Marketing in a Digital World

7 Digital Marketing Tools that Will Continue to Evolve

May 27, 2020 by K-Kom

Digital marketing tools have become essential in order to lead the marketing game. These tools are always evolving and businesses have to grasp their use quickly to take advantage of them. However, among hundreds of such marketing software packages and applications, you have to find the ones that offer you the best value for their prices.

To help you with that, we have enumerated seven digital marketing tools that will continue to evolve to take your marketing strategy to the next level.

1.

HubSpot offers many useful tools that help entrepreneurs grow their businesses regardless of what stage they are at. All they need is to set up a web form and live chat software to capture leads. After that, they can send various email marketing campaigns, gather all the data into their CRM software and assess the behavior of the visitors.

From managing social media content to tracking messages and generating leads, the tool is an all-in-one solution for the marketers. The best part about this tool is that it is evolving with time with the introduction of features that facilitate better sales and improve inbound marketing.

2.

The digital marketing tool connects to a website to use social proof to improve conversions on the site. It implements reviews, social proof messaging and videos that are geared to targeted customers when they visit the site. The tool is further boosting its features with hot streak notifications and live visitor count being a few examples that many brands can use to improve customers’ perception.

3.

Moz provides an excellent selection of paid and free SEO tools. Marketers can perform page analytics keyword research, and backlink analyses by using MOZ. Plus, it offers an excellent site-crawler feature. MozBar is evolving with its improved Chrome plug-in that can provide instant metrics for different WebPages at one click.

4.

SEMrush is an all-in-one tool for digital marketing that offers assistance with many tasks, such as position tracking, keyword research, and identifying different backlink opportunities. Plus, marketers can use this tool to do a technical and comprehensive SEO audit.

5.

Looking for an advanced digital marketing tool that can help you get a ton of valuable insights on customer engagement with your website? Google Analytics is your go-to tool. You can explore this digital tool on Google Analytics Academy to learn about its ever-improving features.

6.

This tool is for marketers who like designing professional-level graphics. It helps them create infographics, CTA buttons, and images for social sharing.

7.

This research and monitoring tool can help marketers identify the latest trends and hot topics. BuzzSumo is an ideal tool for generating creative social media ideas, blogs, and high-performing content. It also identifies influencers and monitors brand performance. The paid tool is committed to bringing more innovative features to help customers rock their marketing strategies.

Bottom Line

Overall, the given digital marketing tools are perpetually evolving to provide ample opportunities for marketers to improve brand image among consumers. You have to pick the tool that best suits your business or use a combination of these to create a solid marketing strategy.

Why Digital Marketing is Important for Your Business

May 29, 2019 by K-Kom

You want your business to reach more people. But it becomes harder with people having exposure to so much information out there. How would your message reach people going through the clutter and chaos of information? How do you ensure you’re not lagging in the marketing game? You must come up with better ways to deliver your message and advertise your services/products.

The digital age we live in calls for digital marketing. Whether you run a big business or have a small startup, digital marketing is a necessity rather than an option. Here is why you need digital marketing to get your business going:

Reaching Your Target Audience

The main reason digital marketing is a ‘must-have’ for your business is it targets a specific audience. Advertising through television, newspaper/magazines or other channels is not as effective in targeting the audience as digital marketing. Digital marketing tools help you deliver your message to your main audience. Search advertising (Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.) is a digital marketing method for targeting specific demographics. You can target people based on interests, profession, education level, or buying behavior, i.e. identify people who are most likely to buy your products.

Cheaper and Affordable Marketing

Digital marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing methods. The cost per lead (CPL) is much lower with digital marketing. In many cases, a social media campaign or a website ad can advertise your business to a larger populace, at a fraction of the cost of a TV advertisement. Digital marketing is hugely beneficial in terms of affordability for small businesses and startups.

Creative Marketing

Digital marketing allows you to be more creative with your marketing campaign. Your website and advertisement brochures should have the following characteristics to attract customers:

Unique and eye-catching logos
Innovative forms of texts and buttons
Catchy phrases and tag-lines to target a specific audience
Creative visuals and graphics

Advanced Analytics

You have to analyze how well your business marketing is going. You can’t have an exact idea of the reach of a TV ad, but digital marketing allows you to know how the audience interacted/engaged with your ad by answering these questions.

Whether they found it appealing enough?
Did they share it with someone?
Did the ad lead to a sale or not (convert)?

You can even analyze your audience based on how they interacted with the ad. You’ll know who’s more interested in your ads and learn how to better tailor your creative techniques towards your target audience. You’ll also learn which type of websites they’ve visited, and how that lead them to your website.

Increased Revenues

With effective digital marketing tools, your sales increase, (along with your profit). According to Google surveys, companies with digital marketing have better revenue growth expectancy by 2.8% annually.

Get Your Business Going

Digital marketing is more convenient, affordable and profitable than ever. You can target potential customers and directly affect the bottom-line. Your business needs digital marketing to reach out and sell better than your competitors. We can help get your business booming, stand out among your competitors with our fresh new marketing ideas that are sure to convert your leads.

Website Problems That Will Scare Away Your Customers

October 20, 2018 by K-Kom

Your website is one of the most important parts of your marketing efforts and can be the foundation for your entire business if you provide services, do business around the world, or run an e-commerce company.

Website visitors are easily frustrated and “bounce” or leave if something doesn’t load fast enough or if a shopping cart is too difficult to figure out. In fact, over 70% of carts on average are abandoned with items not purchased, according to Baymard Institute.

Here are a few elements you will want to ensure your website has in place to keep your potential customers interested, informed, and transforming into loyal clients.

Excellent Mobile Experience

With everyone using their phones more and more often, having an excellent mobile website is crucial to gaining new customers or ensuring users spend enough time on your website to complete the tasks you leave for them, whether that’s to purchase something, read a blog, or sign up for the newsletter.

More than half of all internet traffic now comes from phones, and more than half of those make a purchase from their phones. Other screen sizes are being used as well, so having a responsive website is the most efficient option to accommodate everyone.

Minimal Advertisements

It is a good idea to create a road map for website users to guide them to the actions you want them to complete. This can be accomplished with pop-ups, alerts, and other attention-getting strategies. But, once the website crosses the line and becomes annoying, this will be a reflection of your brand name, and people will leave. Interrupt their experience as little as possible, and only do so for important actions.

If you make your money through advertisements on a content-based website, again don’t be annoying. Advertisements slow the website down and are a nuisance to look at while trying to read. Keep it classy!

Clean, Streamlined User-Friendly Design

Everyone thinks differently, and many will not figure out what you want them to do on your website unless you make it very simple and obvious. It is your job to guide them through the conversion process, and ensure every step along the way is quick and painless. Use mouse heatmaps and analytics to see where the highest percentage of users are dropping off the site.

The user interface (UI) is incredibly important, but none of it matters if the website itself breaks easily. If you have a shopping cart, for example, make sure the application works well all the way through the transaction and payment. Check and double-check important buttons for newsletter signups and forms.

Fast Load Speed

There is nothing better to turn someone away from your website than slow load times. If your website takes longer than three seconds, nearly half of all users will give up immediately, and potentially find your competitor’s website instead. Site speed and performance are a top priority for any business who wants to attract new customers.

Does your business website meet all of these points sufficiently? Contact K-Kom today to find out what you can do better to ensure you’re not missing out on hundreds (or even thousands) of potential sales.

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.

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.

How To Avoid Local SEO Problems Part 2: Your Website

October 31, 2017 by K-Kom

Let’s pick up where we left off in our last blog post How to Avoid Local SEO Problems Part 1: Business Plan and Location. Now we’ll move on to the big kahuna: the all-important website.

Whether you have one already, just started one recently, or are thinking about it now, here are some things to either fix or completely avoid, so you know you’re doing everything you can to ensure a good rank on search engines and that the right people will find you when they need you and your products or services!

Picking Your URL

This is an important step in your digital success. Pick the wrong thing, and it can limit your future unborn business ideas, or cause people to type it wrong and get lost or worse, find a competitor.

Just like with your business name, you wouldn’t want to choose a URL that limits you to either your local area, or one specific service. Now you can get creative and buy these types of URLs and forward them to your main site, but of course this will cost you a little bit for each one you want.

As well, “.com” is still the most recognized type of domain, so be careful if you choose something else like .us or .random. Choose the .com if at all possible. You can however buy the others as a safeguard, to ensure competitors don’t buy them and forward them to their own websites!

Multiple Websites

Some businesses with a few locations opt for having a separate website for each location. At first glance, this might seem like a good strategy for ranking in each local area. However, there are some downsides to this to consider:

Marketing budget spread too thin instead of focused on building one brand
Not enough content on each site and/or duplicate content (same or similar text on each site)
Confusion for Google rankings if the same name, address, or phone number appear on more than one website

Content Strategy

People are looking for local experts for whatever they’re looking to buy. They want to buy from the best source they can. So show off your expertise on your website. Share the knowledge you’ve accumulated over the last 10 or 20 years that would be relevant and helpful for your visitors. At the very minimum fill out a Home, About, Contact, Testimonials, and then a page for each main service or product you sell.

Website Contact Info

Do not leave potential customers without your contact info (or how to order products) within easy reach no matter where they are on your website. This means putting this info in the header or footer so it is automatically on every page. Make sure phone numbers are click-to-call enabled for mobile devices, and include a map and driving directions on your contact page if you have a storefront.

Calls to Action (CTAs)

Any main page on your website without a call to action, means people will not have anything to do after they’re done browsing. People want to know what to do next, and without direction, they will leave. Tell them outright to fill out a form, call you, go to your event, buy your product, etc.

Avoid these problems and put systems in place that remind you of the best way to do things, to ensure your local business is ranking on Google where you want it to be.

3 Key Elements of Local Small Business SEO

October 24, 2017 by K-Kom

The web and search engines are constantly evolving. Google has been working on making “search” a personalized experience for each individual person, so based on search history you and I see the results most relevant to us.

Small Business SEO Elements

Keyword Analysis + Quality Content

One of the most important factors today with ranking well on search engines is quality content mixed with the best keywords (or keyphrases).

First, there are tools out there (such as AdWords Keyword Planner) that not only share with you a list of words related to what your product or service is about, they also show the average number of times per month those words are typed into Google by someone, and how competitive it is to get onto the first page of Google for that search phrase.

Once you pick the keywords you want for each page of your website, then you must create good content/descriptions of each thing that you do, and include those words in the most natural-sounding way possible. Theoretically, this shouldn’t be a problem if you picked words that are relevant to your business. Also, you don’t want to put everything on just one page, because search engines won’t know which phrase to rank you for.

Google My Business

If you haven’t already done this, claim your business listing at google.com/business (it’s free). No matter if you have a physical storefront or not, enter the address you do your business from. There’s a box for service providers to select so your address will not be shown if you don’t accept customers at a physical business location. Then to verify you are who you say you are, Google will mail a postcard with a code to that address. Enter this code into the listing once you receive it in the mail.

Once this is all done and ready to go, complete your profile with your logo and photos of your location or service, as well as important info like:

Phone number
Website
Business hours
Menu (for restaurants/bars)
List your services

Encourage clients to leave reviews here too.

There’s a newer feature that allows people to ask questions, which you can then answer. Currently, to know if someone has submitted a question, you must have the Google My Business app installed on your phone and be logged into the account that manages the listing. This may change in the future, perhaps sending an email notification or something like that.

Avoid answering questions with just a “yes” or “no”. Not only can people go back and edit their questions, making your answer completely irrelevant, or even bad for your business, giving a detailed answer looks better on your part as an expert in your field.
- For example: If someone asked if a restaurant has vegan options, and the business owner replies “yes”, the person can edit the question to say
When a question is upvoted, it will appear in order of the number of upvotes, seen as an important question.

Other Important Steps

There are some other things that directly affect your local SEO ranking such as relevant directory listings, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and link building. Check out our blogs on how to do local SEO the easy way to learn more about these important strategies!

When your business is ready for a long-term boost to your bottom line, contact K-Kom, a local business SEO expert, serving local businesses from Menomonee Falls and Milwaukee WI, all the way to California.

“OK Google: local search engine optimization experts near me!”

How To Do Local SEO The Easy Way: Part 1

October 3, 2017 by K-Kom

If you know a little about SEO already, you know the rules change constantly thanks to Google and the people trying to cheat the system. When it comes to local SEO, especially for a small business that can only serve the local area, it’s imperative that you show up on the top few search results to keep your business alive and growing. And because the know-how of these online tactics is becoming more and more well understood, your local competition online is already or will become very steep, so it’s better to be ahead of the crowd if you can, or at least start fighting the good fight now before it becomes impossible.

Here are 3 easy steps to get your local SEO strategy moving in the right direction.

Make your title tags and meta descriptions relevant

These two things, what shows up on Google for people to see, still matter a great deal – not only for ranking purposes, but for selling those prospective clients to click on your website and not your competitor.

Every letter counts in search results

Google has increased the size of the description and title, so these can usually fit 50-60 characters and 160-200 characters respectfully. While it may not seem important, make sure these aren’t getting cut off with the beloved “…” at the ends. It looks and sounds far better if you can fit a complete thought out there.

To get a preview of what these are going to look like in search results, you can use tools like Yoast’s SEO Plugin in WordPress and see exactly how your business is being presented to the world, and edit it right there to be the best length.

Good content for search results

Include the name of your city and/or service area.
Focus in on one great keyword or phrase, and put that as close to the front of the title as you can.

Claim your Google My Business

This step is so incredibly important to local SEO that if you haven’t already done it, do it yesterday… or now. Not only will people see a map of your location, but a link to your website, reviews, a description of what your business is, phone number, etc.

To do this, go to google.com/business. Go through the process they instruct you on, and you’ll come to a verification step which usually results in either a phone call to your business phone number or a mailed postcard to your business address, with a code. Type this code into the verification area, and you’ll be all set to appear on search results in a nice informative box.

Online Directories

While Google doesn’t give as much credit to tons of these like they used to, they still look at a few key big ones like the BBB, Yelp, YP, social media, other review sites, blogs, local newspapers, and local directories that you’ll have to research.

Google also pulls and compares data from places called data aggregators. There are a few big players out there, like Acxiom, Superpages, Infogroup, and Localeze. Factual seems to be pulling ahead of the crowd and you can update your business’s data there yourself so you can be confident that everything is accurate.

Pro tip: make sure your Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) all show up exactly the same, punctuation and all, for every listing you claim and publish.

If you’re ready to boost your local SEO strategy to the next level, please contact our local SEO experts at K-Kom Marketing today. We’ll be glad to give some more insight into how to beat your local competition.

We work mainly to create SEO strategies for local Milwaukee companies and others around Wisconsin, and work with small to medium-sized businesses across the United States, boosting their local search engine rankings wherever they’re located!

“OK Google: SEO services near me!”