Looking Back To Look Ahead: Key Reflections

As we enter the second month of 2023, we are looking back in order to look ahead. Firstly, we hope you kicked off the year rested, recharged and ready to hit your new goals. Over on our side, we can certainly say we started the New Year off with a bang. That probably explains why we’re posting our 2022 recap at the start of the month of February, but hey—that’s what happens when you’re busy working with incredible clients. 

Before the fuzzy New Year feelings slip away, we’d like to take a moment and recognize our team’s achievements over the last year. Thanks to all the work our teams put in throughout 2022, we’re starting off 2023 hungry, with bold, visionary ideas for what’s to come. 

2022 proved a period of enormous growth for KCG. Not only did we expand our client roster, but we also welcomed new team members to the family. We poured hours into our own business strategy and values, all so we can continue offering our clients our very best work that’s in alignment with our core mission. Slowly but surely, we’ve expanded our reach in new corners of the globe. And we celebrated a ton of milestones—big and small, personal and professional—along the way.

We’d like to share our highlights of the year with you here, mainly because we couldn’t have done any of this without the formidable support, dedication and perseverance of our employees and clients. There’s no time like the New Year to recognize the achievements of the past while keeping an eye on the future.

The Team

KCG is lucky to have a diverse stronghold of dedicated, passionate team members from around the world. And last year, we doubled that luck by adding two outstanding new members to the team. 

• Matthew Muñoz became the newest addition to our incredible project managers. Originally from Los Angeles, Matthew is based in Barcelona and serves as a critical liaison between clients and KCG. As a fierce lover of learning new languages, he earned a Master’s degree in translation studies from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and continues to wield his excellent communication skills with our clients at KCG.
• Our wonderful designers welcomed Fatima Zahraa to their ranks. Fatima creates stunning visual design across web and print applications, bringing our client’s visual identity to life and pushing the envelope for what makes good design really good. She’s based in Casablanca, Morocco—and she’s our first team member to reside in Northern Africa! 

We also got to celebrate some of our team members’ big moves throughout the year. Our Head of Technology Salman Ahmed Titas is a prime example. He bought a one-way ticket from Bangladesh and made Spain his new home—an exciting and invigorating change, both for personal and professional growth.

Salman wasn’t the only one who bought a one-way ticket to start a new chapter. Our designer Luiz Rodrigues did the same, leaving his home in São Paulo, Brazil to live his best digital nomad life and experience different cultures around the globe. He’s been traveling for almost a year now and started with exploring different Brazilian states before touching down in Argentina. From there, Luiz moved to Toronto, Canada, where he’s currently continuing to work with KCG. He’s also taking English classes (and hopefully staying warm!).

One of our biggest strengths as a team is our unwavering ability to adapt to change. We’re quick, nimble and relish being pushed outside of our comfort zones. Whether we’re buying a one-way ticket without looking back or coming up with innovative solutions in the face of tough business challenges, we take every opportunity to stretch ourselves beyond what we think is possible. That’s an invaluable lesson we learned about ourselves in 2022, and we’ll be sure to carry it into 2023 and beyond.

Our Clients

When we look at all the clients we’ve worked with over the last year, we consider ourselves pretty fortunate. Better yet? Our client base tripled in 2022 thanks to the hard work of our sales and leadership team.

As a mission-driven organization, we pride ourselves on collaborating with clients working to do good in the world. It’s truly an honor to be able to help companies that make a positive impact scale. Here are three companies that joined the KCG family in 2022: 

• The office of Dr. David Kashan. Dr. David Kashan, MD, FACS leverages his extensive decades of surgery expertise—and his impressive training at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic—to deliver outstanding reconstructive and cosmetic surgery results to his patients. Dr. Kashan helps his patients feel better in their own skin, as well as reclaim parts of themselves they might have lost due to trauma or illness.
• Our design, development and copy masterminds put their heads together to deliver a beautifully-branded website for Dr. Kashan’s new practice. We continue collaborating with Dr. Kashan and his wife, Chantal, to ensure the site performs optimally and to drive home robust SEO efforts.
• Recharge Democracy. The brainchild of Dr. Alison Gash and Dr. Dan Tichenor, Recharge Democracy (formerly known as Democracy’s Child) is an organization that connects youth to resources for political action and organization.
• Alison Gash, Ph.D and Dan Tichenor are authors of a book, also named Democracy’s Child, that spotlights youth-led movements that are transforming democratic societies, from climate change and racial justice to queer and immigrant rights. We’ve collaborated through countless hours to strengthen the branding, messaging and expansion strategy for the client—including coming up with a fresh new name.
• KitchenLabs Holdings is pioneering the restaurant revolution. Serving as a strategic growth partner for restaurants and food entrepreneurs, Kitchen Labs offers a unique platform designed to help their clients prosper, grow and succeed in the ghost kitchen era. It’s all about getting new customers fed and making space to put innovative ideas on the menu.
• Since our initial project kickoff, we’ve been helping Kitchen Labs craft a sustainable, performance-driven Instagram PPC campaign. We’re also pitching in with PR efforts to drive more brand awareness in their local Miami market. We’re hungry for more work in 2023!

You might have noticed by now that when we say we champion diversity, we really mean it. Our commitment to upholding diversity isn’t only reflected in our team (though we are from all over the world), but in the clients we collaborate with, too. 

No matter the industry or the size of the company, we’re proud to work with the wide range of mission-driven businesses that we do. Whether you’re a small startup or an enterprise, we support you. Whether your mission is to help patients celebrate individuality, get youth more active in politics or even help food entrepreneurs thrive in the competitive restaurant scene, we support you. It’s our greatest joy to help our clients help others. (Plus, we’re pretty good at it, if we do say so ourselves. Check out our recent case studies to see what we can do!)

New Insights 

With all the expansion we did last year, we also generated a handful of new insights we’ll be taking with us into 2023 and beyond. Here are some of the highlights.

For starters, video content is king. This isn’t news, but it was fundamental to recognize that video isn’t going away anytime soon—and that creating a solid video strategy is the only way to move forward in 2023. This is what we’re telling our clients, but it’s also something we’ve started working on to bolster our own marketing efforts.

Take it from this research report generated by Hubspot:

“The trend is clear: in 2022, consumers increasingly expect to see video content from brands. Why? Videos give consumers the opportunity to see how a product or service works in real life, discover any flaws before purchasing the item, and identify perks that they might not learn about in the text-based description.”

Makes sense to us. On top of that, as Gen Z accumulates more and more purchasing power with age, you’ll want to reach those audiences where they’re at. And where are they? They’re on TikTok, for the most part! (The average Gen Z member spends roughly five hours on TikTok per day).

We know starting a video strategy may be intimidating, which is why we’ve rounded up some good tips on our blog for people just getting started creating video content. 

Video aside, we spent a lot of time this year getting our blog strategy in motion. Ever heard of a pillar content strategy? It’s a proven technique for getting high-quality blog content on your site and boosting your SEO initiatives.

A pillar strategy involves creating pillar pieces of content (long-form, broad-topic pieces) that live on your website. Those pillar pieces link to smaller, more specific cluster articles that give audiences short bites of useful information. Structuring your blog in this way allows you to hit on various search topics and keywords, offering audiences valuable content that solves the problems they’re seeking answers for.

In the case of our blog, we looked at our core service areas and created pillar topics based on those business realms. From there, we were able to identify smaller topics that really hone in on specifics in one general area (for example, this guide to PPC audience targeting).

SEO is a long game, so the results of a blog strategy like this may take months to come to fruition. But it’s thoroughly worth investing in if given the opportunity.

Our Culture Of Giving

In case you missed it, KCG is always trying to leave the world a little better than we found it. We kicked off our giving initiatives in 2020 when we adopted elephants living in a rescue shelter in Koh Samui, Thailand.

This year, we felt a shift in the tide and went on to adopt—drumroll please—our very own family of sea turtles! With help from our sponsorship, our new sea turtle friends will remain protected so they can continue contributing to the vitality of their ecosystems. We don’t want to live in a world without sea turtles; these gentle reptiles are crucial to keeping seagrass beds and coral reef systems healthy. They also provide the oceans with fundamental nutrients that maintain the balance of marine ecosystems.

We do a lot to help out the animal kingdom, but in 2022, we really began examining what we can do to help other people, too. In concurrence with our 2023 brand strategy, we’re identifying key causes and organizations that we can support in the name of LGBTQ+ rights, environmental justice and other social justice initiatives.  

Do you have a cause or organization you think is important to support? Let us know and we would love to start a conversation. 

In-Person Summits

As a remote-first organization, we’re pretty used to only ever seeing each other on Google Meets. And because we’re scattered all across the globe, in-person collaboration is hard to come by. 

But 2022 proved fortunate. We were lucky enough to hold not one, but two in-person summits this year, both out of our home office in Tarragona, Spain. Core leaders of our project management, marketing, tech and sales teams met during the first week of October to discuss the year and plan for our future business goals. The next week, our own content team hosted their first (hopefully annual) writers’ summit, which turned out to be an incredibly productive, laughter-filled week of strategizing for the future of our marketing and brand ethos.

In Conclusion

It’s hard to say goodbye to a year like 2022. Like any company, we faced our own set of trials and tribulations, but we took advantage of the opportunities in every challenge. Thanks to our diligence, creativity and resilience throughout this year, we can confidently say that we’ve arrived in 2023 with even more exciting things to come in the pipeline. 2022 built a strong foundation. We’re ready to keep building in the New Year. 

Thanks again for being a part of our journey. We look forward to collaborating and growing with you in 2023.