• Why SEO is Important to Public Relations (SEO for PR)

    Why SEO is Important to Public Relations (SEO for PR)

    SEO has been a well-established practice for many years, yet it remains a mystery even to those thoroughly steeped in the art and science of promotion. This is a problem because the absence of SEO can negatively impact otherwise well-thought-out sales strategies, marketing campaigns, and even brand positioning. With every day that passes, it becomes more and more important for public relations pros to understand the significance SEO carries in crafting a smart strategy.

    First, some basics.

    What is SEO?

    SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of increasing content’s visibility with search engines (e.g. Google and Bing) through efforts like incorporating relevant keywords into content, writing descriptive metadata, tagging images, and much more.

    Why should marketers and PR pros care?

    Optimizing content for search engines increases visibility, thus increasing the number of people exposed to your messages – i.e. the most important thing we do.

    “Content”, by the way, is anything you’ve designed to be seen by your target audiences. Your website, your whitepapers, your press releases, your social media channels, your thought leadership articles, your webinars – everything that requires a description, be it a handful of tags or a boatload of text, will benefit from being optimized for search.

    If what you’re saying now is “But what does that actually get me in the end?”, consider key learnings like:

    When a question or need arises, our phones are far and away our most trusted resource, with 96% of people using a smartphone to get things done.

    To meet these needs, people are at least twice as likely to use search than other online or offline sources such as store visits or social media. Not only is search the most used resource, it’s the resource 87% of people turn to first. 

    think with Google, September 2016

    And if what you’re saying now is…

    “But I’m not an SEO expert. How am I supposed to help with any of this?”

    Here’s your answer:

    • Bulleted text. Breaking up text into bullets and numbers makes it easier to read. The longer your audience spends on your content (i.e. the better the user experience), the better it will rank in search results.
    • Keywords/keyphrases. At the start of any PR program, you should decide on the keywords, keyphrases and topics that are most relevant to your brand. Their relevancy is determined partly by how you want to describe your brand, partly by how your direct competitors describe themselves, and partly by the specific terms your target audiences are using when they search for the products and services you provide. Make sure your content thoroughly (but not obnoxiously) incorporates the terms you’ve deemed important to your positioning.
    • Links/backlinks. Search engines decide content’s value by the number of outside sites linking to it. If you want your content to perform better in search, make sure your various online properties, social channels and media friendlies link to it as much as possible.
    • Descriptive anchor text. Search engines pay attention to the specific text you use when you hyperlink to outside content. As always, they’re looking for keywords, so be descriptive. “Click here” is wrong. “Read our latest eBook, Why SEO is Important to PR, by Matter Communications” is right.
    • Image titles. Surprise! The file names of the images you use are important to SEO. Just like with anchor text, make sure the file names of the images you use online are descriptive and use hyphens, not underscores. “Why_SEO_is_Important_to_PR.jpg” is wrong, and for that matter, so is “pic for blog thing.jpg”. “Why-SEO-is-Important-to-PR.jpg” is right.
    • Social Media channels. Remember the rule about how everything that requires a description will benefit from SEO? Social profiles are no exception. Make sure they feature keywords and appropriate links, and keep your activity up so the channels steadily grow over time. Engagement, however, is absolutely paramount. The more people you have engaging with your content – liking, sharing, commenting – the farther your content spreads, and the more links you have telling search engines that your content is valuable.

    As you can see, there are a lot of little things we can all do to positively influence the visibility of the content we write, place and promote. You may now go forth, and optimize.

    If your curiosity is decidedly piqued, however, remember that some very knowledgeable, very talkative PR and SEO people are just an email away.

    How do PR and SEO work together?

    PR and SEO work together by creating high-quality, newsworthy content that naturally attracts backlinks from authoritative media outlets and industry publications, which signals credibility to search engines and improves organic rankings. PR efforts amplify content visibility through media placements, social engagement, and brand mentions, while SEO ensures that content is optimized with relevant keywords and technical elements so it can be easily discovered by target audiences searching for related topics.

    How can PR and SEO teams integrate for maximum impact?

    PR and SEO teams can integrate by using keyword research from the SEO team to inform media pitches and thought leadership content. PR teams should target topics that audiences are actively searching for while securing high-authority backlinks from media placements that boost search rankings. Additionally, PR amplifies SEO-optimized content through earned media coverage, social engagement, and brand mentions, creating a unified strategy where PR drives awareness and credibility while SEO capitalizes on that interest through organic search visibility.

    What’s a common misconception about SEO that PR teams often (incorrectly) assume?

    A common misconception PR teams often (incorrectly) assume is that acquiring a high quantity of backlinks from any source will automatically and instantly boost SEO rankings. You have to focus on those tier 1 (Forbes, FastCompany, Fortune) and tier 2 (niche publications- think like https://www.printweek.com/ for printing companies) to boost rankings, visibility, and domain authority. In addition PR links, natural links like directories, partner businesses, and blogs from other websites should be monitored and pursued (when appropriate) by your search team.

    Vanessa Boynton

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  • DIY SEO – Four Easy Steps you can take to improve your Search Engine Visibility

    DIY SEO – Four Easy Steps you can take to improve your Search Engine Visibility

    Search Engine Optimization [SEO], is one of the best free marketing channels for any small or medium-sized business. If you’re anything like 89% of typical consumers, chances are that your buyer journey begins with a search, whether that be on Google, Amazon, or any other site that features a search engine. 

    Here at Matter, we provide enterprise-level search engine optimization and search engine marketing [SEM] (paid ads) to a variety of large and medium-sized businesses. That being said, we realize that there are plenty of small businesses and mom-and-pop operations that are just looking to do the legwork themselves. 

    DIY SEO is the process of improving your site’s organic search visibility without paying an agency or expensive SEO tools to do the job for you. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing SEO in-house, but it’s important to understand the basics so you’re making the most of your time and getting the results you’re looking for. As your marketing partner, we’ve provided you with a step-by-step guide to DIY SEO!

    Step 1: Keyword Research

    The first step of DIY SEO is determining what keyword you need to rank for. If your brand isn’t well known, you’ll have to rank for non-branded keywords, which are common tongue words and phrases that either describe what you do or how you do it. This should always start with a google search. 

    To find the best search terms, ask yourself a simple question: “If I were looking for this product or service, how would I search for it?” Search engines like Google and Yahoo have been widely utilized for over 20 years now, and most of us know exactly how to find a product especially if we’re knowledgeable about the subject. Trust that you know 

    You’ll notice that when you start to search for a term, your search term is appended with several variations. If you’re trying to rank for GRC, which stands for “Governance, Risk, and Compliance,” you won’t want to target that term directly. Instead play around with the search bar to find longer phrases since those are usually far easier to rank for. 

    Another useful way to find keywords is leveraging AI tools like Chat GPT and Google Gemini, with some prodding you can typically get some good ideas around more general subjects. In this instance we’ve asked Gemini “If you were looking for forensic engineering, what would you google search?” The original response was too broad, so we then asked it to be more specific. The results gave us some great ideas around some specific sub-services related to the parent topic:

    Step 2: On-Page and Off-Page SEO

    Once you’ve determined your subject and created your webpage, you’ll need to optimize it. Most Content Management Systems [CMS] like WordPress and Wix have SEO plugins that you can download for free, but it’s still good to know some basic best practices. 

    On-page SEO involves marking up the visible part of the webpage (the one you’re looking at now) to make sure that all of your target keywords are in the body text and you’re including them within your header tags. In this instance the, “Step 2: On-Page and Off-Page SEO” is one of our header tags because we believe that it’s one of the most important parts of DIY SEO- that’s the same type of process you should be thinking about when laying out pages. 

    Other on-page SEO best practices include:

    • Include your target keyword in the title 
    • Putting keyword related to your parent topics in the headers of your page
    • Using bulleted lists to make information more readable
    • Adding images and video content to make content more dynamic

    Off-page SEO deals directly with non-visible elements of the page. Within your page builder, you’ll typically see blank areas that talk about meta fields, local schema, social markup, etc… The most important thing to denote on these pages are the meta title (usually the same text as your regular title) and your meta description (a brief description of what a user can expect to find on the page if they’re looking at search results. Populating these fields with keywords is another great way to improve the rankings of your webpages. 

    The most important part of on-page SEO is content quality. Make sure, as you write the document, that the information you’re providing is helpful and digestible to a normal user. Google values websites that create helpful, reliable, people-first content, and automatically assigns higher rankings to sites that do so on a regular and consistent basis. 

    Other off-page SEO best practices include: 

    • Setting alt attributes to images to rank in Google image results
    • Setting schema (or structured data) on local, about, and other niche page types
    • Ensuring that your URL contains the keyword you want to rank for
    • Ensuring that meta data and URLs aren’t overly long and accurately convey what’s on the page

    Step 3: Local SEO

    If you’re a local business, you realize the importance of getting in front of the people in your area. One of the most effective tools to get in front of local audiences is through your Google Business Profile. 

    After following the instructions given via Google about how to claim your business, you’re ready to start optimizing. In this context more information is better; making sure your address is correct, business hours are updated, your asking your clients for reviews, and you accurately designating your service areas are all best practices. 

    Step 4: Technical SEO + Tracking

    Typically, Tech SEO issues only plague large sites, but it’s good to keep a pulse on both site performance and organic performance. We recommend Google Search Console as it only gives organic data rather than GA4’s all encompassing site traffic information. 

    Speaking about technical SEO specifically, the most important thing to keep an eye on are you core web vitals, which use a variety of different measurements to determine whether your URLs are good, need improvement, or are poor in terms of page performance. Normally, page-speed or page responsiveness will bring these KPI’s down and should be fixed by either minimizing large image files, and ensuring that your plugins are updated or you’re deleting the ones that aren’t currently used. 

    SEO is an ongoing process, but with these four key tips you’ll be ranking and generating traffic in no-time. If you need help with SEO or you’re looking to run some paid Google Ads, visit our SEO and SEM services page and take a look at our client success stories.

    Ethan Lyons

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  • How to Drive Your Business Forward with Data-Backed Intelligence

    How to Drive Your Business Forward with Data-Backed Intelligence

    In a Harvard Business Review Survey of 10,000 senior business leaders, 97 percent believe that being strategic is the leadership behavior most important to their organization’s success — yet 96 percent lack the time for it. We hear this firsthand from marketing leaders and their teams who struggle to step out of daily execution and into deep, strategic thinking to position themselves for long-term success. So what’s the best way to kickoff that moonshot marketing plan?  

    The answer is: data.  

    With this powerful tool, CMOs can help guide their brand to success using the roadmap of actionable insights developed by a team of strategists leveraging real-time customer, industry and competitor data. Sounds great! But before we begin the countdown to your brand’s ignition, let’s start with the basics. 

    What is data intelligence?

    According to Brandwatch, data intelligence, “enables organizations to adapt to a fast-changing world by connecting decision makers to strategic insights derived from a combination of real-time online data, customer data and marketing intelligence.” This means brands can gather information across all media publications, social media, blogs, forums, reviews and any other internet source, and turn this data into actionable insights that drive real business impact for their brand. Marketing intelligence gives brands a holistic approach, combining all key performance indicators across earned, owned and paid media to develop strategic, data-backed insights. 

    Why is a data-backed strategy so important?

    Basing strategy on data removes guess work — validating decision-making, yielding more successes, increasing program ROI and minimizing risk. 

    Data-backed strategies guide marketing teams on how best to optimize program ROI by consistently measuring against key KPIs. Data uncovered from intelligence programs can reveal how a company is positioned and where there are areas of opportunity. This concrete information grounds a strategy in truth, minimizing a company’s risk.  

    competitive landscape data

    In this industry, nothing is set it and forget it.

    The market and competitive landscape are constantly evolving, so it’s essential that strategies remain agile to ensure they’re resonating with your target audience, reaching KPIs and optimizing ROI. Every integrated marketing campaign, creative asset and tactical activation should be continuously analyzed, measured and adjusted to hit your indicators. An effective strategy and intelligence team knows how to act nimbly and shift budgets to maximize each tactic and boost every channel, ensuring the program continues to reach the client’s main goals. By constantly assessing campaign effectiveness and holistic business trends, brands can meet their goals in an efficient, affordable manner – no matter how the market evolves.

    trending hashtags across key brands

    Putting data intelligence to work

    Regardless of your vertical, your brand or your offerings, the marketplace is a maelstrom of competing brands struggling to stand out to an increasingly fractured audience. Whatever channels or tactics you turn to, you’re up against your direct business competitors and countless others to capture your audience’s attention and differentiate your brand. In today’s dynamic and ever-evolving landscape, brands are always looking for ways to remain nimble and align with messaging that captures their target’s attention. That’s why top brands across B2B and B2C are increasingly leveraging marketing intelligence to inform their strategies.

    Through foundational competitive research and continuous data analysis, strategies can be adapted, ensuring they are optimized against the competition. Whether making a micro adjustment to monthly or quarterly spend or a yearly modification to the plan, strategy and intelligence teams leverage data insights to ensure the brand’s goals are achieved. 

    audience entertainment data

    Here are the six ways decision makers are leveraging intelligence to drive real impact for their brands:

    • Brand Analysis: Glean critical insights about your brand and products from your target market. Quickly analyze brand sentiment and message penetration, evaluate top-branded mentions, and measure brand affinity to benchmark your brand’s overall health.
    • Competitive Analysis: Review competitive SOV broken down by channel and analyze key competitive messaging, positioning and campaigns, so you can develop a unique market position.
    • Communications + Crisis Management: Identify any major flash points, controversies or spikes in negative sentiment in real-time, so you can craft a response immediately and accurately measure its impact.
    • Campaign + Event Analysis: Evaluate sentiment around key events or activations; measure organic reach, conversation volume and buzz; and identify key media pickup, reach and impressions.
    • Target Audience Analysis: Identify the channels, websites and publications where your consumers talk about your brand and the industry. Identify key topics, keywords and hashtags relevant to your industry. Understand your target’s media consumption habits, wants, needs, as well as any myths and stigmas they hold about your brand or your industry.
    • Industry + Trend Analysis: Keep a pulse on key industry trends in real time; benchmark trends year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter to inform future campaign strategies; identify key influencers and authors in the space.
    target audience analysis data

    Strategies work best when they are constantly being optimized. Our intelligence programs give us a clear view of your company, the industry and your competitive set, so we can position your business to stand out in an ever-changing market. Whether it’s understanding the intricacies of your key personas, assessing public sentiment and conversation on industry topics, or uncovering emerging industry trends in real time, Matter’s highly knowledgeable Strategy + Intelligence team ensures every decision is data-driven to optimize ROI.

    With countless successful missions under our belt, leading B2B and B2C companies partner with us to plan, create, launch and optimize their campaign success.

    Interested in seeing how marketing intelligence can elevate your brand’s strategy? Check out our Intelligence page or reach out below to learn more.

    Matter

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  • 5 Ways to Take Your Email Strategy to the Next Level

    5 Ways to Take Your Email Strategy to the Next Level

    The reality is, most leads aren’t ready to buy the first time they interact with your brand. Buying cycles fluctuate among industries, services and products, which is why lead nurturing is such an essential part of your digital ecosystem. Email marketing is one of the fastest and most cost-effective forms of lead nurturing to date.

    To run an effective email marketing program, it’s important to make sure your organization is utilizing automation to its full potential. Understanding and implementing email best practices can significantly elevate your email strategy and deliver a clear ROI for your business.

    Whether it’s Constant Contact, Hubspot, Pardot or another email marketing system, segmenting and nurturing your leads with email workflows is a huge driver in building relationships and moving leads down the funnel. If you want customers to buy from you, you must stay top of mind by getting in front of them multiple times. 

    Here are the top 5 ways to ensure success: 

    1. Segment Your Audience’s List

    Segmenting your email lists allows you to develop targeted messaging for your audience personas. Marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns. Through segmentation, you can achieve high levels of personalization by collecting data on individuals who are interested in your product or service. 

    2. Focus on Personalization 

    In today’s marketing climate, the answer to delivering emails that successfully drive conversions and brand awareness is personalization. Start the email with a first name personalization token and use insights from behavioral or web analytics to customize the content throughout the email. You should also include personalization in the subject line, as it’s proven to increase open rates exponentially.

    Here are three different ways to use web insights and behaviors to segment and personalize your email communications to make your customers feel like you see them as a human and not a number:

    Demographics

    The first way marketers can segment emails is by using demographic data — such as age, gender, company position and income level — to tell you about a contact’s needs and interests. For example, if you’re hosting a local event in Boston and you know a segment of your audience lives in the city, you can target them with a specific email. Gather demographic information and behavior through forms on your website with tools like HubSpot or Mouseflow

    Email Engagement

    Email engagement is another easy way to segment your lists — and it can have a huge impact on your overall email campaigns results. 

    You can create a re-engagement email campaign for inactive users that can include a coupon or discount to get these contacts to re-engage, or you can create an email offering VIP access to products for users who consistently engage with emails. And in most email marketing platforms, you can create lists based on email marketing activity – last email open date, click date, etc.  

    email marketing lists

    Website Behavior

    Keeping track of a visitor’s website behavior is another simple way to get more information about visitor interest. Website behavior is an extremely powerful data set to utilize, and in some platforms, you can easily view a contact’s behavior on your site. 

    track website behavior

    You can trigger targeted email workflows based on a page view or specific form fields submitted by users: 

    • Individuals who visited one page but missed another related page 
    • What videos people watched or what buttons they clicked
    • Content they downloaded 

    3. Add Visuals to Your Emails

    While your emails should be informational, it’s important to provide as much information as you can through visuals — be they graphics, videos, infographics, gifs or images. 

    Most individuals skim through emails, so having visuals that will catch their eye and make them read the content is critical. The examples below show how updating an email with a few images, CTAs and graphics make a big difference in the overall look and feel of the email. 

    text email vs email with visuals

    4. Automate Your Email Campaigns

    Creating quality leads that convert prospects should be the main goal of any email marketing program. Automation helps move leads down the funnel and into various stages of the buying journey in a scalable way. 

    Automated emails help deliver consistent brand messaging at the right time for each individual. Effective automated campaigns help move people from awareness to consideration to the decision stage.  

    Some automated email workflows that work well for B2B and B2C organizations are: 

    • Welcome Workflow: A top-of-funnel workflow used to bring new leads into the funnel who may not be looking at specific products or services. Often triggered by a sign-up form on the homepage or highly trafficked webpage.
    • Abandon Cart Workflows: Used mainly in B2C to remind consumers they left an item in their cart, offering an incentive to purchase. 
    • Post-Purchase Workflow: Builds brand awareness and loyal customers through continuous engagement after users have purchased.

    Amongst these highly effective workflows, there are others — such as post-event, product-specific, industry-specific workflows — that all enable a strong email marketing program. 

    email workflow chart

    5. Test as Much as You Can

    Many email platforms allow you to test various parts of your email to understand which content resonates most with your audience. A/B testing subject lines can help increase open rates, while testing CTA buttons helps you to analyze what language made your readers click through. It’s essential to utilize data to continuously optimize and improve your email campaigns.  

    Ready to level up your email campaigns? Fill out the form below and our email experts will be in touch.

    Kendall Pope

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  • Marketing Jump Start, Part III: The Digital Buyer’s Journey

    Marketing Jump Start, Part III: The Digital Buyer’s Journey

    The buyer’s journey is the path consumers take to go from prospect to customer. In the age of digital expansion, your customers are using search engines, online content and social media to make informed decisions more than ever.  

    By understanding your customers and the path they take to purchase your product or services, you can better answer their questions and guide their journey at every stage to increase the chances of conversion. The buyer journey is complex, and it’s not always a straight path, so you must take care to consider each phase of the journey to better assist customers along the way, targeting them with the right messaging, content and education. 

    Actively nurturing your prospects and effectively utilizing digital channels will yield faster conversions.

    Persona Development

    Before you kick off planning your digital strategy around the buyer’s journey, persona development is essential. Taking the time to understand each audience segment – and their challenges – will help you understand how to match the right messaging and content to each phase of your customer’s journey. Making assumptions does not enable accuracy. The more precisely you can match your messaging and content to your customers’ needs, the faster they will move down the funnel.

    Understanding the Buyer’s Journey Phases

    Awareness Stage – Branding and Inspiration

    In the awareness stage, prospects understand their needs, but may not know your brand. This is the time to make your audience aware of your product or service. You need high-level content that introduces your brand and your suite of offerings, and informs consumers how you can address their pain points. Your brand should rank highly on search engines and have the right messaging to attract attention. 

    During this phase, you want to trigger interest and inspiration. So, use these tactics to put your brand on your audience segments’ radar:

    • Thought leadership content is essential and must offer interesting perspectives on topics your audience is interested in.
    • SEO/SEM ensures your website ranks when your segments are starting their research.
    • Digital advertising on key websites will keep your brand top-of-mind while your audience is researching.
    • Press releases and online media hits will help build brand awareness and validate your offerings.
    • Influencer marketing builds credibility, which goes a long way at every phase of the funnel.
    • Social media promotes thought leadership content and brand awareness posts to reinforce recognition.

    Consideration – Increase Brand Preference, Education and Trust

    During this phase, you want to increase consideration and education while building the trust of your audience segments. Your audience is continuing to research, validate and understand their choices, and how they compare with other brands. They are further defining what they need and vetting their options. It’s not just about selling and pushing your product/service offerings – it’s about providing answers to customer inquiries and validating your offerings through resources, educational content and targeted promotions. Key tactics to deploy include:

    • Supporting and validating informational content continues to be vital, and the content must match what your audience is looking for. To best help guide your audience during this stage, consider using easy-to-consume, educational content, such as webinars, blogs, eBooks, white papers, podcasts, videos and case studies.
    • Remarketing to your audience helps you stay on their radar by promoting supportive content once a prospect has visited your website.
    • Email marketing to support the journey is vital at this stage, as it helps nurture their decision-making process with personalized content and messaging.

    Conversion + Community Building – Getting Across the Finish Line and Growing the Relationship

    At this point in the journey, decisions and purchases are ready to be made. This is where promotions, such as coupons and special offers, are helpful for product sales with the primary intention of creating urgency and timeliness. For business-to-business offerings, you want to continue validating and adding credibility via additional case studies, demos and testimonials. 

    Once a purchase has been made, most businesses continue to build a relationship with their customers. Building brand loyalty and trust with continued marketing efforts, like email marketing and social media posts, are critical – and can lead to repeat purchases or referrals. In today’s competitive landscape, growing a relationship with your customer through continued content sharing and education will go a long way in keeping your brand top of mind.

    To see how these pieces work together with a strategically mapped-out plan, check out the below example of how a customer journey can be supported with digital tactics – following the consumer from awareness to brand loyalty.

    John Megna

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  • 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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  • Top 5 Ways to Build Your Digital Presence in the Cannabis Industry

    Top 5 Ways to Build Your Digital Presence in the Cannabis Industry

    It’s no secret that as more states legalize Cannabis here in the U.S., and other countries are embracing it as well, that there are hundreds if not thousands of new brands launching this year hoping to ride the wave of this red hot market. But to stand out and make a name for themselves, many of these startups don’t know where they should be investing first to elevate their brands and start spurring investment or sales.

    Although there are still restrictions on paid search and social as well as advertising for Cannabis companies, there are many ways to build a strong online presence. By acting now, you can ensure you start building awareness for your company and laying a strong foundation for the future.

    Build out your profile.

    While it may seem obvious, many organizations don’t full take advantage of all the ways to list their company and get better organic search results. For example, claim your Google and Bing listings and optimize them with as much information as possible about the company and executives; complete all contact info and add in compelling content such as photos. Do the same on reputable sites in the Cannabis industry such as Leafly and Ganjapreneur.

    Also, ensure your physical address is on all your web pages as well, and add a Google location map to your site. These may seem like simple aspects to add, but they are often overlooked.

    Content, content and more content.

    What are you offering that’s different or better? What is the real value and who is your target audience? It’s imperative to articulate your message and remain consistent across all your Owned channels, as well as any listings. Creating compelling content is crucial at this point and will only help boost your search results. Once you have your message, start a blog and be consistent.

    Also, look to related sites and publications to submit contributed content to sponsor. This will help drive traffic to your site as well as help to build your reputation in the Cannabis space. Another channel to explore is YouTube. By starting a channel and posting videos regularly, you can help drive even more clicks to your site.

    Reviews for your business.

    If you’re a retailer/dispensary especially, whether in CBD or marijuana, reviews are a great way to generate not only site visits but foot traffic. Encourage happy customers to post positive reviews on Google and Bing but also on apps such as WeedMaps and CBD Oil Maps, as well as websites like Leafly.

    Page titles and descriptions.

    To ensure searchers are getting the most relevant information to their search queries, keep page titles and meta descriptions optimized using relevant topic keywords and key phrases. Page titles are an accurate description of a page’s content or the topic that page covers, and they give the first impression to people about your brand and website, and can be used for social sharing as well. Descriptions allow you to capture your audience with a well optimized summary of the page’s topic and an enticing call to action.

    Take advantage of verified marijuana accounts.

    Although you cannot advertise on Facebook, the term marijuana has recently been allowed. It is now searchable and allows verified profiles to appear in search results for marijuana-related terms. This is a huge opportunity to take advantage of – and one way to do this is by finding those influencers and organizations who are verified and collaborating with them on different forms of content, from videos to blog posts, news articles and the like. This searchable content will help to drive brand awareness.

    Navigating the restrictions in Cannabis can be challenging. Why not tap a team of experts to help? Matter has a team dedicated to understanding the ins and outs of this industry and can help you build your presence no matter what stage of the process you may be in currently.

    Matter

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  • What’s New in the World of Social Media?

    What’s New in the World of Social Media?

    As our favorite month of fireworks and beach days comes to a close, we have to remember the ever-changing world of social media platforms. This past month, we saw quite a few updates that will impact day-to-day usage and long-term strategies. From WhatsApp to Facebook, here are the things you need to know in social news and updates.

    LinkedIn Adds Multi-Photo Post Capability

    LinkedIn iOS users can now share multiple photos in a single post and soon enough, Android users and desktop users will be able to do the same. As LinkedIn notes, there’s some nice opportunity here for social marketers to get more creative with company culture posts, scenes from industry events and more.

    WhatsApp Moving Towards Monetization?

    Since Facebook purchased WhatsApp in 2014, there hasn’t been much movement to make money off the messenger service, which counts more than 1 billion users around the world. According to Adweek, that may be starting to change based on a few recent job listings. The new postings are soliciting applications for a product manager, product marketing manager and public policy manager, all of which reference upcoming “monetization efforts.”

    Twitter Taking 10x the Action on Abusive Accounts

    According to Adweek, Twitter is making strides to make the platform a safer place with less harassment and toxicity. According to the VP of Engineering, Ed Ho, in 2017, the platform has taken action on ten times as many abusive accounts each day as it did last year. Twitter is also making it more difficult for repeat offenders to create new accounts and more.

    Facebook Removes Link Preview Edit Function

    As part of the ongoing efforts to tamp down on “fake news,” Facebook is changing the way that business pages (and everyone else) can publish links. Up to this point, it’s been possible – and highly advisable – to edit link posts before taking them live, because a more suitable photo or catchier headline often drives more clicks. Unfortunately, this functionality can also be used to create spam and misleading content, which is exactly what’s happened and what Facebook is trying to stop.

    Facebook To Add Subscription-Based News Service, Paywalls

    Facebook is set to start testing a subscription-based news product in October 2017. Publishers have long agitated for a paywall on Facebook so that they can make more money from their own reporting (and from Instant Articles in particular) when it’s viewed through the platform; now that 2,000 publishers have organized for antitrust action against Facebook and Google, the social platform appears ready to listen. According to The Street, the model will direct Facebook users to the publisher’s home page, where they can buy digital subscriptions, and emplace a 10-free-articles limit. Publishers will retain full control over whether to lock or unlock their articles.

    LinkedIn Adds New Notifications

    LinkedIn has added some new bells and whistles recently, including a Daily Rundown notification, a weekly update on how many other people found user profiles and new customization options for the feed. According to Adweek, these tweaks are all really aiming to do the same thing: getting users to spend more time on-site or in-app, and that’s been a major goal for LinkedIn during the past year or two.

    Facebook Testing Custom Audience Based on Instagram Business Profile Interactions

    As first reported by Adweek, Facebook is testing out the ability for advertisers to create a custom audience based on engagement with Instagram business profiles. Here’s an example of why this could be so helpful: let’s say the Boston Red Sox want to sell tickets for August home games. They could create some really cool posts on Instagram (say, a video of Jackie Bradley Jr. stealing a home run from Aaron Judge in absolutely heroic fashion) and then promote that for engagement. Tons of people will engage with that ad, and then the Sox could re-target those same users through the new custom audience parameter and drive them to the ticket landing page.

    How to Hide Inappropriate Comments on Instagram

    Pretty straightforward in terms of the functionality, but this sometimes flies under the radar. There’s an Instagram tab where you can control for nasty words/phrases, which is useful, because it allows social managers to screen out anything unwanted in advance. A piece by the Social Times gives a nice step-by-step, and there’s actually a custom keywords field as well, so if there are other phrases users would like to screen out, they can do so.

    Want to talk social for your business? Send us a note: http://live-matter-now.pantheonsite.io/company/contact/

    Matter

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  • Three Takeaways for Businesses to Succeed with Video in 2017

    Three Takeaways for Businesses to Succeed with Video in 2017

    Vidyard, a video platform that helps businesses host, manage and analyze their video content, just released their 2017 Video in Business Benchmarking report. These findings are based on “first-party data collected from the Vidyard video platform from more than 500 businesses and over 600 million video streams within the last twelve months.” For those decision makers and digital marketers looking to move the needle with video in 2017, here are three key takeaways:

    1. VIDEO QUANTITY

    • On average, businesses on Vidyard have just shy of 300 videos in their library
    • The average number of videos published by businesses each month is 18
    • The most common videos produced are Explainers, Product Demos, How-Tos, and Testimonials.

    For most businesses, 300 videos (or even 18) may seem like a lot. However, not every video is the professionally produced and polished video meant for the masses. Some are employee produced, some are webinars, some are short with a specific call-to-action for social. But the main takeaway is that businesses need to become well-versed in producing and publishing all types of video in 2017.

    /></p> <p><strong><span style=2. VIDEO LENGTH

    • The average video length is 8-minutes, but nearly 56% of all videos published in the last year are less than 2-minutes long
    • Videos under 90-seconds see an average retention rate of 53%
    • The average video retains 37% of viewers all the way to the end

    As a video producer helping businesses make 100s of videos every year, this all looks accurate. When consulting with clients, we say the ideal video length should be 60-90 seconds to equally ensure attention as well as tell an engaging story. The latter being the most important: a video should be long enough to make a point. That, and a video should showcase or explain a pain point or key takeaway as early as possible in the video to ensure everyone receives the message or sentiment – even those that drop-off half-way through viewing.

    /></p> <p><strong><span style=3. DISTRIBUTION

    • 78% of businesses using video use it on their website or product site
    • 72% of businesses using video use it on social

    Websites and social continue to be the most popular video distribution channels, but what’s most interesting is that 86% of business-related video is watched on a desktop and only 14% on mobile. I’m sure that statistic will change year over year as the demographics and technologies in the workforce evolve, but for now, this might impact decisions as to how a video is created and distributed.

    The most popular viewing time is Wednesday between 10AM-2PM EST. That’s right, the hump of the humpday. Additionally, “Wednesday outperforms all other days for almost every single time period throughout the day, and takes 18% of all video views throughout the week.” That said, this is likely a very saturated day of the week for video distribution. Maybe a good way to cut through the noise is to release your business’ videos on the weekend when there’s less competition for attention?

    /></p> <p><span style=CONCLUSION

    Industry research concludes 92% of respondents said that video is becoming more important to their marketing efforts. And more than two-thirds are increasing their budgets for digital and mobile video. Though I may be biased, this seems like a smart decision considering Vidyard notes “mass consumption by consumers is happening to the tune of 20+ billion video views per day across platforms like Facebook and YouTube. Brands are no longer asking if video is a worthwhile investment.”

     

    Sources:

    1. http://awesome.vidyard.com/rs/273-EQL-130/images/Video-in-Business-Benchmark-Report-2017.pdf
    2. https://www.newswhip.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/The-NewsWhip-State-of-Content-and-Social-Strategy-2016.pdf?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTW1Oak1qazRPVFJsWldRdyIsInQiOiJNNVhvZGxEbnJtNmNpek4yaWdRMWxVNm5PZk9uV0pwb2lTWlhlVHhGRVwvS1h3aHV4eUxaZmpYVFdEb2g2UENwckd2ZkNRU1wvWkN1THdTSEtHN2sxMXVNOHFnSjdLWm1IRGdGQk1TQWVMRmxvPSJ9
    3. https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/2016-IAB-Video-Ad-Spend-Study.pdf

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    Tim Bradley

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