Why should I bother with a business website, you ask? Below I outline five reasons your business benefits from a website.
1. You can express your brand and express your business your way through your own business website.
While social media definitely has its place, it doesn’t enable you to give your clients and customers a lot of in depth information about your business. A website offers information about your brand and how you do business that is always available to your clients and customers. While social media is valuable for interacting with your network, posts get lost over time because new posts are continuously replacing them. Websites can offer plenty of information within a structure that is simple to navigate, so that it’s easy for customers to find the information they need to know about your business.
Also, social media platforms are of course designed to reflect the social media platform’s brand, not yours. As a result, they have that “all-the-same” look. While this is fine for social posts, ideally you want to be sending people from social media through to your website so they can fully experience your business offerings, individual awesomeness and unique brand.
However, let me qualify this. When you are growing your business, you may be in the position where you can only afford free social media tools, and that’s fine. It’s far more important to grow your client base and network and gain lots of testimonials than it is to pay for a website while your business is growing. After all, there is no point in having a website if you don’t any information to display on it just yet. As Marie Forleo communicates at the 50:27 – 57:23 mark of this video very well, it is far better to build social proof in the form of testimonials and broaden your network at this point to nurture the growth of your business.
Also, you may be a business whose clients and customers are all within your local community, and you may be in the privileged position where you have plenty of work without having to promote to a wider audience. You also may not need a website, unless you are looking to expand and grow to a wider geographical region. Some tradespersons in country areas of Australia fit into this category nicely. These trades businesses are in enormous demand, and are known by everyone in their community. They often market their business by posting to social media, but they don’t have the time to travel out of their area for work and physically can’t take on any more work in any case.
Or, perhaps your business is locally focussed and you are targeting retirees. You may find that you can better reach your particular market by promoting through print advertisements in community directories and newspapers, and that you don’t need a website either.
My point is that while websites are an amazing way to express your brand and grow your reach, you need to assess the point that your business is at on its growth trajectory, your target market, and the benefits you will gain from a business website.
2. A website provides highly accessible information about your business to the entire world.
As mentioned above, a website is a great way to share information about your business quickly and efficiently. You can tell people to check out your products or services online, any time of the day or week.
Or they can find you themselves, if your website is search engine optimised.
This makes a website a fabulous tool. Instead of paying administration staff to reassure prospective customers about your products and services, you can include a frequently asked questions page and customers can get the reassurance and the answers they need beforehand. You can also reassure and help customers in other ways on your website, by telling them your story, showcasing the various goods and services you offer and demonstrating your professionalism. Not only this, but you can offer a free resource to your customers through your website to grow your email list. You own this email list, so while your followers on social media would evaporate if the social media platform closed down for any reason, your email list is safe.
You are linked to the whole world through a business website. While I understand that your target market is definitely not the whole world, a website helps you reach a wider target market.
And incidentally, when you write blog posts that are search engine optimised to draw customers to your site by helping them with their problems, you happen to add to the beautiful wealth of helpful content that is on the internet. Happy days!
3. You have full control over your own business website.
Your website is your own slice of the internet.
It’s your baby, and you control every aspect of it. You pay for it and no one can take it away.
While social media platforms are fine, they are owned by corporations. As we all know, sometimes corporations fold or cease to offer a certain product when their business changes, or when another corporation buys them out.
As a result, as your business grows you will need the safe harbour of your own digital address.
4. Your own business website is affordable. There are web designers that can create a business website for you without you having to sell one of your kidneys.
Setting up a website should not be prohibitively expensive and should not be sold to you with eye-bogglingly exorbitant ongoing costs.
While setting up a website is an investment and it does take time to create one that will achieve your businesses goals, you shouldn’t feel like you are being carved a new a***hole by your website designer, or that you need to mortgage your home to get yourself a website.
In addition, your website designer should be happy to work with you and offer you plenty of options. Do you only want a simple one page website, or do you need a multi-page site that lets you sell goods and services as well as sell tickets to events? How can you help your website designer so that the project is less time intensive for them? Do they offer a number of different packages to suit different businesses?
In addition, your website developer should always ensure that you are given your own administrator’s logon for your website, so that you personally can upload or edit the contents and change the look of your site at any time.
Happily, the ongoing costs of having a website are actually rather low. Basically, each year you pay to have your website hosted, you pay for your domain name, and you pay for your website “theme,” unless you have used a free theme (these aren’t recommended because they don’t allow you to make changes easily to some parts of your website).
Otherwise, you just need an internet connection and a computer, which most of us have anyway.
You may choose to pay your website designer for other ongoing services to save yourself time, but these should always be voluntary and your website designer should openly discuss them with you.
5. A business website allows you to sell your products and services on auto pilot 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
Very importantly, your website enables you to sell products and services on auto pilot 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Product based businesses are not the only business that can benefit from this. Service based businesses can also of course sell their services in a number of ways online. For example, many writers provide some or all of their services as a package that people can purchase directly, or sell books and other resources on their website.
The ability to sell goods and services online is of course a game changer for many businesses, with customers able to purchase at whatever time of the day or week that suits them. Personally, I love being able to buy a birthday present at 9.00 pm at night on a Sunday from a great Australian business that I love. The business of course benefits because they get their money up front and sales transactions don’t require their own time or staff time. Small business operators are able to make money while they sleep.
The Buy From the Bush website is an example of such a website that does good things for rural Australia. This website links small businesses in the bush to an expanded market, and drives sales to small rural businesses from people who are living anywhere in the country.
In summary, there are a number of benefits to having your own business website, especially as your business grows.
I need to to thank you for this good read!! I definitely loved every little bit of it. I have you book-marked to look at new things you postÖ
Thanks so much and sorry about the delay replying, I really appreciate your compliment.