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If you are thinking of setting up a web marketing agency then you need to think carefully about how you are going to run it. It may be that you are going to only use freelance designers, marketing experts and programmers or you may decide to employ a number of people to work within the business. Ideally, you will need a central hub that everyone can work from, as even if you are only using sub-contractors, ideally you want them close at hand so you can discuss projects and keep up to date with what they are doing.

When looking for clients, you need to decide how you are going to market your web design and marketing agency. The first thing you need to do is have a great website and a good presences on the social media sites. You may also decide to attend some networking events to give out business cards and drum up some business.

Be sure to check what your competitors are able to offer and also what they charge as this will allow you to check that you are competitive.

Results are often a huge selling point when it comes to marketing, so you may need to build up a good portfolio before you can tout for larger contracts etc.

In any job it is important to have a way of showing people what you can do. It may be that you have physical things you have built, designed or made or that you can show them results you have got for previous customers.

As a graphic designer you need to be able to show your potential customers what types of designs you can do. It may be that you have no qualifications relating to design work and therefore the only thing that potential customers have to go off is your previous works.

The best way to do this is to create a portfolio. If you are a web designer only then you may decide that the best way to do this is through a website. If you also create logos etc. then you may want examples of printed stationery.

When putting your portfolio together do a brief few paragraphs talking about the brief for the project. This will give your potential customer a good overview of the issue the client had and how you overcame it. Try to remember to update your portfolio as often as possible so your latest work is always available to view.

Having your own business can be exciting but you will quickly learn that if you do not have strategies in place for branding and marketing, you will struggle to make it successful.  

A brand strategy is making long term goals for the development of a successful brand and may include thing like having a logo designed, marketing through social media sites and creating a website. To create an effective brand strategy you need to consider your consumers. You should always keep in mind where you want your business to go and how you are going to achieve that.  

A brand is not just a logo or business card it is the entire ethos of the business and the experience you give to your customers. 

There are creative elements to your branding such as logo, slogans and colourways that will help people recognise you company apart from others, but this is just a part of it.  A brand needs to be built up and this is where your marketing comes in to play. Once you have the creative side sorted out you need to decide what experience you want your customers to have and then tie this all in together with your marketing.

With many people using phones, tablets and laptops to view websites, it is imperative that yours looks and functions correctly on all of the different screen sizes. This is a problem that many designers and programmers face when designing a website, it’s easy to have a page designed on a desktop PC and think that everything looks good and works well at the testing stage but then it can look awful when accessing it from a mobile device. You may find that the display is not aligned and some of the site won’t function as it should leaving the viewer no option but to leave the site and go elsewhere. This is obviously not what you want when trying to promote your business.

To get round this issue a lot of larger companies have a specific mobile version of their website and/or an App.  The website can recognise what the screen size is of the device that is being used to view the site and display the correct version.  Mobile sites are often more basic and have larger display text that can easily be read from a small screen, they also tend to have easier navigation around the site with not as many navigation tabs onscreen. 

Marketing can be very confusing at times and there is so much jargon about that it is easy to get confused over what all the different terminology means. Retargeting is different to remarketing and below we explore what retargeting is and how it can be used.
Retargeting is a relatively new term, about 5 years old and can often be split down in to online and offline. We are going to focus on online remarketing in today’s world and look at the advantages of using it in your business strategy.
In a nutshell remarketing is marketing your products or services more than once to the same person or group of people. For example, if you send out an email containing links to products on your site and a person clicks on one of those links. You may then email them to ask what they thought about it, if they need any additional help or to give them a special offer code to persuade them to make a purchase. This is remarketing – essentially marketing again to the same person.
If someone does make a purchase through your site then you may send them an email afterwards saying …”we see that you have bought x and thought you may be interested in this…”. This is another way to retarget them after they have made a connection with you by buying through your website. This is used by many companies such as Amazon and can work extremely well.

There are a number of ways in which you can do marketing to help increase your sales or enquiries. Some forms work better for some businesses than others do. Mail marketing is often a common form that businesses use as it is often quite cheap to do and easy to track the results.

A business may use email marketing as the main way to communicate with their customers. This can allow them to quickly reach each contact and even personalise the email and products/services that are included in the email based on their marketing preferences or previous purchase history. One of the many advantages of email marketing is that you can track who has received your email, how has opened it and even what they have clicked on within the email.  

Some businesses use postal marketing to communicate with their customers, allowing them to send out catalogues, promotional flyers and newsletters. You can personalise printed mail but it often ends up costing more money and more time.

Post mailing is quite an expensive process of marketing compared to email marketing and it is hard to track the results of how successful the campaign has been. This being said, many companies still feel that it is beneficial to their business.

If you are looking for a free statistics package than can allow you to track your visitors on your website then you will probably opt for Google Analytics. The code can be very easily added to your website to ensure that each time someone lands on your site their visit is tracked. It can be very useful in finding out if your marketing is working and where is best to invest your time and money. The great thing about analytics is that it allows you to drill down in to more than just the number of visitors you can actually find out what pages they viewed, how they found your site and how long they spent on the site amongst other things.  

You do have to be careful though taking everything at face value as sometimes the data can become skewed. If you notice a sudden increase in your traffic then check where the visits have come from. If it is showing as coming from referring sites, then dig a little deeper to find out which sites it is saying gave the referral. You will often find that this is not real traffic and is actually what’s known as spam referrals. Spam referrals can make your web stats have a sudden unexplained spike in traffic which often comes with an extremely high bounce rate. Usual you can visit the referring URL and find out if there is a link to your site, if not then it is spam and needs to be discounted.

If you are a website programmer then you will know that time is money. The quicker you can do something the more money you will make on the project. If you find that you are constantly having to write out the same bit of code and time again then it is worth creating a code a bank that you can refer to. When you write out a chunk of code that you often use, copy it and paste it into your bank, then when you come to need it again it is a simple case of copy and paste. After some time it is worth checking that the code you have in your bank is the most up to date.
You may even want to go as far as setting up a number of template websites that you can resell. You may be able to see them and providing you have the content and images to go in them, get them up and running within a few days. This is a great way of making the most out of your time and streamlining your processes. Programmers that do this often make websites faster and can have a very quick turnaround on developing a website.

As a web developed CSS is very important and often one of the first elements you will learn about. CSS helps to design the page, setting sizes, positions, fonts and colour of different elements you have on your page. Not all browsers support the same CSS functions so it is important that you keep up to date on what works on what browsers to make sure that you site performs well on all of them not just one of two. CSS is all about boxes. Everything that is displayed on the screen has a box. Each element is given a width but then you can also add padding and borders to this meaning that the placeholder needed for that box will take up more room than the actual width of the element. With people using a number of different screen sizes to view websites it is important that you make your design responsive so that elements shrink and enlarge to fit the screen they are being viewed on. If you do not do this, not only will your website not display properly to some people but you may also get penalised by the likes of Google in the search engine results pages and find that you get pushed further down.

As with any website design, when designing a site for children, you must always consider your audience and build it with them in mind. A website that will predominantly be used by children must be easy to navigate through and laid out in such a way that they understand how to get from one area to another and back again. It is important to keep the content clean and clear and not try to be too fancy. Children often like to see bright colours and moving areas of the site, but overdo it and they may find it too confusing.

If the site is going to be used by children of varying ages then you may want to split the site up by asking the child to choose their age group first. This can then allow you to really specifically tailor the content that is shown to them so that it fits their ability.

If the site is an educational one, then you may want to include some simple games that they can play to ensure that the site is not only educational but also fun to use. When considering your navigation, younger kids generally prefer image and character-based navigation whereas older children may be able to read though a list of options available to them or use a search function to find what they need.