If you are a proficient website developer, owning a web design company will give you a sense of achievement besides enabling you to attract more projects than you would as a freelancer. In Singapore, web design agencies are categorized as online businesses.
Therefore, starting a web design agency involves the same process that you would follow when registering any other online business. It requires a lot of planning as well as significant investment in terms of time, energy, and resources.
How to Register an Online Business in Singapore
Just like it is the case in other countries, there are several requirements that you must meet before you embark on the process of registering an online business in Singapore. Citizens can register an online business themselves.
The easiest way of creating a web design agency in Singapore is having it registered as a private limited liability entity. Limited companies in Singapore are regarded as separate legal entities from owners. Therefore, you are guaranteed protection from debts that are beyond the capital amount that you contribute.
The Singapore Companies Act allows anyone above the age of 18 years to register an online business.
When registering your web design agency, you must provide the following information.
Company Name
You will be required to choose and reserve a name for your company. The name must be approved before you are allowed to proceed with the registration process.
Directors
The Singapore Companies Act requires those who are opening online companies to provide the names of directors. In instances where those seeking to register a web design company are not Singaporeans, they must choose at least one local director.
Your web design agency must have as many directors as you want. However, you must ensure that they are older than 18 years, and must be in possession of a clean criminal record. Similarly, they must not have filed for or suffered bankruptcy in the past.
Paid Up Capital
Your company needs at least $1 in paid-up capital during its registration. After incorporation, you can increase this amount. The paid-up capital can be in terms of preference shares or ordinary shares.
Registered Address
To ascertain that your web design company will be operating from Singapore, you must provide a local business address. This can either be a commercial or residential address, but cannot be a post office address.
During its first few months of operation, your web design agency might be small scale. The Home Office Scheme allows you to run such a business from your residential premises.
Taxation Details
For purposes of taxation, you must provide your tax details when registering your business. Nonetheless, Singapore has some of the most investor-friendly tax incentives and exemptions. Anyone opening a web design agency will love these incentives.
The business registration process in Singapore is online. Therefore, a registration certificate can be issued to you within hours provided that you meet all the requirements. After being issued with a certificate of incorporation, you must create a business profile for your web design agency.
You will also need to open a corporate bank account, and a company seal and rubber stamp. Likewise, you must set up necessary business infrastructure including your website.
Marketing Your Web Design Agency
Once your Singapore web design agency has been registered and issued with a certificate of incorporation, you need to hit the ground running and start looking for projects. Marketing your newly-registered agency will help you attract your first clients within a short period. This will form the foundation upon which you can grow your business.
Your website should be the main marketing point for your new company. Having a properly designed website showcases your advanced expertise in web design and development, something that can help you win clients. Here’s how you can position your newly-created web design agency for success.
Focus on Branding
Personal branding should be the spine of any marketing strategy that you put in place. In this regard, you should focus on building your brand around one particular service that you offer. You must keep in mind the fact that prospective clients will only choose you to handle their projects if you convince them that you are an expert in a specific niche of web design.
Target Clients Who are New to Web Design
During the tentative stages of running your web design agency in Singapore, it is advisable to attract businesses and individuals who are relatively new to web development. These clients should be offered low-cost selections of templates that they can use on their websites.
Endeavour to build longstanding and recurring business relationships with your first clients since they will form the backbone of your work portfolio. It is hard for new web designers to get new customers, but easier to work with past clients again. Therefore, you should build recurring relationships with past and present customers.
Share Your Client Profile
As a web designer, you will get most of your business from referrals. The easiest way to earn qualified referrals is by having referral sources who know about the clients that you wish to serve. Therefore, you must create and share a profile of your ideal clients.
Once you create a share an ideal client profile for your web design company, it will be easy for referral partners to recognize individuals and businesses that can be a perfect fit for you. Those who will be referred to you this way are likely to end up being paying customers.
Create an Enviable Digital Footprint
Your new web design agency will undoubtedly be competing with established agencies that have more expertise and larger marketing budgets. You need to tread carefully to avoid being pushed out of business by more-established web designers.
It starts with the first impression that clients have of you. However impressive your marketing campaign might be, it can be futile if you do not have a digital footprint that’s up to par with that of your competitors.
In this regard, ask yourself whether your website is practical and stunning. Being a web design company, the easiest way of showing your clients about what you can deliver is creating a functional and stunning website for yourself. It should also contain samples of your previous projects including those that you undertook even before you established the web design agency.
Building an enviable business profile for yourself also entails ensuring that your company’s Google My Business listing is correct and updated. This will make it easy for prospective clients to find you.
Choose a Niche
Find a niche that you want to specialize in. It could be the setting up of e-commerce sites, lead generation websites, product websites, or even learning management systems.
Often, owners of new website design companies think that they can grow by accepting all clients who walk through their doors. In reality, this can prove to be detrimental to your company’s growth. You will be spending too much money and resources collecting data as well as preparing yourself to work for customers whose industries you know little about.
When your web design services are focused on a particular industry, you will be able to channel your energy, resources, and time towards any projects that you get. Similarly, it will be easy for you to define and refine workflows as well as provide invaluable market insights to your clients.
When marketing your web design agency, show potential clients that you are an expert in your niche. Your marketing efforts should focus on your area of specialty. Follow this up with the other services that you offer as either upsells or add-ons.
Don’t Feel Overwhelmed by Competition or Clients
Your web design solutions provider will be competing with more-established agencies. The fact that they have been in the industry for longer doesn’t mean that their web design services are better than yours. Focusing on what they do will only divert your attention from your business.
Be ready to market your relatively small web design business to prospective clients. You have to bear in mind that every business starts small. Your small business can grow if you convince clients that you can offer services that are at par or even better than what is offered by more established web designers.
In line with this, you shouldn’t shy away from pitching your web design services to potential customers. The initial conversations that you have with prospective clients are likely to be awkward and stuffy. With time, however, they will learn to trust you and even consider you for future projects.
You might be a relatively new website designer in the industry. Nonetheless, this shouldn’t stop you from showing prospective clients that you can provide solutions that match their needs. This entails creating helpful content as well as demonstrating industry expertise to clients. How you meet your prospective clients doesn’t matter. What matters is how you earn their respect and trust.
Stay Focused
The web design business is highly competitive. New web design companies are likely to get comfortable once they land their first major projects. Regardless of how fast your new web design agency expands you should never get comfortable.
You have to keep in mind that other web design companies in Singapore are competing for the same clients as you. Even if your business scales, you should not sit back and focus on your current clients only. Instead, you should be on the lookout for other clients who can get added to your portfolio.
Implement One Marketing Strategy at a Time
Indeed, you will be desperate to grow your company within the shortest time. Unfortunately, many web design agency owners end up implementing too many marketing strategies at the same time. Often, this fails because tracking the success of each marketing strategy is overwhelming.
You should evaluate all the marketing tactics which you think can work for your agency. These strategies should be listed down and prioritized according to the impact that they have on your web design company. Thereafter, implement the marketing strategies one at a time.
While implementing the marketing strategies that you choose for your company, avoid the temptation of adding a second strategy until you have seen the first one through. This will ensure that you implement all strategies properly, and without getting overwhelmed.
Be Ready to Hone Your Skills
The web design industry is highly dynamic. New trends always emerge. To stay relevant, you must be ready to learn about new trends as they emerge. Honing your skills will give you the ability and skills to work on any project.
Web designers are always advised to try getting better at aspects that they think they are good at. Your clients are likely to come back if they realize that you are committed towards improving your ecommerce website design Singapore services..
Continuous learning and the commitment to stay updated on industry best practices and emerging technologies will help you build trust among your clients as well as retain them.
Stay Patient
Building a web design business can be an anxious undertaking. You never know when your first clients will come in and also if you will enjoy a continuous stream of clients thereafter. Just like it is the case with establishing other businesses, you should be patient when starting a web design agency.
It will take considerable time for you to build your web design agency in Singapore from scratch and establish it as the go-to web solutions provider. Rather than rushing, give yourself time to find qualified clients, make mistakes and learn.
Conclusion
Setting up and building a web design agency into a successful agency in Singapore may seem like an overwhelming task. Nonetheless, this is not necessarily the case. According to the Singapore Business Review, there is a growing demand for online content in the city-state. Therefore, there are limitless opportunities that you can exploit to build your new web design company into an industry leader.
We are best known for having the most professional and proficient website designers in Singapore. They will team up to create an excellent website that will enable you launch your business in the country successfully. Call us today on +65 6789 9852.
