One of the problems that clients have expressed to us many times is that after they came to a place where they understood the importance of investing in their web presence and web based marketing they were faced with a scale of choices that seemed to have no middle, only opposite extremes.
On one end of the scale there were the cheapest solutions, things like every more sophisticated Do-It-Yourself type services, such as the one being advertised on TV by Intuit heavily right now. In this type of solution, for the low, low price of $ 4.99 a month you can choose from over 2000 website templates that look nice, you just plop your logo into a corner and away you go.
The issues here, as I see them, are that while template style sites have come a long way, and are very inexpensive, it comes with the drawback that your site is going to inevitably look like a thousand other sites out there that chose the same template. They also put you in a box. There are boundaries when it comes to customization, limitations that may or may not fit your business. Combined that with the fact that while the look of the site may be well designed graphically, does it even fit your business, and will it speak to your target market segment? Does it integrate with the brand you have established with your company? You have worked hard to create and build your business brand, you have risked and sacrificed and carefully hired employees, established relationships and tried to hone your company’s message. With all that said and invested, do you want to entrust that brand now to a $ 5.00 website to be the most effective online tool to sell your company and its services?
Not much farther up the scale is the one person design shop, the person working from home with some 3rd party software to create a website, and usually a good knowledge or education in graphic design. While this can be another economical solution, a little pricier than the DIY site, this again does not normally address the marketing side of web design. Programming a pretty site is one thing, thinking through what it should look like, why it should look that way, what the navigational structure should be, how to drive traffic to it when it has gone live, what the branded copy should say…these are not the things that one person design shops are typically equipped to fully help you answer. These solutions are also usually not the most adept in the actual programming of a site if it falls too far into the “from scratch” customization arena, where functionality meets specific marketing goals. The bottom line is, while you can have the beautiful site in the world, but if you do not have a strategy to drive traffic to it it’s like putting the Mona Lisa of billboards in the middle of a desert where no one sees it and responds.
Move up one more rung on the scale and you have the even more expensive IT firms, which can specialize in software development, 3rd party software integration of existing systems and yes, they can create a website for you as well. This is squarely a issue of focus, as the idea behind creating a great and effective website with excellent ROI has to balance not just technical “know how”, but also an understanding of how marketing research figures into the design itself. The IT firm doesn’t really focus on understanding the target market segment your company is trying to talk to, get into their mindset and define their buying drivers. They are not focused on examining your competitors and understanding their brand proposition to make sure your message and copywriting is a differentiator in establishing your sustainable competitive advantage effectively to the consumer or company that hits your website.
From here the middle of the scale is noticeably vacant of options in the minds of many small to midsized businesses, and the next step up to a website design and development solution is a doozy!
At the top extreme of the scale are most of the advertising agencies and marketing firms that can certainly capture both halves of the equation: the marketing acumen and focus on strategy, and the execution of the strategy through proper and effective design and programming. The issue here is the price tag, plain and simple. We have reached the top end of the scale, into the rarified air of the website that now costs in the tens of thousands on the low end into the solid six figure category, and the goal of having a web based marketing strategy that is really effective appears to have becomes out of reach for the typical midsized business. This is where most of Xapsis clients had found themselves before meeting us…stuck in the middle.
Where do you go when you need more than a $ 1,000 web solution can provide, and yet you are shell shocked by the six figure proposal? When you need the marketing acumen, but assume that the costs associated with it is out of reach? When you or your clients have specific needs to make the business run more efficiently, more profitably, more conveniently, or even more globally through the web?
Xapsis Integrated Marketing was created to fill that middle gap! We can take the budget you have, maximize it, give you the results you want and the ROI you need, and you don’t have to sacrifice either side of the issue (Marketing/Execution). Let us show you today what our current clients have already found out, we can take your company from where you are, to where you want to be, and do it cost effectively! Don’t give up on the goal of fully leveraging the web as a viable and powerful marketing tool to connect with your current and future clients, let us show you what is possible and attainable today!
From where you are to where you want to be,
Doug
