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About Us

We're very different. A Micro Digital Marketing Agency with experts dedicated to trade businesses. We work together and closely with your Marketing leadership.
Some dislike our direct approach. Clients love the results.
Search thinking is in everything we do.

People use Google to find what you have to offer (obviously).

We use data* to fix, improve and polish or even rebuild your website so it connects with those people through Ads or Organic SEO.

Your website should matter to those people, and as a result of that - it will seriously matter to you too. 

*Much of this data is thought of as hidden. It isn't. Our educational approach means that we help clients harness this data for their initial needs, and the benefit of your long-term goals of your Digital Marketing Strategy.

How do we do this?

Sometimes the most important thing we do is stick to the plan. Every client begins with a strategic plan. 

Clients are often their own worst enemies and like a magpie they want to go hunting for new shiny ideas. We focus on the plan, and we help you see why that step-by-step methodical approach works time and time again.

This is why being straightforward helpful and getting a reputation for being blunt adds so much value. 

Who are we?

We're a small team - about as small as we could be. There are currently just three specialists in the business. We are a Micro Digital Marketing Agency.

Matter Solutions has been 15+ people and growing to this size was exciting it did result in a diluted focus on outcome for clients. This caused Ben, our founder, some concern and stress. We hired business coaches, we used consultants, we changed systems and we hired a full-time Agile Coach - everything worked a little bit but the outcome wasn't ever quite as effective as it had been when we were just 3-5 really dedicated experts... so when COVID came knocking wiping out our biggest clients and we were already moving to a work-from-home model it made sense to restructure.

We're super-efficient. People with 5, 10 and 20 years of experience know how to get things done effectively and quickly and we identify and fix problems before they even arise. As they say, if you think hiring an expert is expensive try hiring an amateur.

How do you scale for large projects?

We plan work thoroughly to ensure that we don't take on too much work at once. The very first quarter or a quarter in which we're ramping up a campaign is the most time-intensive phase of a client for our team.

It is worth noting that we have years of experience using...

  1. Code. We use automation via Google Sheets and Google APIs to create custom data extracts to find patterns that indicate opportunities for our experts to review. 
  2. A dedicated offshore team. These team members rarely communicate directly with clients, they work with data extracts to add a human touch for our experts to review and determine the appropriate action. 
  3. Hiring skills. We're excellent at engaging the right contractor, at the right time, to get a specific aspect of the campaign attended to without perpetually carrying a salary.

 

Who do you get the best results for?

A good way to consider this is about the type of clients we take care of.

Small owner/manager businesses

70% of our clients are owner/manager "small" businesses, they range from a couple of people up to hundred-plus companies.

We're proud that they trust us to give them Digital Marketing guidance we know that they value Digital Marketing, they value a direct line to specialists instead of an army of account managers and customer service buffers.

We also know that many of them have been led on a merry dance by digital marketing partners of all kinds around Brisbane and beyond.

The campaigns we run for these clients usually have multiple threads and range from $10-50k per quarter including ad-spend.

Corporate Clients

The number of "corporate clients" we look after is lower than the number of small businesses but they spend considerably more on their campaigns, naturally. They enjoy the dedicated expertise of the same people who helped bring them onboard and spoke to them before engagement. We don't have a team of client winners and junior-do-ers. 

We've worked with (and still work with) some well known Aussie companies. Some are Australian Subsidiaries of Global Corporations who want a better (and local) option for high-quality digital marketing rather than working with the agencies that Head Office in Europe or the USA uses. 

Google Ads, SEO & Technical
Ben Maden MEng (Aero) MBA
Ben Maden
Strategist, Google Ads, SEO & Technical (Founder)
Ben Maden
Clarity - Results - educate
Free Resources
Ready to start?
contact us

The Team

Pippin - Head of Barketing

Pippin

Head of Barketing. Expert at wellness & W-A-L-K-S.
Victoria L

Victoria L

Client Director, Meta Ads & Project Management
Ben Maden (Google Ads)

Ben Maden

Strategist, Google Ads, SEO & Technical (Founder)

Our Values

Clarity

The catchcry of "radical transparency" was thrown around our office as far back as 2014 but we never quite managed to embrace it fully until we all started working from home in 2020.

Web Design & Development: Project boards are sharable with clients.

All areas: Shared Google Sheets are the mainstay of our working documents. These are all open for client access and review. 

Everything we have, you're welcome to see.

Results

Results, results, results!

(Yawn! Yes, of course you can read this on every agency's website).

Our clients, even the small ones, get the right metrics* for their campaigns so you can judge us on our ability to deliver real and lasting value. 

*Yes, that means we can customise your report at the start for the life of our campaign.

KPIs matter!

Educate

Our transparent approach often means there are questions. We help clients consider how much guidance & training they want for staff to go along with getting the work done.

We've been delivering digital marketing training since 2010 we've and have found that learning on actual campaigns is extremely valuable, this is especially true for Google Ads training and SEO training. 

Helping your staff to bake Search Thinking into your business can transform the way your operation sees its website.

We have some excellent FREE RESOURCES for anyone who wants to Learn Digital Marketing
Client Fit MAtters

Best Fit Clients

Clients LOVE TO WORK WITH

Client fit makes sense for us and for you. Here are some characteristics of the client's we've been able to help the most, and have fun doing so...

  • Clients who have a solid product or service offering.
  • Customers want/need the offering but they need help to connect.
  • Clients who value strategic thinking. 
  • Clients who want to build a solid long-term relationship. We know finding a good agency is tough but hopping from one agency to another is a bad sign.
  • You're looking to generate at least $350k-5M additional revenue over the next 12 months.
  • You're keen to get moving and have the resources to do so.

CLIENTS WE DON'T TAKE ON

There are some businesses that don't match the way we work. If you're on this list we're probably not able to take on your business.

  • If you're looking for code monkeys to just bodge together a website, that isn't us.
  • Clients who refuse to believe that websites and digital marketing can add value. Respectfully, when beliefs are firmly against the success of your own website (it happens) then it is a bad fit for us. We want to work efficiently and effectively and justifying every move, metric and moment is a tide we don't want to swim against.
  • If your business is on life support or worse. Last-gasp digital marketing isn't something we're able to offer.

Our History

April 2000 - Matter Solutions was founded to deliver first class websites.

2001 - Our website ranked #2 in Google for "London Web Design". This taught us that first class websites for clients needed more than just good coding, design and hosting.  They needed SEO, a term that wasn't even coined until 2004!

From these early days we did technical work on websites and link building to help client websites rank in Google, Altavista and even Yahoo.  It worked. Clients loved it and we grew and grew. 

2006 - Ben moved to Australia, kept most of his UK clients and when the 2008 GFC hit and Ben's first kid made working from home interesting so the focus became clients in Australia.

2010 - Addition of Google AdWords Management, complemented the "organic traffic" from SEO, with "paid traffic"

2012 - We created "Inbound Marketing" packages, these  were a mixture of SEO, Content Marketing and Facebook Marketing etc and became very popular especially with our B2B clients as the ways to buy and earn traffic widened.

These growth steps always revolved around providing clients with *first class websites* so in 2014-2015 we expanded the web team building a CSS framework (MatterKit) of our own and spending many years using and improving this in custom WordPress Website builds.

2014 Office in South Bank.

2016 We moved to a larger office in Fortitude Valley and continued to build upon our MatterKit framework which almost became a WordPress website that built WordPress websites! 

2019 we realised that ThemeBot needed a complete rewrite after WordPress changed everything with its release of Gutenberg.

2020 We were working toward Work From Home (WFH) for the entire team after a successful Pilot by a few key team members when COVID hit our biggest clients very hard. 

We downsized, switched to everyone working from home, and have been looking after existing clients and growing again since.

2021 is already full of interesting firsts. First major Laravel Web Development project approaching completion, first deployment of three WordPress websites built in parallel for a global corporate client. 

2022 has started strong with a growing portfolio of SEO campaigns, some of which are Whitelabel Campaigns for a managed IT Services provider and their clients in Sydney.

Want to get started?

If you like the idea of working with a small professional team send us an enquiry via our contact page to take the next step with a call and a meeting.

contact us
Ben Maden
STRATEGIST & Developer (founder)
Ben Maden MEng MBA
Company Founded
April 2000

Testimonials

Katrina Locke - Strategic Manager at Ontex Healthcare

Ontex has worked with Matter Solutions since 2014, and I have been involved since 2016; with the last year escalating our investment in digital projects.

The Matter team has been a critical resource to advance our custom Laravel platform and marketing activities; shifting our organization from minimal digital exposure to improving our digital performance ten fold to effectively compete in our strategic market.

By approaching our project work through a phased approach, we have been able to launch a number of successful initiatives through Matter Solutions which have exceeded project requirements at local and global levels through delivering not just on timelines and budget, but also the features and level of creativity expected.

This company is more than a typical digital agency - they act as true partners to your organization. 

This professional organization will work to your requirements and act proactively, suggesting best methods and not afraid to steer you in the right direction. 

I cannot recommend Ben, Victoria and the team highly enough.

Nick Moller - ADF Mentors

Their communication is outstanding and the end product was remarkable.

Elijah Bates - Formerly WestPac, now at Google

Ben is an articulate and intelligent speaker. I can't recommend him highly enough. I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation style and how he can provide tangible examples to real world problems. 

His engineering background gives him a platform to logically problem solve and find solutions for business problems.
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