The Smart Agency Approach to Website Design

Brought to you by Richard Mullins

Are agencies doing their clients and themselves a disservice when it comes to building corporate websites? Chances are if you ask a client this question the answer will be no. The site most likely reflects the company's visual brand identity, the tone reflects its personality, the quality and calibre of the material is first-class. Everything seems perfect -- but is it?

In designing websites, many brands could be missing an excellent revenue generation opportunity that could not only help them pay for the design and maintenance of their sites, but could also help contribute to the company's overall bottom line. So what can agencies do to increase revenue generation opportunities from brand websites?

The smart-agency approach to website design
To answer this question, we need to take a close look at what the smart agencies are doing. Quite simply they're providing more than just attractive creatives. They understand the broader business needs and build websites that meet the marketers' strategic business objectives. They help solve problems and act as business consultants who understand the brand's business and entire ecosystem.

For instance, the websites they design get customers to do what the marketer wants and are focused on solving the problems set out in the brief before being attractive from a design perspective.

While these agencies are interested in winning awards, they're even more obsessed with design that meets a strategic objective, over and above creating websites that just look pretty from the get go -- after all, form should follow function. It's this old adage that smart agencies keep at their core.

Generate additional revenue with cross brand selling
Although most marketers aim to increase revenue as much as possible, it doesn't necessarily mean they are designing their websites with the sole purpose of achieving this.

For some marketers the aim, for example, is to increase traffic and use it as a tool to find out what products customers are interested in (using behavioral analytics technology), and for others it might be for customer profiling purposes. In these scenarios, regardless of what it's been designed for, the smart agency would have helped the marketer achieve the problem set out in the brief.

If, however, the goal of the marketer's website is to deliberately generate revenue from the website, then one of the tactics they can use achieve this is to make use of an affiliate network to sell between websites. Take this example: When a car manufacturer sells vehicle applications, what it might do is partner with other brands that sell extended warranties and insurance, sell these products during the application process, and share any revenue generated by the opportunity.

This approach can do wonders for your revenue, but it's important to recognize it can harm your brand too. Most affiliate networks don't provide good co-branding recommendations, and so you never know who you're teaming up with.

Another way to tackle this is for the marketer to get their agency involved and to identify bespoke affiliate-like opportunities they can manage together, instead of relying on a network. In this type of scenario the two marketing departments will be responsible for creating the promotions and deals, while the agencies will provide valuable advice on the kinds of brands to be associated with.

In doing this, marketers will also be able to develop more strategic and sophisticated campaigns that allow for better targeting, profiling, and co-marketing.

Revenue sharing delivers better design
If cross selling is not appealing, marketers could consider working on a revenue sharing basis with the agency.

Typically, when an agency sells its creative it does it well. But when the site it delivers to a marketer doesn't do well, it will reticently admit its failure -- which is why we think revenue sharing is ideal. It forces agencies to step up to the mark and guarantee their work. It also locks agencies into developing creatives that genuinely deliver on the brief. Essentially, it also means agencies will be more motivated to succeed and act with the marketers' best interests at heart.

Conclusion
Successful revenue generating websites don't just happen by sheer luck. They're the result of a lot of hard work and rely on a considerable amount of intelligent thinking to get up and running. They also rely on partnerships with the right agencies, technology partners, and brands. Essentially those marketers and agencies that are succeeding are aware of this and it's their websites that are pushing design to the edge.

Richard Mullins is director of Acceleration.