KKom Marketing Blog

KKom Marketing's blog contains a wide variety of critical marketing knowledge for small businesses.

K-Kom Marketing Values & Factors for Success

February 20, 2018 by K-Kom

Every business that wants to thrive for many years to come will do so more successfully if values and goals are clearly written and understood by everyone within the company. If everyone knows the real meaningful reasons behind why the business exists, it will provide added motivation and purpose to the work being done. When the people care, it shows through to customers and the community.

The people of K-Kom Marketing live and work by certain values and we keep a few important success factors in mind while we do what we do.

5 Factors for Success

1. Integrity

Always be honest. Period.

2. Discipline

Utilize and hone self-control.

3. Hard Work

Work, not necessarily harder, but better and more efficiently, and constantly gain new skills and improve existing abilities to be better this year than ever before.

4. Social Skills

Work easily (and pleasantly) with others while also effectively communicating. Take time to learn how to improve communication skills.

5. A Supportive Team

This is important at work, and especially at home. A supportive environment is crucial for anyone to do and be their best everyday.

9 Important Values for Marketing & Branding

Be Unique

Be somehow different from your competitors and make sure it’s in a way that is relevant and important to your clients.

Be Consistent

Do what you do, but be consistent about it. From service or product quality control to posting on social media, to customer service. Be that company that people can rely on in an unreliable world.

Be Focused

Determine the focus of your business, while not boxing yourself into a tiny niche without the ability to logically expand products or services later.

Have a Personality

There’s nothing worse than a business that is just that – a business – untouchable by customers and voiceless. If customers feel you’re above them or unreachable, all personal touch is gone and so is any reason to be loyal to your brand.

Be True to Yourself

Ie. what your company stands for. If you say one thing and do something contradictory to that, people will lose respect for your brand, see you as inconsistent and will more likely move on.

Respect Branding Boundaries

Don’t cross categories. Expand your products or services in a way that makes sense to the categories you’re most skilled in and which are most profitable.

Word of Mouth

No matter how much marketing you do, word of mouth will always bring in the best customers. People trust people more than businesses, especially if they’re people in their inner circle.

Be Committed

This applies to you as a business owner most, but also to your employees. You all need to be committed to the business, motivated, and excited to see your goals come to fruition.

Branding is Discipline Not a Science

Stick to your guns, especially if you know what you’re doing will work in the long run. If you’re tempted to take the business in a completely different direction, step back and think about it. Sometimes pivots are 100% necessary for a business’ survival, but changing an already successful business model can potentially destroy it.

Communication with Your Marketing Agency

February 6, 2018 by K-Kom

As a business owner, your schedule is probably usually packed full, which is why you’ve taken the time to hire a professional marketing agency to take care of that very vital portion of the business.

It can be extremely tempting to hand it over and not think about it after that. Unfortunately, this is not the path to increased success or a happy relationship with the people who are doing the marketing work! Perhaps you don’t quite know exactly what you need, but you do know there’s a problem and you need a solution.

The agency will provide a list of things they need from you, to do their job in the best possible way. Once you have a good flow, establish the information you’ll usually need to have ready for them and make sure to stay organized by having one delivery method to maintain maximum efficiency.

As an agency, it’s then our job to provide as much education as you would like, to take a bit of the mystery out of our process and ensure you’re reaching your business goals.

When you feel the efforts aren’t fulfilling your expectations, tell us. Ask how the problem can be solved so you can begin to form an idea of the tactics used to solve various issues.

At the beginning of a new project, there is more need for collaboration, and as we go along we come to a lesser and more consistent level of communication.

Here are some examples of things we will ask you for, and why.

Past Marketing

Tell us all the successes AND failures the business has experienced over the years in terms of marketing techniques and campaigns. In-house or other agencies, we want to know everything so we can start off on the right foot.

Current Goals

Clearly defining your business goals and explaining these to us is of utmost importance. If necessary, sit down before our meeting and decide what is most important for the future of the business and your brand marketing campaign.

We all need to be on the same page when it comes to expectations, timeline, short and long term targets. Without this insight, your campaigns might not run in the best possible way!

Content

You will hear us talk about content until your ears fall off. This is because it’s very high on the priority list of things your site needs to be visible to the right people on search engines. With our tools and resources, we can provide some content, competitor and industry insights for you, but no one knows your business better than you.

Initial Batch

Provide an initial batch of ideas and previous content as a starting point, things you’ve seen be successful and not so successful. Photos, videos, blogs, news articles, white papers, etc.

Continuous Flow

Think of Google as a big hungry AI robot that needs data to stay fed and happy, and if your site doesn’t provide this, it will bury you alive to make room for others that can provide it, are better quality, and fresher.

As your marketing agency, we are the robot feeders and once you give us a continuous flow of what’s happening in the business, new offerings, new team additions, industry trends, etc. you’ll be heading in the right direction!

Search Engines are Changing + New Google App

January 30, 2018 by K-Kom

Search engines are changing. SEO is not dead; it’s evolving with search. Google pushes updates out almost daily, and as the most advanced AI continues to learn and improve, the task of search engine optimization becomes more difficult. A few years ago, everyone could call themselves SEO experts, but those days are gone and with the changes comes the need to be better at marketing as a whole, which is not necessarily bad.

Search engines are forcing business owners and marketers to understand their target audiences at a deeper level than ever before, to answer tough questions that people want answered. If you can do that, your business will profit.

Thinking about the brand as a whole helps create a message that speaks to people in a more focused, and perhaps more human way.

What does it mean to think about brand as a whole?

What type of message and values do you want to be known for? Make this as clear as possible and find the best ways for your work to demonstrate this in a consistent way.

Consider the buyer’s journey:

Awareness: a prospect looks for a product or service based on their needs/wants. What kinds of questions are they asking themselves, and can you provide the answers?
Consideration: they do some research and discover your brand and competitors, considering all the possible choices. Do you stand out in significant and positive ways in the marketplace?
Decision: they determine which choice best suits their needs and make the purchase. Did they choose you, and if not, what are your competitors doing better?
Customer Loyalty: depending on your business, this could be the most important part. Have the resources and preparedness to offer your customers support, answer questions, and do whatever it takes to ensure their experience is superior to any of the others they could get in the market?

On that note, search engines are looking for positive signals about your brand from other people. This includes testimonials, comments, questions being answered, your content being shared by other businesses or individuals, etc.

On another note, because search engines like to see positive signals about your business, it’s fair to say they do not like to see negative signals. This can include a variety of things, but one which has not been proven yet, is negative brand mentions on the web. There have been instances where businesses had something negative happen that resulted in bad press, and coincidentally their rankings were affected negatively shortly thereafter. So if you’re getting bad reviews, take the time to follow up with those people and take care of their issues or misunderstandings (even better if this can be done online for others to see).

GOOGLE UPDATE: an app called Bulletin is in the works, for the purpose of publishing hyper-local news and community-focused content where it can be easily found, including on Google search results. This could be beneficial for uncovering events and stories that miss local press coverage. Learn more here

3 Big Corporate Blogging Mistakes

January 23, 2018 by K-Kom

Corporate blogging used to be far simpler than it was a few years ago. Posting a few tips or advice related to your niche was generally enough to increase traffic to your product or service website. Now it’s a lot more competitive.

To produce quality content, it’s often best to have a real understanding of the industry you’re writing about. Having that inside look is important for creating a unique edge and standing above the crowd of casual writers.

Corporate Blogging What Not to Do

Ignore SEO & Updates

Google is constantly making subtle and not-so-subtle changes to what they deem worthy of first page results vs what belongs somewhere in the ether. One mistake some businesses make when writing a blog, is wasting all that great content on another website, its own website, or a subdomain.

If that content isn’t on the main business website under its own link, it won’t get the same ranking credit as if were. Google will not associate the blog with your business as well or as easily if it’s not directly on your main website.

YES mybusiness.com/blog NO blog.mybusiness.com | randomwebsiteforblog.com

No Content / Keyword Strategy

As discussed in the previous corporate blogging post, having a keyword strategy is vital, not only for choosing pertinent topics to write about, but for knowing exactly what phrases people are searching online to include in the blog (and they may surprise you).

Letting Old Content Expire

Some old content, such as news related articles, will expire and that will be it. There are some that will remain relevant however, such as how-to articles and informational topics. Edit these once in awhile with industry changes, new key phrases, and any new details.

Failure to Promote

If you’re producing quality, share-worthy content, no one will find it for months unless you promote it.

Social Media – free and paid

Use social media to your advantage. Build communities on the major channels and post your content regularly. This is free, but there are also fantastic paid options.

Paid social ads are great for any business to utilize for consistent branding, increased sales, and sharing your products/services with new audiences with very specific targeting tools.

Email

Collecting website visitor’s email addresses is a popular strategy for building a list of relevant potential leads.

Do a guest blog once in awhile. This isn’t as popular as it once was, but there is still an opportunity to get in front of a large audience, or at least more people, if you build relationships with the right influencers.

Writing Irrelevant or Uninteresting Posts

People are not just going to automatically start reading the blog you spend hours and hours slaving over just because. This needs to be relevant to what they’re looking for, or at the very least, interesting.

Google also looks at how long your content is. BUT don’t write a bunch of filler. Make it long, make it valuable and make it accurate. Based on a study done with content ranking on Google, if you’re going to write something considered long-form, push for the 2,000 word barrier. Give your readers a really valuable article, and you’ll be much more likely to gain backlinks, which is a big factor in search ranking as well.

Remember one thing: content is a long term strategy – don’t give up too soon. Build your audience in the first year, by year two you should have a steady stream of traffic, and then by year three you should be generating business and quality leads.

If you’d like a professional marketing agency to save you time by handling your corporate blog, contact K-Kom and see what we can offer your business.

Corporate Blogging Best Practices Part 2

January 16, 2018 by K-Kom

In our previous post we started with developing personas for your blog audience, planning out content, and ways to do research that would help to round out your corporate blog strategy. Let’s continue the list into a few more areas which are also very important to ensure your blog is worth the time being put into it!

Corporate Blogging Best Practices

Answering Questions

In a B2B environment, often the purpose of blogs will be to answer questions. Broad questions, specific questions, frequently asked questions, etc. So where can you collect these?

Start with FAQs that have potential to be expanded with as many relevant details as possible. If you haven’t collected a list of these, think out of memory, and then go to your competitor’s websites and collect some from there.
Another way is to go into your Google Analytics account, browse through search queries people used to find your site, and use those that are already phrased as questions, or those that could be turned into questions. This is a great option since you’re collecting data right from your key audience.
Another option, if this is available to you, is to ask your clients directly what they would like to know more about, or what information would be helpful when purchasing your product/service, or after purchase.
Go to social media and industry forums and see what people are discussing. Feel free to chime in with answers if you can link it back to your business in a helpful way. Might as well build the brand while collecting keywords! Platforms to search on a regular basis: Twitter, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit.

Have a Consistent Voice

Building a brand requires consistency with action and consistency with voice. If a very clear message isn’t portrayed to your customers, you risk confusing them or worse, turning them away to your competitors. What your company stands for and what you sound like should be fluid with your products/services, and be unique while also making sense for your industry. If your audience is tech savvy, speak the tech language. If they expect a professional tone, deliver it.

Keep Old-But-Still-Relevant Content Updated

If you have some content that will be relevant for a few years or months, something that is more factual or how-to in nature (in comparison to a short-lived news topic), keep an eye on it and update it as industry trends and technology change.

Add new elements, including sub-topics, original photos, and if necessary revise the title.

Be Genuine

People know when you’re faking it and when you’re actually interested and excited about what you’re presenting. Bringing passion and feeling into your content, whatever it may be, is the crucial element in getting people to react and want to convert vs. thinking “so what?” and moving on.

How can you do this?

Highlight the whys behind the company mission. What is the big-picture reason for doing what you do? How are you making your little part of the world better? How are employees contributing, and how do they feel about it? Let them write or share their stories.

If you can’t think of anything, maybe now is the perfect time to start a community project and dedicate a portion of the blog or your YouTube channel to it.

Follow these steps, and the steps from the first corporate blog post, and you’ll be on your way to more loyal customers and better rankings in Google search results.

Short on time?

If you’re not ready to cut out the time it will take to maintain content on a consistent basis, talk to K-Kom about blog management. We’re here to offer our content services and help you grow your business!

Corporate Blogging Best Practices: Part 1

January 9, 2018 by K-Kom

What is a corporate blog?

Simply, this is a blog written and used by a business or organization to further its goals such as increasing sales and customer loyalty. According to a survey, websites that provide an active blog have 55% more traffic coming to their site.

But you can’t write just any old thing and expect people to come read it. The info you provide must be relevant to your industry, relevant to the people you want to reach, and useful (or entertaining depending on what you’re doing).

Corporate Blog Strategy

Here are the first 4 steps you can take to start a good corporate blog strategy that will be effective and worth your time.

Develop Personas

First thing’s first – who are you trying to appeal to? This comes down to who is buying from you. How could you enhance their experience to the point that they become a loyal customer, and where you win over the fence huggers?

Write characteristics of these personas down, and be specific. The better you can visualize your ideal customer, the better you can write to them and figure out what is really valuable to them.

Industry
Job position
Goals
Challenges, problems
Demographics
Location
- Geographic
- Online

The online location is very important. It’s a good idea to find some of these people online and see what they talk about, especially as it pertains to your business. What questions do they ask, what problems do they complain about? Are they on specific social media channels, industry forums, do they write blogs or comment on influencer blogs?

The point here is to develop relationships. It’s much easier to develop a real, trusting relationship when you know who you’re talking to right?

Create a Content Plan

It’s far better to start with the end in mind, or at least with a few months from now in mind. Throw all your initial thoughts and ideas into a spreadsheet, and start thinking about them and expanding into specific topics. Choose a few broad topics and narrow down each blog from there. Create a few series for things that require more explanation, and no need to be brief! Google ranks longer, quality content higher, just don’t start adding fluff. Search Google for a free template for an “editorial calendar” to help you get started.

Do Your Research

Writing things that people will find, and also find useful is obviously very important. So this is where you can start:

Keyword research: there are lots of tools and strategies out there for doing this. Start by searching on Google for the most common phrase you think people use to find your type of product or service. Scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the “suggested searches” and take note, especially phrases that would be perfect as blog topics by themselves. For example, the phrase “what is a corporate blog” is a word that is searched about 90 times per month across the US. That topic relates to the various topics covered in this blog, as well as a few other less-searched words such as “top corporate blog” (20 searches per month).
Competitor content: what are your competitors writing about, and what topics have been popular vs not so popular? Save time and learn from their mistakes.
Real data: have there been surveys or statistics calculated for your industry that are share-worthy? If possible, conduct your own research on something that hasn’t been covered properly, or not as well as you could do it.
Talk to the people: ask your customers outright what they want to know. Use frequently asked questions and expand them into full blogs if possible.

Top Successful Corporate Blogs

Here are a few great corporate blog examples you could potentially model yours off of.

Facebook – From corporate news, to questions like “is social media bad for us?”.
Signal vs Noise – Basecamp leaders write about design, business, and tech. B2B.
Mint Life – Financial planning.

If you would like someone to handle your blog management, K-Kom is here to offer our content services and help you grow your business!

SEO Content Strategy Tips to Massively Increase Website Visits

December 19, 2017 by K-Kom

Content strategy makes up a large portion of your SEO needs. The top three ranking factors as of today are reviews, links, and fresh, quality content. It might be tempting to throw together a few articles and share them on social media, but anyone (including your competitors) can do that just as easily. So planning out a strategic approach is not only important, it will set you apart from the crowd and place you as an expert in your chosen field.

A strategic content plan should start with:

Prioritizing topics and themes that will be easiest to rank for.
How best to link to other pages of your website within each blog article.
Using these topics as an opportunity to link to non-competing but respected individuals or companies and form relationships with these people.
Regular upkeep and maintenance of existing website content so it stays relevant.

Easy Keyword Ranking

First thing’s first – what topics do you want your blog or news section to cover? Write down as many ideas as you can to start. Then we will use some tools to determine where the best place to start is.

Using the Keyword Planner in Google AdWords, you can type in your first topic, and a list of related keywords will be generated. You’re looking for keywords or phrases that have a high search volume, will provide value to your audience, and have a low difficulty or competition rating. There is also a tool on SEMRush called “Keyword Difficulty” that can be used in the same way to find these “sweet spot” keywords.

You can also type them into Google yourself and see what businesses are ranking on page one. If you see nationally known brands, you’re going to have a tougher time than with keywords that have small or lesser-known companies on page one.

Internal Linking

As you write, it’s important to link to relevant pages within your website that talk about your products or services. The point of content is to eventually lead to more sales right? You don’t want to come across as pushy or salesy, but when it’s appropriate and makes sense, linking to those conversion pages is a must.

Content Layering

Another helpful strategy is to mix it up between very specific, niche topics and more broad topics that pertain to a larger audience while still being relevant. Other businesses will be able to link to your articles more easily if they’re not so niche, and this could set you up to expand your services down the road.

Is Your Topic Linkable?

Google sees websites as more trustworthy and as an authority when other websites link to them. So, putting content onto your website that people will like enough to share is something to always keep in mind.

Does your topic receive a good number of searches per month?
Do the top results have a lot of other sites linking to them? (if not, you probably won’t get much action either)
If they do, what kinds of sites are linking to them? Would those link to yours?

Another thing you can do is look at the top ranking articles, find one you know you can improve on with better formatting, photos, or new research, then contact the people who have already linked to similar content and see if they would be willing to link to yours.

Maintenance on Existing Content

Keeping your existing content updated and relevant can add major value to your website. Even going back and creating a video based on the same content can attract more people and links to your business.

To see this strategy in more detail, visit SearchEngineLand.com.

How to Improve SEO With a Blog

December 12, 2017 by K-Kom

First let’s answer an important question: what is a corporate blog, and why does it matter for your business?

Corporate Blog Definition

A corporate blog is essentially a blog (discussions or informational-type articles posted on a website) created by a business for the purpose of educating clients, other industry professionals, or describing products or services in more detail. This can also include:

Sharing new ideas for product use
Explaining the advantages of a service for a particular niche in your industry
& more…

Really, this blog can be whatever you want it to be, based on what you think your target audience would find the most value in.

If your corporation has a number of employees, a section of the blog can be dedicated to these people for purposes such as:

Strengthening your brand name and values
Achieving internal goals
Creating a better team atmosphere

Encourage comments, questions, suggestions, and transparency with problems to improve the business as a whole.

Why It Matters For Your Business

The main purpose for having and maintaining an active blog is to provide additional value to your target audience. Ideally then, this:

Creates more trust between you and potential clients
Builds a stronger level of customer loyalty
Positions your brand as an industry authority or expert
Gives your company a voice that humanizes communication, allowing you to be more in touch with your customers (especially for large businesses).

How to Improve Your SEO

To improve your website’s SEO (search engine optimization) / ranking on search engines, Google likes content. This includes written articles as well as photos and videos, amongst other possible formats. Really anything that you can provide that will give additional value (for free) is great to add to your website and share across social media, forums, other relevant websites, etc. Doing this on a regular basis (consistently) will give your website and brand name more credence in the robotic eyes of search engines, and you will begin to rank on search pages higher, and for more search terms.

When writing a blog, it’s good to have a photo every 350 words or so, to break it up and increase the attention spans of readers. Aim for 350 words at least, and if this isn’t possible, don’t go less than 250 unless of course adding to whatever you’ve written would be fluff or worthless (remember: quality, quality, quality). Conduct keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner and SEMRush on the particular topic you’re writing about, to incorporate specific phrases that are searched frequently by your target audience.

Some people like to think of their website as a “once and done” sort of project, but unfortunately it’s not that easy. The website is often the first impression a potential customer has of your brand. It’s like a store which requires:

“Cleaning”: security checks, software improvements, similar to cleaning a store
Style updates
Additions (and subtractions)
Perks: free content or coupons, perhaps the equivalent to sales or complimentary coffee in a store / office
etc.

Some industries, especially B2B, are more difficult to write about, especially in a casual manor. If this is the case for your business, first research your competitors to see what they’re doing for content, and maybe you’ll need to work with your engineers to create some technical guides that would require a customer to give their email and other details to receive it. Or maybe your business would benefit from doing a video blog, and go behind the scenes to show customers something they would find impressive (especially if it’s something unique to your business).

The possibilities are really endless and up to your imagination. And if your imagination isn’t working too well, send a survey out to your customers and straight up ask them what kind of content they would find helpful. Maybe self-help guides or repair how-to videos?

Obviously blog management can take up as much time as you want it to, and not everyone has tons of free time every week. If you and your employees would rather focus on what you need to get done for the business, contact K-Kom today and see what we can do for your corporate blog and content strategy.