Somewhere between the brilliancy of the internet invention and the creation of social media, there was a time when having a website was mandatory for business. But with lots of social media platforms, offering different features and user friendly navigations, it became much easier for business owners to substitute their ‘online presence’ with ‘social media presence’.
If you are a business owner, regardless of its capacity, who do believe that having a Facebook page, Pinterest account, or a Youtube channel alone would help sustain and grow your business, then the coming lines are meant to be read by you!
But firstly, we need to move one false conception out of the way, which we believe is the number one reason why most business owners dread creating a website.
The problem of building a website from scratch!
The truth is that you don’t have to create one yourself! You don’t have to be a tech wizard to operate your website, and you definitely don’t need to resolve any issues preventing the smooth operation of your site. There are many easier ways to create a website. For example, a lot of webmasters use website builders. By following in-depth articles on guides like this it’s really easy to build a site!
On the other hand, there are many companies established just to do that for you. It all starts with your vision, of course, what do you want your potential clients to know and do on your website, and website creators will do the rest for you! You will also need a web hosting service provider to host your site and ensure that it is accessible to people online post uploading.
All you have to do here is to choose the most suitable hosting plan, and this comparison on the best web hosting services for Canada will save you hours of researching which web host is the best way to go. This is why it’s absolutely crucial to analyze the market and have a lot of research done so that you are better informed on which hosting service would be best for you in order to get your website off the ground.
Now that creating and hosting a website is made easy, now is the time to talk business; the real means you would benefit from creating that website.
Your business will be more trusted
This is of great importance, especially if you are a small business. Your website will serve as a portfolio of what you have achieved through having, for example, ‘previous projects’ link or previous clients’ testimonies and will give customers the chance to know what you have to offer.
In an indirect way, you are reassuring your customers that you can and should be trusted with their time and money. Having a professional website, that is easy to use, and packed with previous clients’ testimonials will cash in faster than most traditional means.
Cutting costs
After paying for your website creation, hosting, and balancing out the monthly costs, you will be surprised how a website has actually trimmed all the unnecessary costs you would have spent on communication and marketing.
Think about it this way, every time you need to market a new product or service, you need to pay content writers, designers, and printing costs. But, with a proper website you will swiftly skip any printing costs that come into large sums to cover different client segments and areas.
In addition, if you wish to update an offer, add an item, or promote further reductions; you would have to reprint the entire marketing material. But with a website, you can update whenever and however you please, with very minimal cost as you would pay for content and design only.
Moreover, having a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website would help reduce the time spent by your employees answering repeated questions by clients or suppliers and would spare the time needed to better your customer related services.
Visibly online!
Don’t skip the fact that most growing businesses today have websites, so if you decide to vote against creating one, you will lose online customers. They won’t see your brand/business as they do their online research for businesses offering similar services or products just like yours, simply because you are not there!
It is not enough to have a Facebook or Instagram page as long as your business won’t appear on your customers search results. Having a website increases people’s awareness about your brand and what exactly that you do through providing you with proper online presence that you can easily enhance using search engine optimization methods.
Accessibility to place orders
It’s like having a sales team working around the clock, but without the extra hours you would have to pay for. Your website will be there, ready and inviting to any potential client roaming the internet after business hours. That is, in addition, if you put your products for sale on your website, you will be making money even while fast asleep.
That is because the more you simplify the navigation on your website, the more convenient it will be for clients to buy your product or book your services. You can always automate your website in a simple way where you would receive an automatic email with every purchase a customer closes.
And it can go more complicated than this where your website would ‘automatically’ lead your customers from the first browsing click to final sale closure.
Beat your competitors
You can always increase turning leads to customers by upgrading your search engine optimization game. While you can also hire a digital marketing/SEO specialist to do that for you, you can also outsource this task to a digital marketing company to handle the entire process on your behalf.
One question though, how would you find a trusted digital marketing company or a reputable SEO specialist? Our guess would be that you would go online and do some research. And that is exactly what your customers do, in fact, recent studies have shown that 81% of customers revert to online researching before making a final purchase as opposed to 19% who rely on previous experience and word of mouth.
What an SEO specialist or a digital marketing company would do for you is identifying the keywords your potential clients use when looking for the products or services you are providing. Then they would create content that employs such keywords in taglines, meta descriptions, and post titles.
Afterwards, such content would be uploaded on your website over certain durations, so that when your customers research this keyword they would see you on their search page, organically, without having to pay for ads.
There are many ways your business would benefit from creating a website, starting with building credibility, to being present online, to save time, cutting costs, and increasing sales. All this can be attained if your website is efficiently hosted and professionally designed to have attractive design and simple navigation techniques to guide your customers easily.
