[Focus on Just One Thing] How to Choose a Website Production Company You Won't Regret
ACIDHOUSE, INC.'s Tetsuya Ashida here.
Small business owners working on launching or managing a website sometimes ask me this question.
I would like help from an outside production company or partner, but where should I go and how should I ask?
In this article, I answer those questions.
When Choosing, Only One Thing Really Matters
To put it bluntly, their specialty is all that matters.
Of course, you also want to assess their track record, reliability, and compatibility, but in practice you cannot judge those until you try working together.
What matters most, I think, is whether they have a clear specialty and whether you feel you can safely leave the work to them.
For some reason many people treat this separately, but choosing an outside production company or partner is actually no different from hiring staff. Everyone and every company has strengths and weaknesses, so ask them to handle only what they do well, and expect strong performance.
Conversely, don't push them into work outside their strengths, and steer clear of outside production companies or partners who eagerly say “We'll do it!” without being particularly good at it, operating in full “we just want work” mode.
Which Work Should You Outsource?
Broadly, there are three categories:
- Website production
- Customer acquisition
- Operation
Let's look at each in detail.
Website Production
This falls into three areas:
- Planning and structure
- Design
- Site construction
For websites built by small businesses, “easy to attract customers” and “able to update and improve quickly and repeatedly” are extremely important requirements.
Ideally, choose a company that understands designs that attract customers and is good at building on a CMS such as WordPress, but at the very least, make proficiency in CMS construction a minimum requirement.
In reality, very few production companies have outstanding know-how in customer acquisition.
So your side (the business) needs to learn and handle anything that affects customer acquisition yourselves.
For production, you can “do everything yourself,” “outsource part of it,” or “hand over everything (outsource it all)”.
Which method you choose depends on your business's situation, but one thing you absolutely must keep in mind is: “Just because you use an outside production company or partner does not mean you can give up learning basic web knowledge or managing the work”.
The reason is simple: website production is part of your business, and it is your business itself that determines its success.
In that it requires management, this too is just like staffing.
Customer Acquisition
People tend to think “customer acquisition = advertising agency or SEO consultancy,” but that's a common mistake.
Not all of them are like this, but the goal of companies of this kind is to extract larger budgets from their clients, not to deliver results or support business growth.
Customer acquisition isn't something you tackle one tactic at a time, such as advertising or SEO.
- Build the site
- Attract customers
- Analyze once you start getting responses
- Improve the pages
- Analyze further
- Attract customers and encourage existing customers to return
- Analyze further
- Increase the budget and attract more customers
- Repeat steps 5–8
You should work through it as this full cycle.
I have used the phrase “customer acquisition” so far, but what you actually need to do is grow your website into a money-making asset and build systems—in other words, marketing.
So if you want support, the company that built your website is the best choice if it knows customer acquisition well, since it understands the background. If not, choose a marketing company or marketing consultant, not an advertising agency or SEO consultancy.
One yardstick is whether they are well versed in direct response marketing (DRM). It's worth asking when you contact them.
Many advertising agencies take about 20% of the ad budget they manage as their incentive each month. In other words, what matters to them is the size of the budget spent, rather than advertising performance.
With SEO consultancies, there are quite a few cases of practices that backfire in the long run by locking in a low rating from Google—SEO spam in the past, mass-produced copycat articles today。
Another thing these companies have in common is that accounts are often won and run by sales teams “with quotas to hit.” Contacts and teams also change, so realistically, they are hard to call well-suited partners for the goal of business growth.
Operations
This covers support for day-to-day website updates, CMS updates, server management, domain renewals, and other engineering work needed for ongoing operation.
For operations, too, unless you have a particular reason not to, it's best to choose the company that built the website.
The reason is the same: they know the background.
If You Can Hand Over the Whole Thing, That's Best
As shown above, there are several ways to outsource, but if you don't know how to divide up the work or want to prioritize speed, another option is to rely on a partner skilled at using the web strategically to grow businesses.
Consolidating everything with a web strategy partner gives you the following:
- You never lose sight of growing the business through the web
- Communication costs stay low
These are the advantages.
I wrote that when outsourcing, you should ask partners to do what they're good at, but outsourcing piecemeal tends to pull you off your objective, add work, and cause miscommunication.
Hiring such a partner does cost a fair amount, but it will be more efficient than moving the individual pieces forward yourself.
A web strategy partner is, so to speak, a conductor.
They don't carry out every task themselves as one person (or one company); they identify the methods and work needed, assign the hands-on tasks to other outside companies or partners, and manage them.