When asked why they stand out from the crowd of other web design or development agencies, many owners rattle off a somewhat generic list of benefits, such as great customer service or unique designs. But these features and benefits are common to many agencies. 

How can you truly stand out among competitors in today’s cut-throat web design agency landscape? This article presents some actionable insights from our recent webinar on this topic with leaders from two too-performing agencies, Developmark and TheCamel.co.

Obviously, every client coming to you wants a website that looks good and works well for visitors. But from a marketing standpoint, focusing on that alone doesn’t suffice to attract businesses to your agency. A useful mindset shift is to market customer attraction to clients rather than mere websites. After all, most businesses want a website for the purpose of attracting customers. 

To borrow from an old phrase, you need to sell the sizzle, not the steak. And, when looking at the standard agency offering, there is no “sizzle” in just promising to build a functional website for clients. What you need to focus on is selling the meaning of a service. What does a drag and drop website mean to prospective clients?

There is arguably no better meaning to a business than having a website that excels at attracting customers. If you can communicate how the websites you build will achieve that, you’ll get more clients. 

When clients buy website building or design services from you, they’re really buying your mind and your strategy. Yes, the technical foundations are important to get in place, but clients will do business an agency that demonstrates knowledge of the human element of web design, such as building rapport and relationships with the client and helping them connect with customers’ emotions on their websites, all while ensuring their sites look unique.

Back in the early days of modern psychology, Austrian Sigmund Freud wrote about how the two main motivators in human life are seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Freud’s writing about this topic became formulated into what’s known as the pleasure principle. 

As an agency, when trying to establish what the “sizzle” is for any client, it’s worth using this principle and asking what brings them pleasure about your services and what difficulties does your agency solve that would be painful to deal with. You can still describe features and benefits, but to really stand out, try and qualify clients by getting to their deepest motivations. And skew towards the pleasure side of this principle. 

Taking an example from the leading agencies that featured on the webinar, a prominent headline on Develomark’s website entices prospective clients with a promise to, “turn your website into a full-time salesperson”. This sentence alone directly speaks to a pleasurable motivation for any business owner looking for design, search, or other Internet marketing services.

Even though you’re running a modern agency selling services that didn’t even exist 50 years ago, the actual sales process remains pretty much the same as it’s always been. This is important to get right, especially the three first phases of sales, which are:

1. 
   Meet and greet — the vital element here is building a good first impression of your agency. Once again, succeeding here doesn’t come from focusing on features and benefits, but from being personable. 
2. Qualifying — in the qualifying phase, you’ve got to determine whether or not any client is a good fit for what you offer. This is as much about connecting on a personal level as it is finding out their business goals; get to those all important pleasure and pain points.
3. Demonstrating — the demonstration phase is where it’s fine to focus on features and benefits (e.g. websites being primed for Core Web Vitals without any work from the client’s side) but add a personal slant to this gleaned from previous steps. For example, if the client likes golf, then having their website optimized for Core Web Vitals out of the box means more time practicing their swing.

A good way to strip the essentials of your messaging down in a way that stands out is to try and get potential clients to ask, “why would I do this myself?’ Convey the professionalism and uniqueness of your web design services to bring clients into a mindset where they wouldn’t think of getting what they want any other way, whether on their own or from an alternative agency. 

When people began first visiting the pyramids in Egypt, they wondered how on Earth it was possible to build such structures. Speculation began percolating that extraterrestrial life must have created such complex designs. When people look at your brand, your websites, and your process, they ideally should feel a degree of incredulity that it’s even possible to provide whatever website service it is for that cost you’re quoting. 

When you take this approach you need to back it up with action. The first site you deliver to any new client should get them thinking, “how in the world did this agency do that at the price level they’ve charged.” You should get business owners’ friends asking who designed their site, because it looks that good. 

The unsexy truth about web design services is that you’ll often just about break even on the initial website, but profitability stems from an ongoing long-term relationship in which businesses buy added-value services from you because the initial impression was so solid.

A final secret sauce to aspire for as a digital agency is to get to Disney levels of service. Study what Disney does and apply that to whatever service you offer, and you won’t go far wrong. And don’t forget to speak to those pleasure and pain points rather than listing features/benefits for whatever clients come to you, whether it’s a local coffee shop wanting to get found in their town or an eCommerce site owner selling an exciting new product.