Creative Designs Blog

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Posts Tagged marketing

Creative Designs launches company to help roofing companies

Sep 17

Posted by admin in Creative Designs News | Comments off

It has been a busy last few months for the team at Creative Designs as they have recently added a new division to their line of superior website products. This month Creative Designs has released a website aimed at helping roofing companies go online with a sleek, professional, and user-friendly website. After several months of market research and development, we have created the most affordable website package for roofing companies and have designed a product that will help roofing contractors close more sales.

In a statement from Creative Designs’ owner Shawn Gervais, he said “We spent a lot of time doing research on the marketing and sales side of things to perfect the most effective closing tool for roofing companies. Our roofing website sample illustrates the effectiveness of our product and has already helped several roofing contractors close 20% more sales shortly after our launch. We anticipate that this product will prove to be the single most important closing tool for any roofing company. However we are not offering this to every company. We believe that a large part of our products value is the exclusiveness that comes with joining our network. Since we want to build long-term relationships with our roofing contractors we will only be offering this product to one roofing company in every city across North America. This way our clients can maintain a significant competitive edge over their competitors to ensure that they are able to close more sales and grow their business.”

It is definitely a powerful product that every roofing company should consider before their competitors decide to join the Creative Designs network. The website packages are all-inclusive and clients will receive included search engine optimization along with their website, design, hosting, domain name, and emails for their business. You can find out more information about our new product division and to join our network of successful roofing contractors call us or complete the online signup at our roofing website design site by clicking here.

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Design it yourself or hire a professional website design firm?

Sep 17

Posted by admin in Business, Website design | Comments off

Whether you should design your website yourself or hire a website development firm depends on several important factors. Of course one of the most important things that you should consider is your level of IT expertise and available resources (i.e. IT staff or employees with development experience). There are several website technologies and development techniques/methods that can turn a plain, boring, and difficult to use website into a user-friendly, search engine optimized, professional looking, and functional company website. The decision to design and develop yourself or hire a professional website design company comes down to your skill levels (or that of your staff), the features you want or require, the image you want to project for your business, and the amount of time and energy you have to devote to developing your company website.

Some necessary skills you will need in order to design and develop a website are:

  • Knowledge of HTML – There are visual editing programs that can help you with design but some basic knowledge of HTML is necessary.
  • Artistic ability – In order to make the site visually appealing you will need good eye for color and generally good taste as well as creativity.
  • Graphic software expertise – You will also need some knowledge and experience with graphic editing/creation software in order to produce attractive web-ready photos, images, and graphics for your website. You will also need to optimize your images for the web so that they load quickly while preserving the quality.
  • Navigation expertise – Another critical skill is understanding how to present information and create a flow within your website. This means that you will need to have an understanding of navaigational structures, design, and implementation in order to develop a website that presents your information in a user-friendly way. If your website visitors have difficulty finding information they will leave and go somewhere else. Imagine yourself in a store where you are waiting for someone to come help you. Most people would leave after a brief amount of waiting time and go somewhere else. Now you can just imagine how many of your website visitors will leave your website instantly if they have difficulty finding what they are looking for on your site — all it takes is a simple click of a mouse and they are gone.
  • Programming knowledge - Depending on the features you require in your website, you may require advanced programming knowledge. If you require a database or interactive and dynamic content then you will need at least some knowledge of JavaScript, JQuery, PHP/MySQL, ASP or programming languages to add interactive web pages or integrate your website with an online database.
  • Marketing, advertising, and business experience – No matter how you cut it you need to have marketing and business experience to build a professional, feature-rich, user-friendly, and effective website. There are major business and marketing concepts and aspects that need to be taken into consideration when developing a website from the beginning stages to the official launch and maintenance.

I can’t do all of that, what do I do?

If you don’t have the time, energy, experience, or skills needed to develop your own website then the best option is for you to hire a professional website design company. Now, one important thing to note is that I mention company and not freelancer or designer. Website companies and firms can offer you three very important things:

  1. Reliability and professionalism
  2. Business and marketing experience
  3. Quality assurance

Furthermore, website design firms will be there in the future when your business needs their services/products whereas freelancers come and go and may not be around in a year or even a month when you need website maintenance, support, or other products and services. Can you really afford to risk losing your investment or time, energy, and money by choosing a freelancer to work on your business website? Over the years I have seen several clients who have lost a lot of time and money because they were trying to save some money by hiring a freelancer. This is your business we are talking about and if your business is important to you then it should be worth the proper investment in order to create a professional image and increase sales.

The best way that I have found to help business owners and entrepreneurs answer this question is to use an example that everyone understands. Deciding whether or not to hire a website design company to develop your website is like repairing a car. You can repair your own vehicle if you have the knowledge, tools, and the time and it will not cost you very much with your largest expense being time and energy. Of course if you are not highly trained or skilled in car repairs then the quality of your repairs may be much lower than the repairs completed by a professional mechanic. This is why the majority of people take their vehicles to professional mechanics in order to properly repair their vehicles. If you want or need your car to run smoothly then it is better to take it to a professional; especially if their work is guaranteed. Similarly when it comes to your company, you probably want your website to function properly, always be available, be user-friendly, search engine optimized, and feature-rich. So does it not make more sense to have a professional website design company manage your business website. This will allow you to use your time and energy to run your business while providing the peace of mind and security that your website is being developed and maintained by a reliable and experienced company.

Summary

The decision whether to hire a professional web design firm or to design and develop the site yourself depends on the skills and experience you have, how much time you can spare, and whether or not you want to do the work yourself or focus on the other tasks required to run your business.

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How to market your business on a small budget

Sep 17

Posted by admin in Business, Website design | Comments off

There are several ways you can market your business on a tight budget. Here are five cost-effective tips that you can use to kick start your marketing campaign and expand your client base.

When it comes to marketing your business there are many different options and strategies that each have their benefits. Even if you have enough capital and marketing dollars to fund an expensive and large marketing campaign you can usually achieve your marketing objectives by exhausting less expensive but equally effective options first.

Five Inexpensive but Effective Marketing Tips for Businesses on a Budget

1) Contact your existing clients and offer them discounts on services or products in exchange for referrals.

The establishment of an affiliates or referral program is an inexpensive way to foster new business. This tactic is great because it encourages old or existing customers to use or buy your products and services again while bringing you new clients. Another advantage with this approach is that the discount you offer your clients for the referral does not have to be substantial since they have already used or purchased your services or products at full price before. By offering them a discount or other incentive you are able to entice your previous customers to return and bring you new customers at the same time.

2) Stop marketing to customers who are unprofitable.

Many business owners have this idea that the more sales or clients you have the more successful your business is or will become however many business owners waste a significant amount of time, energy, and money with “break-even” customers. Essentially, you will be far better off if you market your products or services to new prospects than you would be to continue servicing or marketing to customers that are using more of your resources than they are contributing. Of course the familiar saying “It is less expensive to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new one” still rings true; however more often than not you will find that there are quite a few clients that are costing you as much or more than what you are investing in keeping them as clients. One easy way to curb this or at least minimize the impacts is to keep detailed records on all aspects of your business in order to determine which customers are break-even customers and which ones are worth a more serious investment and more marketing efforts.

3) Contact local media networks.

Local editorials convey far more credibility with prospective clients than paid advertising. Contact your local newspaper about running an interview about your business. Of course you will have to give them something to write about and it will have to be news worthy. Perhaps the new release of a service or product that benefits the community, some recent charity work, or even the launch of your business just to suggest a few.  Also, preparing a press-release and other information destined for the media will increase your changes of getting published.  In many cases, if you submit a ready-to-be-printed article your changes of getting printed are increased as local papers etc. often have “spots” that need to be filled from time to time. Why not help them fill that spot with your editorial.

4) Don’t let your customers fall through the cracks and slip away.

We have already covered the benefits of putting more effort, money, and time into customers that are profitable vs. those that are not, however every successful business owner knows the advantages of hanging onto clients that are worth hanging onto and you will most likely be able to distinguish between the two the longer you are in business. It is true that it costs far less to retain an existing customer (whether inactive or disgruntled) than to acquire a new one although you will need to use your business intuition to determine which ones are worth the investment of time, energy, and money. Send a personalized email or card, make a brief telephone call to see if all is well, or even send a small gift or discount card/customer appreciation card to let them know that you are and should still be a part of their day to day life.

5) Put your information on everything you hand out.

Put all of your contact details on every promotional material, letterhead, envelope, car door etc. that is used for your business. This may seem like common sense but you would be surprised at how many times we have received a business owner’s promotional materials with missing information or watched them drive past in an unbranded vehicle. Of course there are some objects such as vehicles that may be used for personal use as well so you would not want to permanently brand the object; however there are always alternatives. For example, you may share your vehicle with your spouse and would not want to invest in a vehicle wrap that permanently (can be removed but not easily or inexpensively) displays your company information. An inexpensive and easily removable solution is to invest in vehicle magnets.  There is really no reason why you should be traveling in a vehicle without displaying your company phone number, email, website, address, or at least your logo. Furthermore, only under extremely rare circumstances should you continue to distribute promotional materials with missing information. If you have a website then it should be clearly printed on every piece of paper, business card, envelope, or other item that you hand out. If you have recently acquired a company website but you still have thousands of business cards without this piece of information then you should order new ones with the website and put the old ones on reserve. Notice that I said reserve and not to toss them away. The reason you should keep the old ones is because they still have value, just not as much value as the new ones. Of course if you have paid for your website and/or would like customers to visit the website then you would not be doing your business or yourself any favours if you continued to hand out the promotional materials without the website address. The old ones are handy for specific circumstances and therefore are still valuable business tools. For example, you may find yourself in a situation where you are speaking with clients who would not be interested in visiting your website or do not have internet access. These are the perfect situations to distribute the old cards. Additionally, you can use them to give to acquaintances that have requested your number on a personal/friendship level. This serves two purposes: A) your acquaintance now has your contact details and will be able to contact you, and B) your acquaintenance may show the card to someone who would want your services or products or your acquaintance may even purchase or use your services or products themselves.

Conclusion

While these five steps may or may not benefit your particular situation, every business owner should invest some time in considering alternatives to expensive marketing strategies in order to utilize available resources and tools. There is no right or wrong approach to marketing as there are too many variables. The important thing to remember is to keep detailed records and statistics of your business practices, previous marketing strategies/results, customers and conversion stats, and any other form of data that can help to minimize the risks associated with marketing campaigns. Furthermore proper research, brainstorming, and a closer look at traditional forms of marketing can often yield great results while keeping within a small budget.

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