Are you looking for a web designer in the beautiful Tar-Heel State capital? If you are, you have come to the right place. But before we talk about what we can do for you, let’s talk about what it means to be in business in the capital of North Carolina.
The city of Raleigh is the 41st most populous city in the United States and the largest city in the Research Triangle, home of some of the most important Universities of the country: NC State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Raleigh has been featured in a number of “Top 10 Lists”, including publications by Forbes, MSNBC and Money magazine, because of its quality of life and advanced business climate. However, because of this vibrant business climate, combined with the rich educational environment, Raleigh is a competitive market. What that means for business owners is that in order to properly compete, a higher level of sophistication is necessary.
Raleigh is home to hundreds of website design companies, as with anything, some of them are really competent and some can’t really bring value to your business.
How to find a good website design company?
The difference between a good and a bad web design comes back always to the site’s ability to reach it’s business goals. Goals can include things like: lead generation, brand recognition, internal staff support, documentation, as an information hub and many more.
As long as your web design company is capable of designing a website that will reach those goals for your company, you are in good hands.
Why a regular design agency approach doesn’t work, especially in RDU?
The reason why the traditional agency model for web building doesn’t work is because it fails to address the main concern of websites in 2024: websites by themselves are not good at generating leads for your business.
Traditional agencies focus on designing you a site maybe even with all the bells and whistles, but fail to provide effective solutions to the question: “how are we going to bring in the traffic?” Imagine for a moment that you are creating a beautiful store, great inventory, top notch selection, great lighting, the ambience is second-to-none. However, the store happens to be located 35 miles away from the closest town. No matter what you do to the store, the problem is with bringing people to it. The same applies to websites. You have to plan how you are intending to bring qualified traffic to your website in order for the reach the website’s objectives.
In Raleigh, in specific, the combination of a vibrant business environment with the higher education nature of the city, makes a more competitive field. Businesses here need to leverage their competitive advantages at a much higher level if they want to be successful. In smaller cities, the offer of services is often lower, and therefore the available service providers have a better chance of doing business with a less sophisticated approach.
If we add to the mix, the post pandemic environment, we see that:
- Traditional marketing is not as effective as it used to be in bringing awareness to a business.
- Digital marketing is more competitive because almost every person has a computer on their pocket (smartphones.)
- 252,000 websites are being created every single day. And there are more than 1.18 billion websites in existence on the web.
The solution
The solution to reaching your business goals involves a new way of thinking and an approach that also keeps the foundation of the old things that work.
- Branding must be a key component of your differentiation strategy. If people can’t remember you, then you’ll have a harder time gaining momentum for your business. Being recognized by your target audience is crucial.
- Strategic thinking must drive your web project, rather than being a secondary thought. Your website should be designed as a cog in a wheel of business objectives, rather than an objective by itself. Your website is not just a brochure online, it is a tool that should generate a multi-faceted set of values for your business including: branding recognition, communication, nurturing and of course sales.
- The website should be seen as a marketing tool and measured as such.
- The website should be matched with an effective marketing plan.
The Merkados AIM System
At Merkados we created a system that we have been refining for the the last 20 years. We call it the AIM System. AIM stands for Attract, Improve and Momentum through Measurement.
With AIM, we successfully help business owners address the pillars of how to grow their business with their digital presence: we attract an audience to an optimized set of communication vehicles while we refine your digital competitive advantage messaging to create new moments of growth.
In essence, we improve your messaging, we attract your target audience to that message, we measure the results and we start again – creating a system that helps your business grow, not just a website that looks nice.
If you would like to learn more on how your business in Raleigh can benefit from our web approach, contact us today!
Topics: Website Design Raleigh, AIM System, Raleigh Digital Marketing, Raleigh, NC, RDU.
