Digital Opinion South Africa

Website automation: The beginning of the end?

In today's world, everyone needs an online presence for their company or brand, for those that say otherwise I say good luck to you. With self-making website builders and logo makers, the market tends to vie for these cheaper options when building their brands. This is creating a stigma that the website services of digital agencies are becoming obsolete and irrelevant.
Website automation: The beginning of the end?
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What people tend to forget is that we are often dealing with visionaries and creatives who are entrepreneurs that believe their product is the next best thing to hit the market. Not only that but they also believe that their way of marketing their product is better. Many of these people then take it into their own hands to build and market their brands. Why? Because it is the cheaper option! I almost wonder if these people have ever heard of the phrase, ‘you get what you paid for’.

Consult an agency

Understandably there are those that are not able to afford outsourced services, however, in the long run, a shoddy made website or logo will have a far worse effect on their growth and ROI. The best is to consult an agency. With so many around, it will be easy to get an approximate estimate of costs and idea of their previous work in the field.

As great, easy and cheap as platforms like Wix might be, you are not getting any specialist feedback or insights from those who do this for a living.

A brand is like a house, if you have a weak base, at some point, it will come crashing down around you.

Remember when building a brand, it is best to do it in stages and bite-sized chunks. There are agencies that will not cost an arm and a leg to build a decent landing page for your business, where at a later stage you can continue to build on it. This gives time for adapting and room for improvement as you continue, as a brand very rarely is perfect from the get-go.

Are dev houses and departments becoming irrelevant?

The real question is whether or not dev houses or agencies with that department are becoming irrelevant. My answer may be surprising, however after talking to clients and friends with their own businesses, we are in fact benefiting from these builders for two reasons.

The first reason this is good is due to these builders acting as a sieve to bring clients that are open to solutions and proper brand building to our door. This keeps the process smooth and the channels open, where advice and experience are well heeded.

The second reason is that with all the clutter and the ease with which sites can be built, brands that are serious about their products want to stand out from the clutter and building the site or logo yourself is not going to get you there.

The real question that should be posed, with regards to this topic is, are these self-made builders not an advantage to the marketing industry and agencies, and are they not actually improving the margins of these agencies?

About Keenan Bouwer

I have a strong base in marketing and I believe in focused strategies that bring brands to their relevant audiences. Audiences are not broad and undefined as in the past, we are now in the future. Audiences have become segmented and crave meaningful content, thus I help to establish strategies that talk to sectioned audiences within a larger market.
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