Web Design & Website Marketing
Your Foundation For New Customer Production.Once you understand the importance of Website Marketing, you’ll better understand the importance of picking the right
Web Design Company and the role they should play.
Let’s start our discussion with Website Marketing, and then we'll discuss Website Design Services.
Website Marketing
The Controversy
There tends to be a significant controversy surrounding website marketing for small businesses, so let’s start by exploring two crucial questions.
Understanding the logic behind the answers to these common questions will allow you to decide your website’s importance and how best to utilize it.
The first question is:
Do you really “NEED” to have a website?
Consider this FACT: The most recent statistics show that 91% of consumers start their buying process online. In a B2B transaction, this number increases to 96%.
So, if you’d like all these potential customers to consider you in their buying process, you’ll need to be visible online. Once potential buyers find you online, you’ll need to send them somewhere. If you’re not going to send potential customers to your website, where will you send them?
The most common question people ask at this point is ...
Why not use Facebook or some other Social Media page in place of a Building A Website?
Creating a page on its platform is cheaper than building a website, and doesn't require a web design services expert.
For the majority of companies, this is a huge mistake.
In Fact, “This Is The Most Costly Marketing Mistake Made By Countless Small Businesses.”
If you think that statement sounds a bit dramatic, consider these two critical points:
1. Like almost every other Social Media company, Facebook earns its revenue by showing advertisements to its viewers. The advertisements it shows viewers are determined by keywords entered, the company’s profile or person being searched for, and a plethora of other criteria. Consider that there’s a high potential that the person you bring to your Facebook page will be exposed to a competitor’s ad while on Facebook. And if the viewer is a Facebook member, these competitor ads will continue to show for weeks, even months after that visit you initiated. You’ve just introduced your potential sales lead to a host of competitors that they likely never knew existed. That's Not Smart Sales Lead Management.
2. Bringing a potential customer to Facebook (or other social media platform) opens the possibilities of distracting them from their original intention with other Facebook-related activities that have nothing to do with your business. You caused your sales lead to get sidetracked with other activities and forget you exist. And while they may restart their intended search at a later point in time, you now have to be fortunate enough to “be found” a second time to have a chance at making a sale. That's Not Smart Marketing.
Consider that your website contains no competitors' ads, no distractions, and you are in complete control of precisely what the viewer sees during their visit.
“Your website is the only safe place on the internet to send a sales lead.”
The second crucial question is:
Is Building Your Own Website A Smart Idea?
Companies continue to spend remarkable amounts of money attempting to convince people that “anyone” can create a website in just minutes by using their DIY products, BUT should you do it?
Let’s not debate these DIY products’ quality and whether their claims are even close to accurate. Instead, what I’d like you to consider is “who” is building your website and then to think about the impact/effectiveness of the resulting website.
The answer to my question is that you, a staff person, or even a friend, will build your website.
Building your own website means you’ve just entrusted every visitor’s first impression of your company to a person who most often has: no real web design skills, limited if any marketing skills, no content writing or graphic arts skills, and very likely no knowledge of how to manage a user’s experience on a website. This sounds like it could be a recipe for disaster.
Statistics prove that once someone forms a perception of your company, it is incredibly tricky, enormously costly, and often darn near impossible to change that perception. Large companies have spent millions of dollars attempting to change consumer perceptions, and almost all have failed miserably.
From A Marketing Perspective,
A Customer's Perception Rules, Reality Doesn't Matter.
Now you understand why a web page's appearance and every word on that page is much more important than initially considered.
Your most relevant content, including what you stand for as a company and what makes you different from your competitors, needs to be front and center for potential customers to digest easily. Content that summarizes why someone should buy from you quickly becomes critical to help buyers make their decisions. And remember, people don’t read websites; they browse them, so layout your pages accordingly.
If you want to maximize your sales leads, you should directly link your website’s content to your marketing strategy. You should not leave this critical project in the hands of anyone other than a marketing expert, not even a web developer or web design company. Web developers are technical (code writing) people, web design people are typically graphics people. And while they may be good at their respective jobs, they should not be making marketing-related decisions on your website. Your marketing expert should precisely dictate what the web developer/designer creates, where it goes on the page, what it says, and why.
Your company's marketing strategy must be the foundation for every webpage on your website.
After considering these two questions above, you should understand two critical takeaways:
1. Your Website Should Be Your Number One Digital Marketing Tactic.
2. Your Marketing Expert Should Be 100% In Control Of Your Website, And It's Content.
Curious about how well your website performs from a marketing/sales lead generation perspective? Ask Us About Our Free Website Audit.
Let's TalkWeb Design Services
& What's Really Important
To better understand the importance and process of selecting the right web design company, we suggest you read the above section on Website Marketing before reading this section.
The most critical takeaway from the above content is that you now understand your website’s importance and why a marketing expert (not a web developer or web design company) should be in charge of your website design project.
When selecting a web design company, most people browse candidate web design companies looking for samples of gorgeous looking websites.
Using this criteria is a colossal mistake; here’s why.
Few customers (if any) will select you because you have a pretty hero image at the top of your homepage. In fact, your website design’s overall ascetics are very subjective to each viewer’s individual tastes. While some people may love your choices of imagery, layout, font choice, and colors, others may not like it much. So while your website design shouldn’t be nasty ugly, your overall web design’s overall aesthetics are secondary to several much more essential items.
Remember, Generating Sales Leads Is The Numer One Objective Of Your Website
When you consider this objective, it makes perfect sense that a marketing company should spearhead your web design project. Many web design services try to imitate a marketing agency, but it’s often easy to see through their facade.
Here’s a quick and simple test that you should consider using before wasting your time speaking with any web design company.
The first critical test of any web design service is:
The instant that the viewer lands on your website, they should clearly understand three things:
- Who you are.
- What you do.
- Why that matters to them, or what makes you different from all the others.
The viewer should clearly understand these three items without ever having to touch the keyboard or a mouse. In the world of marketing, we refer to this as positioning; it's part of your brand strategy. Statistics prove that if a viewer can’t easily find the answer to these three questions within eight seconds, they will most often move on to the next website.
Positioning is an excellent test for any web design company that you’re considering. Go to their website and see if they pass this simple test.
A second critical test of any web design service is:
Does the design give the viewer the ability to interact with the webpage’s content and give you the ability to measure their level of interaction? You should consider these two essential items:
- Knowing if a viewer is interested or not will quickly tell you whether or not you’re attracting the right types of potential customers to your website.
- Knowing which content your viewers are most interested in will allow you to continuously improve your website over time.
The ability to interact with page content is another excellent test for any web design company you’re considering. Although you won’t know if they can measure your interaction, not having the ability to interact should disqualify the candidate immediately. Go to their website and see if they pass this simple test. If they pass this test and you decide to interview them, now be sure they show you (in precise detail) how they measure page interaction. Any experienced web design service should expect you to ask about this and should be able to show you this functionality. Failure to measure page interaction will cost you massive amounts of money in lost sales leads, misguided marketing projects and destructive SEO/SEM/PPC optimization projects over time.
Consider that if you can’t accurately tell precisely which content viewers are most interested in, how do you optimize a webpage for SEO/SEM/PPC?
You might want to ask that question to any web design company candidate that makes your shortlist.
A third and most crucial test of any web design service is:
Whether or not your phone calls and contacts via the website are improving.
A pretty website is meaningless if you’re not getting more sales leads from it.
Unfortunately, this is a test that you can’t perform before you hire a web design company, and you’ll learn the answer to this only after your project is complete.
Save Money, Do Your Website Project Right The First Time.
How To Save Money On A Web Design Project
Our web design services are designed to save you money. We are a one-stop-shop marketing agency for small businesses, meaning we do all work in-house, and we don’t use sub-contractors. The benefits you gain for our approach include Cost Savings and Accountability.
Utilizing multiple vendors always inflates a project’s cost; here’s why:
- Every vendor applies their overhead cost into their pricing. You end up paying for multiple overheads.
- The division of who does what and when typically causes competition between the vendors while each vendor struggles to get the most prominent workload. This results in extended meeting time, less work time, and a larger budget.
- The miscommunications between vendors exasperates everyone involved and extends both the project’s timeline and budget.
- The inevitable finger-pointing between vendors means you get left paying for rework to correct issues because you can’t pin down who is at fault.
When one company does all the work, you have a single source to blame or congratulate (as necessary) and an efficient, cost-effective project that is more likely to meet both your timeline and goals.
Curious about how well your website performs from a marketing/sales lead generation perspective?
Let's Talk