Web design is an essential service in the modern, digital world. Business owners looking to take their activity online often need to consider building a website that could allow them to reach their target audience better.
And if you have web design services to offer, your target market is growing, and actively looking for you. But how do you get in front of your potential customers? Of course, the first place to start is the thing you’re good at: design a website that shows off your skills, previous work and gives business owners a reason to call for a face to face meeting.
However, creating the site is only the first step you need to consider. Let’s discuss the best options for promoting a web design business.
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The Best Places to Advertise Web Design Services
The digital world offers plenty of promotional opportunities for all kinds of services, but which are the best for web design and development, specifically?
The simplest answer here is “wherever your target audience is,” but for service providers, that answer may actually raise a lot more questions. As a general rule, here are some of the best places you can start advertising your website design services:
- Your own website
- Social media platforms
- Online directories
- Other websites (trough ads or by guest posting)
- Consumer inboxes (through email newsletters)
However, it’s not just the place where you need to advertise your services that is the main focus here. It’s also how you do it, meaning how you create a marketing strategy to ensure you can reach your target market and get them to reach out to you.
Here are a few extra tips that can help you promote your web design services.
Consider Your Target Audience
Think of this process as if you were a business looking to promote your product to a specific target audience – because that’s exactly what you are.
Since you’re a service looking for businesses, you’re a B2B (business to business) type of business, and the rules for advertising your services are a bit different than in the case of a B2C (business to consumer) one.
With B2B marketing, you’re not necessarily addressing one individual, but the company or brand they represent. This means your target audience is not always defined by the desires or needs of the individual, but the company they are representing. The sales cycle often takes longer in these transactions as well, because companies need to be very careful about where they spend their budget.
For an individual, adding a product to their cart and buying it can happen almost instantly, even if they haven’t bought from a particular site before. They look at reviews, and if they like the product and price, they make the transaction.
A business will take longer to make this decision. They need to weigh the pros and cons, consider your rate in relation to the budget, and how much value you ultimately bring to the table!
Having a clear view of your target audience makes it easier to take the right decision as to how you promote your web design services. Consider things such as:
- Your niche – do you offer services for specific types of businesses, such as local shops, beauty brands, etc.? Having a clear niche often means you know the specifics of that industry, which could be a big bonus for companies;
- The type of business you’re targeting – are you looking for small businesses or local businesses? What type of company are you prepared to work with? Each type comes with its own requirements;
- What’s your unique selling point? – meaning what can you offer other web designers can’t? Maybe it’s more affordable rates, longer maintenance, or even experience as a marketer, which means you can offer more support to a business than just website design?
Get familiar with SEO
Search engine optimisation is the process of improving a website’s rank in the search engine results pages through a variety of different tactics. There’s a lot to be said about SEO’s direct benefits for a business (and we’ve written many pieces of the subject), but the most compelling ones are:
- It brings more organic traffic to your site
- Can boost your web design business’s visibility
- Builds trust with consumers
- Allows you to stay competitive in the market, etc.
Even business owners will often turn to search engines like Google when looking for web design services, so it’s a good idea to ensure your website meets search engine requirements such as:
- Being mobile-friendly
- Having a good page load speed
- Having high-quality content
- Building backlinks
- Leveraging essential keywords for your business
- Optimising website navigation
Through all these efforts, you are helping Google easily crawl your website, and bring back information to index it. Then, as the search queries go in, the better websites are the ones that earn a top position in the SERP, and therefore have the most chances of getting clicked on by users.
Focus on Content Marketing
Content marketing is a huge priority for many, and your web design business is no exception. Consider a potential client who visits your site. Because they are looking for web design services, of course, they will first consider what the platform looks like, but then what?
Say that at first glance they like the layout, colours, and other design elements. To get to know you better, they will take a look at the content, the words, and pictures you have there.
A content marketing strategy doesn’t just ensure your website provides potential clients with enough information about you, it also helps:
- Include keywords
- Improve your position in your industry
- Help search engines understand more about you and what you’re doing
- Help you match user intent
- Show off your skills and services
Content marketing is also not as difficult as it sounds – it’s easily done, for instance, by optimising your web page content with good keywords and adding blog posts where you go more in-depth about certain topics related to your industry.
A great way to leverage content marketing for your web design business is through the classic case study. Through it, you’re not just giving your site more content, but you can showcase your previous work a lot better, and demonstrate to potential clients what type of results you offer.
Diversify Your Marketing Tactics
There are a lot of cost-efficient marketing tactics apart from SEO and content marketing. For example, social media provides many powerful tools business owners can use to their advantage.
By setting up business profiles on social media, you can increase your brand awareness tremendously. Platforms such as Facebook also offer paid advertising options that allow you to target a specific target market, even business owners specifically.
Web design clients may not make a decision about whether to meet with you face to face based on your website alone. In some cases, they could turn to other places on the web just to gather more information about you, especially information that’s coming from other people like your previous clients.
If they look at your social media profiles and see:
- Active accounts
- An engaged audience
- Good reviews
Then they may be more inclined to make the first move.
And there are many more marketing tactics to also consider, such as:
- Email marketing
- PPC ads
- Publishing targeted articles on other blogs and websites
- Setting up business listings on online directories, etc.
But trying out all these different marketing tactics can be overwhelming, and even end up costing you a lot. And in the beginning, time and money are not two resources you have in spades. The golden rule is to not put all your eggs into one basket, but also not to do everything at once.
If, for instance, you want to focus on SEO and content marketing, some marketing tactics like social media can come with the territory. Try to prioritise the different tactics based on the resources you have to work with, which can also help you keep an eye on your results.
Over to You
Advertising a business’s products or services is a long-term effort that requires a good foundation to ensure all the pieces fit into place and work well together to help you achieve your results. If your foundation is wonky, then all your different marketing efforts likely won’t bring you the benefits you’re hoping for.
We can help you build that foundation. Australian Internet Advertising offers great web design services to assist Sydney business owners optimise their online efforts. We build good websites that convert, simple as that.
To work with us, please get in touch with our web design team online, or call us for a quick chat at 1300 304 640.
