Content Marketing Archives

Long Live the King! Make Way for the Prince!

March 7, 2016 by Adam Olen Leave a Comment

In 1996, Bill Gates wrote an article titled “Content is King” about how content will be presented and delivered on the then-emerging Internet. His lede was simple, and, even twenty years later, accurate.

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”

Gates’ explores how Internet users will interact with content and how, as technology advances, content providers will have to utilize innovative design to keep the user interface fresh and engaging.

“If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.”

While “turning on a computer to read a screen” is clearly a dated reference in this age of screen overload, his sentiment on delivering content is the current rallying cry in the marketing industry.

Informed and engaging content keeps customers coming back to you as an expert in your field and builds brand confidence and recognition. But take equal care to develop the digital design elements that deliver your content.

Good digital design involves – first and foremost – understanding user behavior. Combining an understanding of behavior with compelling design can lead to an engaging user experience.

Why is user experience so important? Remember, every business has a bottom line. Driving sales with clean digital design that heightens the user experience should not be overlooked.

Kompani Group has spent years developing and optimizing e-commerce platforms for some of our clients in addition to designing engaging, functional digital resources for desktops, tablets and mobile. Read more about Kompani Group’s digital design approach in our complimentary white paper.

Content is still king, but digital design is the prince in waiting ready to take his rightful spot on the throne.

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Snippets from Bill Gates’ article “Content is King,” which is archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20010126005200/http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1996essay/essay960103.asp

How Black and White Can Lead to Green

May 28, 2015 by Kompani Group Leave a Comment

Using White Papers to Support Sales & Marketing Efforts

Once reserved for highly competitive technical fields like medicine and finance, white papers are becoming powerful tools for nearly any company in any industry. Communicating the “how it works” message makes for a compelling, interesting, and useful read for consumers and potential clients looking to make an educated decision in what is often a confusing marketplace. More importantly, a white paper can be the catalyst for new sales or relationships. How?

The neutral tone of a white paper “breaks through” marketing and advertising clutter
Straightforward, fact-based messaging creates a strong market position for your product or service
White papers provide clients and customers with the evidence for “why this company?” or “why this brand?” and makes the decision their own idea

And while those reasons are enough to give white papers a try, it’s the opportunity for industry-wide or even global exposure that’s most exciting. Create a thorough, precise document with meaningful information on a relevant topic, and you’re likely to find that media publications, industry authorities, and other business stakeholders will want to redistribute your white paper to attract more readers and build their own audiences. And more exposure for you, is more opportunity to make and maintain sales.

At Kompani Group, we’ve had a great deal of success with this unique content marketing technique. In fact, many of our recent clients have had white papers republished in important trade magazines (and their corresponding websites), regulatory agencies, cities and municipalities, and other key opinion leaders. Along the way, the brands originally presenting those white papers have become respected authorities within their fields, and a trusted resource among clients and consumers.

We can help you do the same… get in touch today!

Optimizing Traffic to your Website

November 25, 2014 by Adam Olen Leave a Comment

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, remains one of the most misinterpreted and misunderstood concepts in the internet and marketing world. In simple terms, SEO is the process of structuring a web page so that it is found, read, and indexed by search engines in the most effective manner possible. While search engines change their algorithms for how they evaluate pages somewhat regularly, the purpose of that is to help sift through strategies and techniques and just find sites that are what they say they are, and to rank those sites according to the value those sites offer to web searchers.

We work with our clients to optimize their websites above and beyond a standard WordPress development in an effort to help web crawlers know what the most important elements of a the site are, and to help our clients know what other content may be valuable to add to the site. Both quantity and quality are important. Ultimately, where your site turns up in search results is a function of the volume of traffic that visits your site and the duration of time visitors spend there.

That said, Google recently announced that another factor that its web crawlers would include in ranking criteria is the security of a site. Read what Google has to say about SSL here. While not entirely specific, this announcement from a company who owns 68% of the search engine market share, strongly encourages website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS. Ultimately, purchasing and installing certificates is not overly costly, and it does add an additional layer of protection for all the data being transmitted through the web.

Other strategies to improve your rankings

While optimizing site content, adding metadata, and now installing a security certificate are all part of a strong foundation for offering your site to the world, additional content marketing strategies are becoming increasingly important. Producing new content that engages readers serves a critical purpose of helping people know who you are; sending that content out to people who will read it keeps them coming back; and driving those additional users to the site tells the web crawlers that people do want to come to your site and thus you should be higher in search so others can find you too.

There are numerous other strategies that can be implemented, and frankly, those outlined above can be refined and enhanced routinely. Ultimately, you need to ask yourself the same thing we constantly ask ourselves: How can we deliver even more value to those that would want to hear from us in the first place?