Introduction

In today’s digital age, having a well-designed website is crucial for businesses and organizations to stand out amongst the competition and engage their target audience effectively. However, creating a visually appealing and user-friendly website can be challenging without professional guidance and if you don’t have a process to collect customer feedback and understand user needs.

In a recent episode of “The Product Perspective,” Jon Tobin chatted to Eric Ressler, founder of Cosmic, a design agency specializing in the social impact sector. In this excerpt, Ressler shares his thoughts on the importance for agencies to find their niche.

01. Craft a purposeful positioning strategy

Standing out in the sea of agencies

During the podcast, Ressler explains the importance of finding a niche and honing your agency’s positioning strategy. Rather than focusing on just one discipline, such as branding or email marketing, Ressler asserts that a holistic approach is essential to deliver exceptional experiences.

By positioning themselves within the social impact space, Ressler’s agency ensured they aligned with organizations that prioritize doing good at their core. This deliberate positioning strategy allowed them to differentiate themselves and establish a strong presence in the market.

02. The potential of the social impact sector

Raising the bar for creative and branding experiences

Ressler shares his observations about the social impact sector, emphasizing how the space presented a significant opportunity for growth. He highlights the low standard of creative, branding, and digital experiences prevalent at the time, motivating his agency to raise the bar and inspire others to follow suit.

The focus on creating outstanding digital experiences, combined with their expertise in branding, enabled Cosmic to contribute to the sector’s advancement while fostering interest from other agencies and creatives.

03. A holistic approach to agency work

Integrating digital and development for exceptional experiences

Cosmic’s approach to agency work is characterized by a strong emphasis on delivering a holistic solution. While they cover a spectrum of services, including branding, design, and website/app development, they particularly excel in delivering exceptional digital experiences.

Ressler explains that unlike many branding agencies, Cosmic opts to keep their digital and development work in-house. This decision allows them to maintain control over the quality of the final product, ensuring seamless integration and superior user experiences for their clients.

04. Balancing in-house expertise and specialized collaboration

Playing the right role in photo and video production

Ressler acknowledges that while Cosmic strives to handle as much as possible in-house, there are specialized areas, such as photo and video production, where collaborating with the right experts yields better results.

Although some team members have extensive film backgrounds, they realized the importance of partnering with specialized production houses for individual projects. This collaborative approach enables Cosmic to leverage specialized skills and deliver top-quality visual content while focusing on their agency role.

Conclusion

In this video Eric Ressler from Cosmic provides valuable insights into their journey as a design agency catering to the social impact sector. Designing an exceptional website requires a purposeful positioning strategy, a deep understanding of the target audience, and a commitment to delivering holistic experiences.

By prioritizing their clients’ needs and integrating digital and development expertise, Cosmic has carved a niche for themselves while contributing to the overall growth and improvement of the industry.

Implementing these key takeaways can help businesses and organizations enhance their website design and create a remarkable online presence that captivates their audience.

How the ability to collect customer feedback helps agencies like Cosmic to find their niche and maximize their impact and the opportunities within it.

When it comes to identifying a niche, it’s really important to collect customer feedback to understand what clients (and in turn their customers) need and making sure what you can deliver matches that. Agencies need to be able to collect customer feedback from websites and web applications using a platform like Userback.

When they can collect customer feedback from websites, web applications and other digital activities, agencies are able to:

• Establish and fine tune their positioning
• Validate that they are in the right niche
• Gather customer evidence and testimonials
• Measure how effectively they are delivering impact and value

How Userback can help you streamline and automate how you collect customer feedback from websites

Userback is a market-leading platform helping 20,000+ software teams to collect customer feedback and understand what users need so they can build better web applications, faster.

Learn more about how Userback helps you to collect feedback for a website in our platform overview.