Help!!! We need website clients!

Hey guys,

I may be going a bit far in asking this question (people may not want to give out their secrets), but what is the best way to generate a steady stream of customers for your own website design firm? The reason why I ask is because I'm working with a friend who is having a hard time generating a steady stream of customers for his business. This is what I've suggested to him simply from what I've researched on the Internet:

1. Leverage Your Website: Use your website to capture visitors email and begin building an email lists. Of course, this assumes that SEO has been done to the site, etc.

2. Create some sort of affiliate program that will utilize your contact list and customers to become reps of your product (i.e. offer 5-7% on a referral).
3. Partner up with other design firms that will complement your services (web only firm teaming with a print only firm). Provide referrals back and forth through this system.

4. Purchase verified leads for web projects. This can be competitive depending on the lifetime of the lead.

5. Direct mail promotion. This can be costly, so what I suggested using business cards or postcards instead. Depending how you word it based on the space that you have on the media, you can put a promotion that is only redeemable by phone or the email opt-ins through the website.

6. Bid on projects through freelance websites. Only drawback that I’ve seen is the amount of bids and the price undercutting.

7. Focus on a specific type of web product and try to specialize in that area. What I've seen lately are company's trying to be everything to everyone and getting killed on price. I suggest focusing on one area of web development (i.e. 'retail e-comm) and charging a premium price since that is your specialty.

These are some of the ideas that I’ve come up with. Does anyone have any experience with these types of marketing techniques? What has and hasn’t worked for any of you?

By the way, I’m not trying to promote any marketing products or looking to steal anyone’s ideas and put them in an e-book to sell. Just want a meeting of the minds and help other entrepreneurs jump-start their business. I'm actually talking to some web designers to get their two cents on this subject and will get back with everyone to let you know if I found out any new or 'startling' information.

Thanks everyone.

First: have a desirable product and/or service. These often sell themselves. You're in town on a business trip, you need dinner. Where do you go? Chances are you'll end up at a place recommended to you by someone who lives in the area.



Catering to a niche is a great way to distinguish yourself. Do you really want a jack of all trades working on a project or someone who also has knowledge of your own business model. E.g. the person who designs websites with streaming audio and video for bands probably isn't the best choice to design for a luxury auto dealership and vice-versa.



All my direct mail goes straight to the recycle bin. Doesn't yours?



You're undercut because money here isn't the same as money there ...

Web design is a highly fragmented industry, with numerous options available to the potential client. The options are not just other web design firms, but web design products, templates, skins, wizards, do-it-yourself options, in-house design person/team, hosting firms that provide free design, "some guy", and "my nephew". Among other things, this makes it (at this time) a very low profit arena. [Side Note: For a short time this was highly profitable and it wasn't unusual to provide simple brochure-ware sites for $5,000 a page back in 1998. I worked at a company that had paid about $750,000 US for a 50 page site that included a small amount of interactive functionality (including a forum, and requests for information). It was a sad bunch of code, poorly written, almost unmaintainable, and impossible to re-skin or extend without substantial changes. I was hired after this fiasco.]

In this situation, unless the operation is relatively large and very well organized (so it can therefore take advantage of a sort of economy of scale), attempting to compete profitably in a fragmented marketplace is impossible. The best you can hope for is to slowly go out of business as your funds dry-up and your operating expenses continue to exceed your operating income. One day, someones check bounces and you can't handle the loss.

So... how do you deal with this? Whenever you are operating in this scenario (fragmented/low profit/creative field) you have to learn to focus your marketing efforts on your ideal customer instead of a shot-gun approach. Most of your suggestions above focus on finding a way to get customers to come to you, but you have to do the reverse.

Two ideas you listed lean in the right direction:
- Having a niche is critical (and very good advice), but how to apply this effectively is often misunderstood. Without going into too much detail, it is often thought that a niche is small, under-served slice of the market based on the kind of service/product they need or the industry the customer is in are in (like e-commerce as a niche, or sporting goods e-commerce as a niche). This is valid, but I propose you think of a niche as a sub-set of all potential customers (that is, the sub-set is customers who you can serve well) who need special attention and will be willing to pay a premium for it once they get a taste of being well served. This is a hard concept to understand for most small business people. In other words, the niche is not the industry/product/service/whatever but rather that the customer is "high maintenance". If you become the answer to their problems, they will become very loyal and be happy to pay a great deal more than the "going rate". You must be able to solve a problem for them where the common solutions have disappointed. The more disappointed the better.

- Partner up with other design firms. This is the beginning of thinking right (it might not be other design firms, but it could be. There could be other sources as well). Apply the item above on working a niche with this type of focus, and you have the start of an effective marketing plan for the small company. The real secret here is to think of the "partner" firms as being your ideal customer which you are going to serve better than anyone else has ever done (rather than the end customer who actually owns the site). The reason this is important is because this is a small enough group who has a constant need so that your marketing efforts will not be wasted. You want to create a situation where you are fishing in a barrel instead of fishing in a lake - your chances of just hooking something by accident is infinitely greater in the barrel than in the lake. There is no room for waste in your marketing efforts at this stage. [Note the idea on constant need. This is critical since it is drastically cheaper to maintain an ongoing customer compared to generating new customers.]

To make a clear example - a large mortgage company can advertise on the radio, television, on-line, in print, in outdoor (billboards, etc.), and direct mail because they are large enough to benefit from the overall potential in the market of people needing to get a mortgage sometime soon. This is the shotgun approach and works well if you are large enough and your customer can be served in a more or less generic manner. However, the individual mortgage broker (either working on their own or for a large company) has to be very focused. They can't broadcast to everyone in their area and hope that their message will be seen enough and be convincing enough to get some action. So how do they do it? They focus on marketing very directly to the people who have the biggest need for mortgage services - the real estate agents. And the real estate agents themselves don't even need the mortgages, but they need to have competent mortgage folks available to be able to get their (sometimes poor credit risk) customer into that home, since that is the only way the agent will get their commission. It is the need of the agent that you must fulfill - you market to the agent because if you satisfy the agent they can be a frequent repeat "customer". And you must be so good at what you do that they feel disappointed when they work with someone else. If you understand this you are one of few. Many small businesses act as if they are large businesses which results in the squandering of their marketing efforts.

That is just for starters. Over the years I have started about 10 businesses in fragmented industries and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way. Most very small businesses are just a way to be self employed, and that can be a very good thing, but at the same time most small businesses are going out of business from the first day they open the doors - they are just doing it a day at a time. One reason is that the typical small business person never learns that they have to work at a much higher profit level than the larger business. They have to go for the jobs/projects/customers where their smallness allows them to charge a premium.

Anyway, don't get me started.