Small Business Website Development or Small Business Marketing
SmashingRed has been around for over a year and a half now and I have learned lots. I have worked with a number of clients to help meet their objectives and goals and continue to do so in the future.
Help Smart Small Business Get the Web Right
In the past few months, working on website projects and development of new systems and strategies for building better websites, faster, I realized I forgot why I started this company: To help smart small business get the web right by intelligently integrating it into their business and achieve their goals.
I am not sure that I know how to say what I want to say about the marketing information void that exists, but I see time-and-time-again, local and big businesses going under or struggling. You cannot just hang up your shingle in a competitive marketplace and expect to build a business.
Why Does a Website Developer Care About Small Business Marketing?
Websites are a facet of marketing. It doesn’t matter what they do—whether they educate people about your company, inform visitors about your products and services, sell things online and etcetera. And, just like good customer service or your beautiful sign, or your telephone directory ad, it must contribute to turning visitors into customers. Marketing is nothing more than leading people to choose something that you are offering.
Expand or Contract?
My conflict is deciding whether to expand the idea of SmashingRed into a marketing consultancy or sharpen my focus onto just building great websites.
The reason to even consider this is that unlike big business, small business don’t have marketing departments or marketing teams. To make matters worse, most adfirms-come-marketing consultancies, are more interested in winning awards than building actual measurable value for their clients.
Small Business Owners Search for the Starting Line
Many of my small business clients don’t know where or how to start actively marketing their business—they don’t know what segments make up their market, they don’t know what a segment is; they don’t know what emotion their customers are fulfilling by using or buying their product; they don’t know that people and business make decisions based on emotions; they don’t know how to write a compelling message for a campaign; they don’t know what a campaign is; they don’t know how to focus on prospects. How can I then expect my clients to write compelling copy to put onto their website if they don’t know these things? How can I even deliver the success that I promised if all the design and development of a great website is then filled with words and images focused on the wrong thing? The answer is I can’t.
Take Control or Change Vision
So, I either have to take control or let go of the idea of building websites for Small Business that get the web right. One thing is certain, I am passionate about helping Small Business achieve their goals. The question is how far do I take it?
What do you think? Stick to Websites or Take on the World?
March 20th, 2008 at 2:56 am
So which direction would you say you ended up taking? I don’t have any insight on whether to take on the world or stick to websites. I just wanted to thank you for the information you have shared. I strongly identified with what you said about wanting to do things perfectly and then ending up not doing anything.
I’ve seen a lot of your posts on modxcms.com and have appreciated your direction and help in those forums. I hope your business is doing great. I’ve gleaned a lot of good information from your blog here and I thank you for it.
March 20th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Mike,
You know, I never completely answered this.
While I feel that I have focused more on making SmashingRed more about web design, the fact that I work with small business implicitly requires that I be a bit of a marketing consultant to them.
Many of my clients still think that Marketing is something they do if they have some extra money or some nebulous intangible that they can’t do because they didn’t go to school and study it. Well, neither did I, but I have read and implemented much of what I learned and realised that Marketing, in a practical sense, is about establishing trust, building relationships and fulfilling the desires. In other words to get people to like you, and agree to buy your product or service and come back for more or refer you to to others.
Marketing is so entwined with every aspect of business that to say that you don’t know how to do marketing is to not understand business at all. The way you answer the phone, deliver your product, fulfil orders, speak in public; that’s all marketing. As John Jantsch, Micheal Gerber, Jay Conrad Levinson, Seth Godin and others would say–to be in business is to be in Marketing.