Web Designers Can Be Hazardous to Your Wealth

To qualify the title of this post, I have seen four main web design strategies or styles both locally and throughout North America. Three out of four are not as effective at building new leads/sales/clients.

1. Graphic Design / Print Shops
   Often offering visually appealing websites as a value added service, but lacking any online marketing strategy or growth plans.
2. Traditional Marketing Firms
   Often offering web design as a value added service to traditional print, tv, and radio marketing methods. These websites are not the core focus and may lack online marketing strategy and growth plans.
3. Recently Graduated / Retrained Web Designers
   Often very strong in the technical aspects of web design programming and languages, but lacking  any online marketing strategy or growth plans. Many times the websites are technically very functional, but lack a visually appealing user interface.
4. Inbound Marketing Firms
   Combines visually appealing websites with technical web design expertise and marketing strategies that set growth goals for leads and sales. Inbound marketing has measurable ROI or return on investment, whereas traditional marketing is more difficult to see the results of an ad campaign.

As a consumer, I have seen a noteable difference between firms that offer inbound marketing and those who do not. The biggest difference being that inbound marketing firms are vested in the success of their customer, demonstrating a return on investetment tha that makes inbound marketing particularly attractive to repeat customers.

My experience as a consumer with traditional outbound marketing firms is much more hostile, with pushy commission based sales people more concerned about a one time sale than a mutually beneficial lifetime relationship with their clients.

These observations have helped me form my company into what it is today, a full service inbound marketing firm supported by a team of experts to provide customers with affordable and effective marketing that they can see is working.

So whether or not you decide Websense is right for your project, keep this in mind when you are sourcing a marketing firm to promote your business: Is the marketing firm you are considering good at only good at one piece of the puzzle, or do they have a well thought out strategy to increase leads and sales for your company?