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[/dropcap] As a graphic design company or web designing company, if you want to succeed it is imperative that you separate your competition for your services, as there are thousands of such players in the business arena. Every nook and corner of a city has web designers or web designing companies so for you to even sustain competition, keep aside dominating competition, you need to create your niche. Broadly, a niche in this area can be attained in two ways, one by doing or offering something unique in comparison with your competitors or by doing what you are doing extremely well. It is easier and more economical to improve upon a service than a product so take advantage to hone up your service. While there are a lot of companies that would design your website for you but not all of them are equipped to do an end to end job or even an efficient one. What does an end-to-end job mean in context with web designing?
Having a skilled staff that has expertise in graphic design, multimedia and animation, coding, networking and above all managing play a key role. These skilled people need to be experts in their respective jobs. For example select a graphic designer who not only has a good hand at graphic tools but is also a good artist. Employ a good content writer who can not only write very well on a variety of subjects but also has good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knowledge. Your technical team should have good programmers and network specialists who can be trusted with both guidance and skill, not to mention at an expert level. To manage this team of experts if you can fill in providing the right balance of getting the work done with quality and timeliness and motivation then you have saved yourself from the expense of hiring a manager. The more creative your staff the better it is for your company to withstand competition as creativity is an important factor that a client will expect from you when you take them through a tour of your services.
Having a good staff is important, however is not enough, for you need to have your short and long term strategies in place. Beginning from marketing to selling, pricing, pre and post sale support and re-investment strategies need to be built keeping the web design market in mind.
Let us begin with the marketing strategy, the web of course as you would know best is an ideal medium of marketing, your website needs to stand out from the others as you are the master in the field. It is a good idea for you to put snapshots of the work you can possibly put on your website so that your potential customers can view your quality and designs, under various categories and themes. Your text should read about the state of art technologies that you use and how customers benefit from it.
It is also a good idea to put learning materials/ articles that may help customers in some way or the other, something like ‘create a website in 10 easy steps, needless to say, keeping the information to basics and your job orders in place. This increases the page hit count as well.
Convincing your customer, that your services are reasonably priced yet very effective is a good idea. Tap on every opportunity that enables you to put up testimonials which is a direct indication and portrayal of your professionalism and efficiency. It is also a good idea to have a target market, rather than trying to attract all customers. Integrating Twitter and Facebook and also having your blog page works well. Last but important: if your site is found within the first ten pages of search engines, you have won some bit of the battle already as it only conveys to the customer that you have strong SEO ideas and framework, which you will also incorporate for the customer’s site.
Finally, contemplate and design an attractive pre and post sale support and maintenance policy, as you would want your customer to stay glued to you, which will not only keep the revenue coming but also referrals. Always aim at going beyond your competition with continuous innovative ideas flowing and being implemented.
This is a guest post by Ricky Palermo, occasional guest blogger on web design, SEO, and all things tech. Ricky is currently writing on behalf of StarmenUSA (web design Los Angeles).