Starting a web design agency looks glamorous from the outside. Successful agency owners earn millions of dollars, get to work with big brands, take luxurious vacations, and appear on Ted Talks.
It seems like the life of your dreams, right?
But, getting there is extremely challenging. Not everyone who started is at the top. Establishing a successful agency takes skill, persistence, commitment, consistency, and courage.
There are no shortcuts.
After spending 10 years in the industry and meeting over a dozen web design agency owners, here are some of our best tips that will take your creative endeavor to the next level.
New web development agencies often make the mistake of finding clients before curating an offer. That’s why agency owners complain about getting peanuts in their early days.
When you don’t decide your services, identify your USP, set timelines and create packages, you give your customers the authority to manipulate and make you do more work for less money. This is where offers come in handy.
But creating one isn’t that simple. Here is a checklist for curating an irresistible offer for your design agency:
Choose an area where your expertise lies or you feel the most passionate about. Your niche should be profitable, display your strongest skills, have growth opportunities, and have less competition. At the start, you can play around with two or three niches, but make sure to narrow it down to become an expert in one.
Not everyone in your niche will be your customer, so take your time nailing down your target audience. Create a customer persona of your ideal buyer by defining their demographics, goals and aspirations, challenges and objections to not buying your service.
With a buyer persona in place, you can be prepared with answers for all the “No’s” you might have to hear while pitching to clients. You can also better educate your audience on why they need your services by being present at places where they are most active.
You can use Hubspot’s Make My Persona template to create as many online personas as you like, according to your business needs.
Now that you know your target audience, you can identify the services that best suit their needs. Evaluate the market and select only those services that are profitable, easy to scale, and have a low barrier to entry. Many web design and development agencies also provide additional services like branding, search engine optimization, video production and editing, content marketing, and others to curate an all-in-one offer that’s impossible to resist.
By this time, you know the amount of work you are willing to put in and the outcome that your client will get from it. Instead of letting your client quote the amount, you put in your offer.
Your rate chart should have the services you are offering, the project timeline, and the expected result. In the end, include the total value of these services to what they are paying right now to entice quick buying.
Now, when you pitch to clients, you are confident in your services and are not undercharging for your efforts.
Running an agency isn’t a one-person job. You’ll have to build your in-house team and hire contractors or freelancers to complete your project. Hiring the right people is the most challenging job you’ll do as a leader. If you hire the wrong team members, you will never achieve your goals, scale your business or impress your clients.
Here are some tips to follow before you hire-
A design process includes brainstorming ideas, getting approvals, completing tasks, and working on feedback. While this seems manageable when you are working solo, but with establishing an agency comes dreadful repetitive tasks. This slows down productivity and makes it challenging to track project progress.
There are many great web design tools that web development agencies can use to automate repetitive tasks and deliver better customer results.
Here are some of them:
Your communication with your team and clients needs to be seamless. Collaboration tools ensure that team members can communicate across boundaries and clients are aware of the project’s progress. These are some of our best recommendations-
Agencies, large or small, juggle multiple projects simultaneously. From ideation to approval, there are a lot of moving parts that project managers have to handle to provide the best outcome. This can easily become chaotic if not handled properly. A project management tool saves you time and effort in managing projects. They make it easy for businesses to track project development progress, assign tasks, and stay organized at work. Here are some of the tried and tested project management software-
Most designers spend a chunk of their time creating mockups and wireframes for clients. These tools help designers seamlessly demonstrate designs over the web. You can also add your clients or other design team members to get feedback on the mockups. There are pre-defined templates to choose from, so designers don’t have to start from scratch. Some of the best web design tools for building mockups are:
Most web designers fear the process of feedback.
It leads to an endless chain of emails with vague comments and impossible requests, making it difficult for designers to understand what the client is trying to say.
So, here, having a visual feedback tool is extremely important. Your clients can directly put in comments, tag people, and communicate in the chat to gain clarity.
And one of the best feedback tools you must try out is Webvizio.
Webvizio lets you leave feedback, assign tasks, and track web bugs on live websites and digital assets. You can easily collaborate and get everyone on the same page. Webvizio lets you integrate your favorite productivity software so your team members can receive instant notifications.
You can create unlimited projects on the platform and add as many work tasks or comments as you want to see on the website.
Set deadlines, oversee task status, and track your team productivity and overall project progress. Get a clear picture of who is doing what at any given moment and achieve project milestones on time.
One of the biggest rookie mistakes new agency owners make is to stop chasing clients when they are at capacity. So, when they don’t have much work, they are forced to accept subpar projects to pay their bills.
Successful agency owners are always looking for ways to promote their services. This way, they are confident in charging high prices and converting big clients.
Here are some places you can look for clients-
For instance, toastdesign.co, a web design agency, has curated an excellent website that talks briefly about their work and services. They also run a blog page that gets over 10,000 monthly organic traffic. Toast ranks for high volume, niched keywords that get them good leads and contribute to a good portion of their revenue.
As your business grows, you’ll have less time to invest in learning new design skills. It’s not that you’ll forget how to build websites, especially when you are working five days a week, but you’ll indeed feel left out.
The web design industry changes pretty quickly. You’ll have to continuously upskill yourself to compete with the latest trends. So, in everything you do as a business owner, never forget to add new skills. The day you stop learning is the day you stop growing.
Here are some ways you can upskill as a design agency owner-
You can also encourage your team members to upgrade their skill sets by offering them access to design courses like-
No matter how simple it might look now, starting a business is a lot of work. There will be a lot of challenges that you might have to face to sustain your business. But, we are sure that these expert tips will help you.
Take your time, and don’t rush the process. You will hear success stories and see design agencies earning good money, but that doesn’t mean your journey isn’t worth it.
No matter what the situation, just get started.
