) and its sassy comebacks, clever retweets and witty banter. While the fast food chain has seen incredible success, as HuffPost says, “Whoever runs Taco Bell’s Twitter account deserves a raise,” the same approach wouldn’t work for a B2B enterprise technology company or a medical device manufacturer.

    This doesn’t mean your social accounts need to be boring. A B2B brand that immediately comes to mind when thinking of successful social voice is IBM (@IBM). The company keeps things conversational and creative with language and images, all while maintaining its serious position as a thought leader in enterprise technology. Social media has become an incredible marketing tool for every kind of business, allowing gained visibility and traction with potential clients and employees too. To implement a successful corporate social media program, first identify your social voice, from there strike the right balance in the tone of each social post, thereby elevating your brand to new levels.

     

    Finding your voice and sticking to it

    Something as simple as posting one semi-controversial tweet or using a hashtag incorrectly can damage your brand’s image. This is why it is important to determine your voice before you begin. When identifying your company’s social voice, think about what personality you’d like your brand to be remembered for. Is it professional? Or approachable, energetic, humorous? Deciding your voice can go a long way in determining how you craft your content. If you don’t decide up front and begin posting without a voice in mind, your social may seem disjointed, and in turn less human.

    To discover your company’s voice, ask the right questions. What makes your company different from your competitors? Highlight that. What is your company’s mission or values? Highlight them. What is the tone of past content your company has produced, e.g. a blog or ad? Utilize it. Who is this content for? Tailor to that audience. Are there other companies you’d like to align with? Emulate their social accounts without copying them. Your voice should be authentic and consistent with the goals of your program.

    From there, you can decide the appropriate tone to take by looking at your target audience, content and goal for each post, as well as the social channel.

     

    Who’s going to be using that hashtag you spent hours brainstorming?

    It’s important to identify your current audience, but also who you’d like to gain as followers. Strike a balance; you want your natural audience to get excited about the content that you’re sharing, but you also want to make sure you’re sharing the type of content that will attract new followers to help your brand grow and succeed. It’s important to regularly monitor any feedback, negative or positive, and adjust on a timely basis. If you’re professional and informative  thought leadership posts are receiving more engagement than your goofy, happy-hour staff pictures, adjust accordingly, all while keeping in mind that each type of post can perform significantly differently on different channels.

    As a rule of thumb, Facebook and Instagram tend to lean more toward employee engagement and lighter company culture and recruitment subjects. LinkedIn tends to be more thought leadership, professional content, and Twitter lies somewhere in between. While the content and tone may be different for all three, maintaining the same voice (personality!) across accounts is key for a cohesive brand story.

     

    Want to learn more about creating a successful social media program? Check us out here.

    Matter

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  • Everybody Grab Your Brand Buddy

    If any one word could lay claim to the zeitgeist of the last decade, it’s “community”. Obviously “community” has been a core driver of human behavior for millennia, but the past ten years have championed the term as the essence of not only how we market ourselves, but how we operate our businesses. As of a few years ago, it stopped being enough to have a good product; you also had demonstrate how your product, or your profits, benefited the community at large.

    This can be an overwhelming idea to startups or brands in crisis, who often suffer from a lack of exposure (or worse yet, an abundance of negative opinions). How are they supposed to break through the gut-wrenching, face-melting din of modern media and transform into an instinctual, essential part of customers’ daily lives?

    I’ll tell you what: you’ll get there a lot faster if you stop thinking about “community” and start thinking about “collaboration”. Having a good product and community benefit at heart isn’t the secret anymore; you have to demonstrate how your brand fits alongside the brands that have already established themselves with your audience and can draw a clear line between the product they offer and the betterment of mankind. So how do you find them?

    1. Build a customer profile. Build several, for that matter. Marketing, advertising and PR agencies have been doing this for decades, and there’s a damn good reason for it. Building a profile for your ideal customer allows you to envision the nuances of their daily lives, including the types of brands that are so essential they’ve basically become thoughtless reflexes. Your goal is to be so well-known that no one thinks about you at all.
    2. Figure out why their chosen brands are essential. For many of them, the reasons may be far from practical. Dive deep into your lizard brain and analyze how the brands in your daily life deliver comfort and validation. Understanding your customers’ emotional needs will make it easier to see how your product, service or idea can double-down on the real, intangible benefits those other brands deliver.
    3. Realize that it’s 2016 and brands = media. That means thinking like a journalist. Brands used to live entirely at the mercy of the media and what it chose to expose, but now the relationship is different. Brands’ best shot for long-term exposure is collaboration with media to produce meaningful content, hence the meteoric rise of guest columns, sponsored posts, brand journalism and content marketing. While you’re thinking about the brands your customers consider essential to daily life, explore which media they consider essential too. Consider that media relationships are the brand relationships you covet, and thus, the onus is on you to create the informed, unbiased, interactive content – with input from independent influencers – that media will want to provide to readers.
    4. Read their quarterly and annual reports. I don’t care how you feel about 30 pages of pie charts and long-winded mission statements. These reports not only deliver much of the transparency that millennials and entrepreneurs crave, they give you an immediate idea about where the brand is expected to go, and how it plans to fit in customers’ ecosystems, now and in the future. You’re not looking for a firework. You’re looking for a satellite.

    Successful brand partnerships are now a critical part of strategic exposure and long-term business growth. They don’t just burgeon one-off ideas – they establish positive associations, pool resources and allow brands to continuously learn from each other. If you’re looking to get your business off the ground, make sure at least one member of your team is dedicated to exploring partnerships, not just investors, with great potential. Too short on time? Here’s a partnership to kick things off.

    Vanessa Boynton

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  • Becoming A "Love" Brand

    We are surrounded by brands everyday, from function to indulgence.  Some we hardly think about, others we choose to become part of their tribal following, but what sets a brand apart, and makes it a “love” brand? We all have brands that we use because they have a connection to us and reflect who we are or want to be. While some of these brands are just small attributes of who we are, the connection is distinct.

    Let’s take a look at some of the most successful brands that are universal beacons in their categories: Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple, Starbucks. Yes, they all have consistent brand colors, a strong logo mark and great products, but so do many others that don’t rise to the same level of these examples.  What really separates these brands apart is they have created a lifestyle consumers want to associate themselves with.

    All of these examples go beyond the one dimensional logo and find white space within their brand experiences, whether it is walking through a glass paneled door greeted by a product guru, or waiting in line for 15 minutes to order a custom drink in a language you barely understand. When walking through those doors you become that sophisticated, stylish tech user that is carefree yet professional or a cultured, international beverage enthusiast. So when thinking about the brand, in addition to considering the musts,consistency, logo mark, marketing, etc., also consider the live experience that your consumer wants to be a part of. What do they want and how can you bring a “love” brand to life.

     

    Matter

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  • Target, Toys and the Art of Newsmaking

    “No news is good news.”

    You’d be hard-pressed to hear this uttered in any PR agency setting. It’s a perennial responsibility of agencies to portray clients as dynamic forces in their industries. If our client produces nothing but guitar picks, we’ll go hoarse cheering that this year they sold the MOST guitar picks, or that they’re the first company to produce picks from 100% post-consumer recycled content, or that their picks were used by 40% of performers at Bonnaroo. Pinpointing these interesting angles amongst a maelstrom of murky branding is one of the most rewarding parts of the job, and a non-negotiable skill when writing a good pitch.

    2015 is hardly over yet, but it has already given us some great examples of brands who have either spun no-news straw into gold, or made mountains of pointless molehills, depending on your perspective.

    This week, Target jumped into the fray with an announcement that toy aisle signage in their 1,799 (and counting) stores in the U.S. will drop gender-specific terminology. Essentially, the LEGO aisle will now read “Build Sets” instead of “Build Sets for Boys.” Aisle layout will remain unchanged, and no official statements as of this post suggest a disruption of the familiar but jarring line that bisects Nerf and Star Wars from nine aisles of retina-singeing hot pink Barbie displays. Business as usual, with a very slight change to aisle text.

    No big deal, right?

    It mightn’t have been. Instead, Target seized the opportunity to turn a potentially mundane policy shift into a cultural milestone, riding waves of both outrage and support into the various news and social media feeds of their audiences.

    The significance of aisle text for toys seems minimal. Glaring visual cues, colorful logos, and luring endcaps mean that if you’re at a big box store looking for a Bratz doll, you need only glance, reach out your hand, and pull one from the shelf. They’re easily-browsable by design.

    Dissection of store planograms aside, my point is that Target could have taken this bold step easily and quietly had they skipped the fanfare, removing gender references from signage without the majority of customers even noticing a difference. These types of aisle markers are updated regularly for a variety of innocuous reasons, typically with no notable impact on the shopping experience.

    In the land of big brands, however, “no notable impact” can spell a missed opportunity. Instead of the subtle approach, this week’s splashy announcement garnered exposure on national news outlets and across a variety of social platforms, awarding them a precious 24-hour reign over national conversations about corporate social voice, gender issues, childhood development, and a host of other hot-button topics. To say nothing of the politics of the decision, the communications strategy supporting the announcement is a shrewd, well-executed run at earned media exposure that communicates authentic and relevant thought leadership.

    TIME – Target Finally Listened to My Viral Tweet About Boys’ and Girls’ Toys

    LA Times – Target plays catch-up in removing gender-based toy labels

    Huffington Post – Target Angers Customers With Its Stores’ New Non-Gendered Policy

    The killing blow, whether intentional or by coincidence, is the timing. This family-oriented announcement preempts most competitors’ traditional back-to-school marketing. Old Navy might be pushing ads for discounted jeans to stock your scholastic wardrobe, but for the better part of a week, Target is dominating parents’ social media feeds, nightly news broadcasts, office breakroom discussions, or even a company blog (ahem) with relevant cultural dialog. Locking down that unfair share of voice is a big deal as families are planning back-to-school budgets, which rose 8% on average over last year.

    But what’s the risk to Target’s bottom line? Potentially, very little.

    Target’s ubiquity and all-in-one-shopping value proposition means that many folks vocally put off by the policy change will once again pass under one of 1,799 scarlet marquees once this story fades. Carts will swell with laundry detergent, dog food, Game of Thrones Blu Rays, and the seduction of instant retail gratification will win back all but the most irretrievably offended. In the short term, supporters of the decision will also see themselves philosophically aligned with the brand, and feel a twinge of pride the next time they swipe their credit card.

    My preceding speculation notwithstanding, there’s still a lot that marketing and communications professionals can glean from this announcement about the subtleties of positioning and newsmaking. And who better to learn from than a successful, high-visibility brand like Target?

    A few takeaways:

    • Interpret national trends and conversations through the lens of your brand, and hunt down relevant, timely entry points to make your mark.
    • Take risks, but calculate them. Boring companies don’t make news, but wild shots can take you beyond controlled controversy and into the danger zone.
    • Consumer brands are often made or broken over the emotional response they inspire in their base. Finding creative ways for audiences to identify with your brand’s voice is a frontier of consumer engagement that shouldn’t be ignored.

    A quick note: We work with a lot of big retailers and consumer brands, some of which have relationships with Target, so we’re always looking at their communications strategies with interest. The above reflects the perspective of this writer, and is in no way informed by proprietary knowledge of this or any other related brand.

    Matter

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  • In launch of #OneGoodReason, CVS demonstrates ‘3 Good Reasons’ we can all learn from them

    As you may have caught on the news on your drive in yesterday morning or throughout the day on Wednesday, it’s a big week for drugstore chain (and Matter client) CVS.

    Earlier this year CVS Caremark made a commitment to stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products at all CVS/pharmacy stores by October 1, 2014 – becoming the first national pharmacy to do so. Yesterday morning CVS officially ended tobacco sales in all CVS/pharmacy locations, one month earlier than expected. Additionally, the company announced it would change its corporate name from CVS Caremark to “CVS Health” – a name that better reflects the overall company’s purpose of helping customers on their path to better health. (The CVS/pharmacy name of its retail stores will remain the same.) As part of their planting a major stake in the ground and renewing their focus as a healthcare company first and foremost, CVS Health rolled out a smoking cessation program to help people kick the habit, with resources and services available at CVS/pharmacy and MinuteClinic locations nationwide, and also kicked off a social media movement (#OneGoodReason) with an event at Bryant Park in New York City, and a flurry of tweets and posts on Facebook that have captured the attention (and support) of movers and shakers ranging from celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, Senators Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein and Tom Harkin, actresses Rita Wilson and Josie Davis, model and activist Christy Turlington, and even First Lady Michelle Obama.

    Naturally, any time one of our clients is in the news for something positive that they are doing, it’s a proud day for Matter. The fact that we are fortunate enough to be a partner of theirs, helping to launch this milestone effort is frankly, a noteworthy milestone for us, as well – to be a part of something this huge in the national news landscape, helping to drive the social media and influencer outreach that is establishing the movement, is exactly the kind of work that we are all so passionate about here. That said, aside from the huge THANK YOU going out to those on our CVS team who have been working hard to make the initiative successful, what struck me most as I was traveling back from NYC last night is that there are so many great take-aways from this launch that really demonstrate why the leadership team at CVS is to be commended – and why they are such a terrific client we continue to learn from. So in a nod to their campaign (and fully recognizing this list could go on much longer), here are three good reasons why other brands and PR agencies should take a close look at what they are doing, and keep these best practices in mind:

    1. We’re all in this together: collaboration with multiple agencies and partners is key – and should be encouraged. It’s no secret that brands as large as CVS Health (and many much, much smaller) rely on multiple partners for multiple aspects of their business. As one partner who’s been working with the team at CVS for nearly a decade now on various public relations, blogger and social media programs, we have been lucky enough to brainstorm with a number of their other strategic partners – ad agencies, creative firms, branding experts and the like. What’s important to remember is that there’s no room for egos, and one of the things we’ve loved about working with CVS on major campaigns through the years is that we are given opportunities to work side-by-side with these other teams. At the end of the day, they “get it” – the best part of having more than one partner to turn to, is that they can all contribute together to sharing ideas and ultimately working with their internal team to bring fresh perspectives and past experiences to bear, so that as a collective team we can land on the best idea, that will get the best results, and execute it as well as possible.
    1. Being bold works, as long as you’re willing to stick with it. Whether it’s a serious issue you’re tackling, like CVS Health’s exit from the tobacco category, or a more playful marketing-focused initiative like the ExtraBucks MoneyTrashers campaign from a few years back, it’s important to approach each with an open mind and a willingness to take a very public stand and share the reasons behind why you are doing what you are doing. CVS has not been shy about making big moves and then sharing the reasons behind their decisions, and standing firm in their belief that they’re making the right decision, at the right time, for their brand (and for their business). Other brands should take this to heart. Accept that you might get criticism along with the praise, and that’s OK as long as you believe in what you are doing and have reasons to back up your choices. Because trust me – the world will hold you accountable, and reporters will ask tough questions! Of course, it’s icing on the cake when your reasons and decisions can be tied to a real, meaningful cause like this one is – these types of corporate action make it even a prouder moment for us to be partnered with a company that is doing good for the world while also doing good for their own business.
    1. The power of social media cannot be denied – but must be harnessed delicately. For about eight years now, PR professionals and marketers have been faced with the realization that social media has become an invaluable, tricky and powerful piece of the communications puzzle. But no matter how often we try, we cannot push a “Go viral!” button or guarantee that something will take off the way we want it to – or conversely, stay quiet if we wish it would be ignored. That’s why it is truly awe-inspiring to witness the power of social media in action and really understand how critical it is to approach this channel the right way. In this case, in launching #OneGoodReason it was important that, as a team, we tapped into the possibilities of social media in a way that was authentic and not self-aggrandizing. CVS (and we) wanted to encourage consumer participation in spreading the word and showing support for quitting smoking – not just patting ourselves on the back or making it all about what a smart move CVS is making. This issue is one that is very personal to people, and so part of the reason the launch has been so instantly successful and has inspired such a diverse group of people from all walks of life to take part is that we’re asking them to share those personal connections and stories, and using social media as a platform to elevate all of their individual voices. The heart of CVS’ campaign is to join together as a greater community with the greater goal of saying farewell to tobacco. And that’s something that many people want to be a part of.

    Not every brand will face a decision as momentous as the one CVS Health made this year. But every day, we are faced with opportunities to counsel our clients on how to approach their business decisions strategically and with a creative lens. I know I’ve learned a lot through our work with CVS – and I’m looking forward to continuing to learn from the bold moves and smart thinking from them, and from other brands, as well. The trick is taking those lessons learned, and applying them to future work…because ultimately, that’s what our clients expect from us.

     

    Matt Mendolera-Schamann

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