What kind of marketing approach is most suitable for a web design company in a country where over 60% of businesses don’t have websites because they 1. Can’t see the obvious benefits with having a website and 2. Can’t afford them? My co-founder and I have two passions, the first is online marketing and the other is doing something good for the people that are not as fortunate as we are. We have decided to offer our web design services in a country where 83% of the population uses internet on daily basis, but still the majority of business owners don’t take advantage of this ( I mentioned the top 2 reasons above). Now, since this is a poor country, we want to merge our two passions. Our plan is to give away free websites and marketing advice in hope that the businesses will (instead of paying us) use this money to make a difference in their communities. We would work side by side with the businesses trying to find great causes they could “sponsor” and they would not only get a free website and advice, but we would also promote every business that contributes in making their community better on our blog and through our existing social media channels. Even though my co-founder is a real marketing genius here in Scandinavia, we still find it difficult to figure out a way to reach and convince the business owners in this particular country (South East Europe) of why they need to be online (website, social media etc) even if the facts are that their customers already are online. It also feels like it’s so much harder to “sell” free services then to actually get people to pay for them (and we really don’t want to do that in this case). Anyone else that has experienced this and how did you solve it? Sorry for the long post, but we really hope you guys have some advice and/or ideas on what kind of actions we should take and how to best and most effective promote our free services. Thanks!
I would have to agree with Miguel above about not offering your services for free. Once you give something for free it is difficult to charge later. I would offer a basic service perhaps for a fixed duration for "Free" with options then for different paid services.
I appreciate from your points that these businesses may have little money but the idea is that with your help they can start to make money online. From my own experience all you get from offering anything for free is a passionate "Thank You" and nothing else.
I also think that offering the service as web design is probably the wrong terminology and one that in my own business have distanced myself from more and more. You need to offer them online boarding for business or some such offer. You need to be offering them the chance to get customers / presence / reputation / money online. Although these are meant to be natural results of web design and associated marketing the words "web design" don't resonate with most business users.
Here are some options that I would suggest
- Take percentage of their business
- Offer a regular (small) payment plan
- Offer them chance perhaps to regain all their fee if they get you 5 referrals for new business that result in new projects for you. The maths on this is that you will be bale to use the clients as your sales team and over time build a client base.
Answered 10 years ago
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