What's the difference between Web Design & Digital Marketing?

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Should you be spending your money on web design, or digital marketing? Or even both? What can each of these aspects of the online world do for your business? Below are three starting-point tips to explain what you need to focus on to grow your business.

Web Design is the process of planning and building a website that will increase conversion of visitors to leads. Digital Marketing involves implementing strategies to improve the reach of your content and drive traffic to your website and social media channels.

Using digital marketing to increase traffic when your website is not up to scratch will turn away customers and is a waste of your time and money.

Before heading down the digital marketing path, make sure your website:

loads fast
looks great and trustworthy,
obviously and succinctly states what you do
is easy to use and navigate,
provides quick access to key products or services, and
delivers a good user experience on mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktops.

So when do you need Web Design Vs Digital Marketing?

Web Design is required when your current website:

is slow
is not mobile responsive
doesn't reflect branding, products or services well
low or no rank on Google for your company name, key products and services
has errors or broken links
has been hacked
has a high bounce rate from the home page or entry point
does not bring leads

You need a professional web design company to oversee the entire web production process. Not only to produce a pretty picture and turn it into a website, but someone who:

is equipped to understand your goals and wider marketing plan,
can incorporate their knowledge of design, consumer psychology and behaviour to improve conversion,
can build an optimised website that people and search engines love, and
understands the technology to develop and host a well performing website

Once you have a great website that is secure, responsive, loads fast, looks great, reinforces your brand and keeps people engaged, then it's time to implement digital marketing.

Digital Marketing is required when you have:

low brand awareness
low traffic to website
low engagement and likes/followers on social media
low or no Google rank

You’re going to need a digital marketer to help you navigate the plethora of tactics that modern digital marketing success requires – SEO, Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Native Advertising – do you have the time, skills and resources to deal with all of that?

Do you know of any successful company, in the digital age that we live in, operating without the continual use of websites, social media, email marketing campaigns…? The list of digital marketing methods is endless! No matter your business type or model, there is an online marketing tactic that will work for you, if you’re willing to invest the time and money in the experts who know how to help you. And none of this will work if you have a poor-quality, non-mobile-responsive website to point your potential customers towards.

If you’ve got your beautiful, functional, mobile-responsive website all set and ready to go – that’s great! Sometimes it might seem like you’ve poured a huge chunk of budget into building a website, and now you have to dig deep again to implement a digital marketing strategy. This isn’t necessarily the case! Depending on what marketing strategies you want to focus on, digital marketing doesn’t have to be expensive to yield results. If you’re a small business and can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on online marketing, try focusing on Search Engine Optimisation, regularly posting compelling content to social media, and/or building an email mailing list and sending out informative emails on a regular basis. There’s plenty that you can do without reaching deep into your wallet – you just have to be willing to spend the time.