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June 25, 2014 By Tom Gimer

New service: Web hosting

Our clients value “comfort”. When they choose us for a project, it’s often because they’ve worked with us in the past and are confident their jobs are going to be completed on time and the finished product will turn out better than expected. Our clients factor their comfort level into the price they are willing to pay to work with us. It’s understandable; everybody values peace of mind.

At KKPDC we too factor comfort level into things when we consider vendor relationships. Saving a few dollars here and there is hardly worth it if orders come late or are of poor quality. The same thing applies to service providers like web hosting companies. Having been through several web hosts over the past 20+ years, we discovered that many of the problems with web hosting companies stem from a lack of communication and poor support when a problem arises. With web hosting, you rarely hear about problems directly from the host. More often than not you find out about problems with your website directly from your customers, which can come as a rude awakening. Think about it — have you heard things like this from your clients?

“Hey, your website is down!”
“Your site looks like it has been hacked. Something isn’t right.”
“I tried to submit a form on your site but it didn’t work.”

When your business website is down or not functioning correctly, helpless is how you feel. And dealing with tech support in cyberspace is a crap-shoot. Depending on the hosting company, the tech support team may be half-way around the world or worse. We don’t want the clients who we build or redesign websites for ever feeling helpless about their site security or hosting, so it made a lot of sense for us to add business-class web hosting to the list of services we provide.

We are now pleased to offer affordable business-class web hosting from a name you already know and trust — us! If you are like most smart business owners, you will value the comfort in knowing your site will always be secure and easily configurable. Every hosting account has it’s own Cpanel, unlimited MySQL databases, the ability to host multiple sites and park domains, etc. And if you ever have a problem you can count on us — a local, dependable service provider for 24+ years — to help you fix things right away.

Stop feeling helpless when your site has a problem. Give some thought to moving your website to KKPhosting.com. We can help you migrate an existing site to our servers or help you build a new one.

February 26, 2013 By Tom Gimer

Marketing tip: try A/B testing

In many of our prior posts we’ve discussed the importance of tracking the performance of your marketing. If you don’t know how well your marketing is doing, and you’re not trying to fine-tune it over time to get the best results, you’re not maximizing the investment you’re making in your company. Now, it’s great that you’re investing in your business, but the idea is to get the best return on your investment. This post should help with that, especially if you’re new to marketing.

One method of fine-tuning your marketing is A/B testing. A/B testing or “split” testing is an experimental approach to design which tries to identify elements in your marketing which increase or maximize a desired outcome or result. Possible outcomes are numerous, such as the submission of a form on your website, a phone call or other direct contact from your customer, a click-through in an email newsletter or landing page, or even a purchase. We’ve talked about these outcomes as “valuable contacts” in prior blog posts, in which we’ve also stressed the importance of setting them up as conversions/goals in your analytics. This will help you monitor marketing performance as well as determine how and why a customer came to find you and/or contact you.

With A/B testing, two versions of your marketing are compared. They are identical except for one variation that you think might impact a user’s behavior. The possibilities for what you change are numerous. Here are just a few:

the call to action language or button
different fonts or combinations
text and background colors
layout changes, placement of content on the page or piece
different images

The goal is to figure out if one version outperforms the other. If the results are significant enough, you know which element should be used going forward.

Many people think A/B testing can only be used to test online marketing, but this just isn’t the case. Your print marketing can also be tested using this method. For example, rather than sending 2000 identical postcards to everyone on your mailing list, you could send 1000 postcards with your current layout and another 1000 with some element modified. To track the performance of A vs. B you’d simply need to include different information to help you collect and analyze the data, such as different landing page URLs (and QR codes that redirect to different landing pages) as well as phone numbers.

Give A/B Testing a try and let us know if it helps you improve your marketing ROI. If you need some help, you know where to find us!

January 11, 2013 By Tom Gimer

Yes, WordPress is awesome, but…

We love building websites with WordPress. Creating beautiful, functional websites with WordPress is so much easier and cheaper than coding from scratch. WordPress is the best open-source CMS out there due to its ease of use, standard features, security, and especially its extendability (more on this later). We recommend the WordPress platform to almost every client who consults with us about building a new site or planning a redesign of an existing one. We trust it so much that we built our own website with it. Simply put, WordPress is awesome, but…

(there is always a but, isn’t there?)…

WordPress’ most valuable feature is its extendability. It can be easily customized and extended with “plugins” that are essentially add-ons to the core code which make WordPress do something extra. As valuable as they are, plugins are also the platform’s biggest vulnerability. You see, the guys who created WordPress are not the only ones writing code for it. There are literally thousands of plugins which extend the core functionality of WordPress (23,062 plugins are in the WordPress repository at the time of this post), and it is difficult to tell the good from the bad because anybody who can code can develop a plugin. Making things more interesting, since WordPress is constantly being improved and updated, unless a plugin developer continues to update and support his plugin in perpetuity (to ensure it works with the latest release), there is a pretty good chance it won’t continue to work forever.

On a site built with WordPress, whenever things aren’t working perfectly (or worse, things stop working completely), fixing things typically involves figuring out which plugins are conflicting with one another. To do this you literally need to disable each plugin one at a time until you identity the conflict. If you have a lot of plugins on your site, this can be very time consuming. Importantly, your site won’t tell you when there is a plugin conflict, it will simply stop working! When plugins do conflict and you figure out the problem, your work is not done. Now you need to decide which plugin you will continue to use and how to address the functionality you will lose by deactivating the problem plugin. Sometimes this is as easy as finding a replacement plugin that doesn’t cause a conflict, but sometimes it is not.

You probably now see the importance of limiting the number of plugins you use on your WordPress site. Not only do plugins have the potential to slow down your site, when they do conflict they can make your site absolutely useless. If yours is like most businesses, you depend on your website to generate leads, provide information to customers, schedule appointments and do other things which are critical to your company. You need to make sure every change or upgrade to your website doesn’t cause it to break. In other words, don’t go plugin crazy! Make improvements that bring value to your business and test them completely.

Oh and remember when I mentioned WordPress updates? It’s great that the platform is constantly being improved, but this can also cause huge problems for the unsuspecting site owner. Before updating the code to the latest release, you’ll want to back up your entire site as well as your database. Ignore this advice at your own peril — you could lose your entire site if the update process fails.

OK enough doom and gloom; we’ll stop scaring you now. And honestly we really do love WordPress! We just recommend that you exercise extreme caution when you make changes to your site or you could easily bring down the entire thing and stifle your business.

July 6, 2012 By Tom Gimer

You don’t need a social media manager

You don't need a social media manager Your small business doesn’t need a “Social Media Manager”.

If the thought of hiring someone full-time to poke around social media websites like Facebook and Twitter on behalf of your company scares the hell out of you, you’re not alone. But I have good news. You don’t need one. The Social Media Manager position was just a ploy by Generation Y to create work during the Great Recession.

Seriously though, instead of hiring a warm, young body who may know little to nothing about marketing, the odds are good that what you really need is a better understanding of the basics of online marketing and then a strategy that you follow religiously with all of your online content. So while you won’t end up with a viral video or thousands of Facebook “likes” which have no affect on your revenue, you will formulate a comprehensive strategy that actually works to generate leads and sales for your business. Here are the basics your strategy will need to address:

1. Web presence

First, figure out if your current website is adequate. It must be optimized for search engines, mobile responsive, and fast. If it isn’t, you need a redesign immediately. Basic on-page SEO tactics are easy to follow and you should do so with every bit of new content you create. A good CMS like WordPress makes this really easy. And with more and more people using mobile devices to access the web, if your site doesn’t render properly on the smaller devices, you’re going to get killed by your competition. Lastly, if your site loads slowly because you use some cheap — or even worse, free — hosting company, guess who’s leaving before your site loads? Everybody. So now you have a website worthy of directing visitors to.

2. In-bound marketing

Your potential customers must be able to find you on the web. But even more importantly, they need to be able to find out more about you and the type of business you operate. You can kill two birds with one stone by maintaining a business blog. Good blogs help potential clients answer questions and solve problems they are facing, all while generating organic search traffic and increasing your brand awareness. If your site and other marketing materials just talk about how wonderful you are (note: nobody believes you), it’s time to change your strategy and start producing valuable content so people see that you are, in fact, wonderful. In-bound marketing also involves being visible where potential customers are talking about you and your competitors. Depending on your business, you may need to monitor one or more social media platforms. This is not a full time position, and there are plenty of tools that make it easy. Social media sites may also be used to share the content you create for your blog. If your business is part of the conversation, you will also need to respond in a reasonably timely fashion to complaints or questions. You don’t need some fool tweeting all day about your wonderfulness. The better course of action is to consistently create and share content that helps people. By doing this you’ll establish yourself as an industry expert. People hire experts when they really need help.

3. Lead nurturing and conversion

Potential customers are at different points of the buying process. Some are gathering information; some are comparing providers and pricing; some are ready to purchase right now. Your online marketing strategy needs to adequately deal with customers at every point. This means you need different content and features for different types of visitors. Now that you have a good website, you’ll want to create more content that speaks to buyers at different stages of the sales funnel. Your business might benefit from automated processes such as email marketing. Perhaps your business is a good candidate for PPC (pay-per-click) advertising such as Google Adwords. Either way, your business should definitely be monitoring site analytics as well as fine tuning landing pages and other pages in your sales funnel so they perform their best. Although it is an endless process of testing, tweaking and testing again, it is not a job for a social media manager because these issues relate to the performance of your website.

Of course there is a lot more to online marketing, but these are the essentials. So until you’re confident that you’ve addressed these crucial needs first, you don’t need a social media manager (and perhaps you never will).

June 8, 2012 By Tom Gimer

A website is not enough

I don’t hate salespeople. In fact, I’m always interested in hearing about new products and services that can help our business thrive. But when I request more information about a company that is trying to sell us something…

“You can find more information about us on our website.”

This is a typical response from some salespeople when you request a pamphlet or brochure describing their services and giving some background on their company.

A website, however, is not enough.

We’ve written in the past about the importance of providing information to potential clients in the form they want it. So when someone like me asks for a brochure or pamphlet, they don’t want to be directed to your website. They asked for a printed piece because that is how they wanted the information. Printed materials are often more concise, to the point, easier to read, and easier to keep for later review. They also give some legitimacy to a business that you have never heard of, or know little about.

“But printing is expensive,” you may be thinking. Well, yes, when you compare printing a brochure to you posting new information on a website manually, printing is expensive. But that is hardly the comparison to make. Instead, compare the cost of designing and printing an attractive brochure for customers who request print to the “cost” of the customers whom you fail to convert because you refused to invest in your business properly.

If you’ve read our blog before you’ll know that this is not just another post promoting print. We try to avoid self-promotion here. And we are more a full service communications provider than simply a print shop, offering a full array of digital services such as web graphics, web design and development, ebook creation, and digitization of print materials, in addition to print. But as we’ve said before (here is just one example) you need a comprehensive marketing strategy for best results.

A website is not enough. It may be a printed brochure or catalog; it may be a brick and mortar shop; or it may be referrals or recommendation letters. But whatever your potential clients want to see from you to make them confident in your business, you need to think about giving it to them. Your competitors will.

online

(there is always a but, isn’t there?)…

1. Web presence

2. In-bound marketing

3. Lead nurturing and conversion

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