Why you need a website: Top 10 reasons why you need a website
Having a business website is an essential marketing tool for any business, big or small, local or global, and across just about every sector. However, it is not enough to have just any website. In order to make sure that your site does everything it can and should do to support your business; you need a strong, effective and engaging website.
Here are 10 good reasons why your business needs a strong website.
1. Consumers Live and Breathe Online
We truly are living in an online age. A recent study by Hootsuite revealed that, globally, people are spending an average of 6 hours and 49 minutes online each day. The figures are significantly higher in certain countries
Not only this, but are increasingly relying on the internet for products and services: they are shopping online more and, most critically, they are searching for businesses online. When people want to find a new product, service, or business, whether a local, long-distance or purely digital product, they overwhelmingly turn to Google.
Put simply, customers are looking for businesses online, so if you want them to find you, you’d better have an online presence. Furthermore, you need your online presence to be as strong as it can be in order to capture as many of these potential customers are possible. A strong online presence at its core means have a great website that will convert visitors to customers, and a way to drive those visitors to your site in the first place.
2. You Need a Digital Business Card
Remember the days when salespeople and business owners would always carry a stack of business cards around with them and hand them to everyone they met? Probably not – but trust us, this used to be a key sale and marketing tool.
These days, websites have taken on the role of online business cards: they introduce your business to potential customers and other contacts, and they tell everyone how they can get in touch with you and, hopefully, buy your product.
3. Improves Credibility and Legitimacy of Your Brand
When it comes to convincing consumers to buy, first impressions are important. Having a business website makes your business more credible and legitimate. We live in a digital world, and it is a common notion to think that if you have a website for your business, your company is real and isn’t fooling people, just like a couple of decades ago it was important to have a physical address.
Having a professionally designed, thorough, and easy-to-use website can help you to more easily convey to potential customers that you are a reputable organization, one they want to do business with.
4. Target a Larger Market
When you have an offline business, you only cater to a limited number of clients, but when you are online, you can target a larger market. Your working hours are longer than usual and no matter what you sell, products or services; you are doing so at the place at very minimal costs.
5. A Good Website Can Build Customer Relationships
Websites are not just an electronic brochure or the venue for your sales funnel which converts visitors to customers. Yes, they can and should be all these things, but they can also be much more. Your website provides the platform for you to build strong lasting relationships with your customers.
Customer relationships matter, and building and strengthening these are some of the best things you can do to ensure the long term success of your business. Securing returning customers makes an overwhelming business sense: it takes a much lower investment to get a repeat sale from a previous customer than to find new customers. Therefore, it is critical that you hold on to the customers you have a encourage them to continue to buy your products and services.
Your site can be a very effective way to do this. When used well, a website is a great tool for building relationships with your customers. Having strong customer relationships will make it more likely for those people to continue to be your customers.
For example, you can publish a regular blog on your site. If you make your blog informative, insightful, and deeply useful to your customers, they will regularly read your posts. In time, they will come to rely on the information you provide, greatly strengthening your relationship with them.
6. Strong Websites Have Great ROI
Compared to many other expenses in your marketing budget and business expenses in general, building a website has a low price tag. However, a strong site will deliver much in terms of leads, sales, and profits, meaning this has represented a phenomenal ROI. The cost of building a website will vary greatly depending on your designer, as well as the size and type of site you want, but in all cases is quite reasonable considering the returns it yields.
7. Your Website Stays Open 24 Hours per Day
Unlike your business, which most likely does not operate or communicate with customers after-hours, your website stays open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Customers can take a look at your products and buy them even when you aren’t available. It means you are selling your services and products 24 x 7. This means that even when your staff is not available to interact with people looking to do business with you, your website is accessible and able to provide helpful information, serve as a point of contact, or even allows customers to make purchases or submit orders.
8. Your Competitors Probably Have One
It is simple. Because your competitor has a business website, you need to have one as well. Customers research a lot before buying a product, and if you don’t have a website, you are helping your competitors gain traffic. It also means that you are failing to keep up with the latest technology and giving up on making your business a success
If you want to stay relevant and competitive within your field, it’s important that your business have a footprint online—it not only helps you stay competitive, but it also helps cement your role as a forward-thinking, tech-savvy business.
9. It Can Help Your Business Grow
If you’re hoping to expand your business and bring in new customers, having a website is an important strategy. Small businesses who’ve experimented with launching a website report being happy with their success. Surveys on small business’ websites show that 81 percent of companies that launched sites saw their business grow, and 97 percent of small business owners would recommend having a website to other small business owners.
10. It Allows You to Hone Your Company’s Brand and Image
A website is a good place to hone your brand—using your specific aesthetic, vocabulary, and more—it’s the ideal forum for you to shape the narrative about your company.
Social media pages, on the other hand, allow your company’s image to be shaped via input from the public—this can be helpful but doesn’t always paint the picture you would prefer to see. By creating and managing your own company site and content, you get to paint the picture of your business.