The internet has changed the way we think, communicate, or navigate in today’s world.
And so has it changed how we buy.
Recently, I wanted to buy some jeans and I decided to visit some local stores.
After visiting 4-5 stores in my town, I was tired and I still had not come across the jeans I wanted to buy.
And here is what I did.
I headed to a coffee shop, Fired google up, and typed the magical words.
“Black slim fit jeans”.
I browsed through some of the listings, found out only a few had websites and links to their social media handles.
I visited one and browsed through their catalog, found a pair of jeans I liked.
Placed an order, just over a cup of coffee.
Have you ever been in a situation like this? I bet you certainly have.
The key lesson from the above incident is the Business that did not have a website and proper social media handles, lost the battle of getting a sale right at the starting.
It was an easy win for the business that had a well-optimized website and social media profile.
The internet is the new marketplace. And if your business is not visible on the internet, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities.
In this post, we will be looking at why a business small or large needs a website.
A Website makes a customer’s life easy.
People are busy. Time and energy is limited.
Building a well-optimized website for your business helps the customer in the following ways:
- Know exactly what the business is about.
- Saves time.
- Get information related to products I want to buy.
- Get updates about events, sales, discounts, etc.
- Ease of accessibility.
A website helps the customer find out exactly what the business is about, their story, the products they sell, and why. It helps the customer decide whether to interact with your business or not in an instant.
Image yourself, trying to get to an offline store that sells cake. Your goal here is to get a red velvet cake for your friend. The estimated time to reach the store is 30 minutes if the gods are pleased andgrant you a traffic free day. But it so happens, as you set out for your adventure, you come across high traffic and you reach the bakery 1 hour later just to find out that the store is not baking any red velvet cakes for the day.
What a pleasant day would it be, right?
Jokes apart.
The point I’m trying to make here is if the bakery had a website that laid out its’s menu for each day, it would have saved our time, energy, and gas too.
An incident such as this leads to a bad customer experience. And that certainly is not a big achievement for the business.
When a business tries to save a customer’s time and tries to add value to their life, it signals to the customers that you genuinely care.
You are not just a business that is trying to push a sale. You are much more than that.
This helps in increasing your credibility, trust, and customer loyalty.
A well Optimized website and proper social media pages can help you provide more value to your customer than a business that does not have a website.
Your website is the backbone of your business. You can host every bit of information that will help to improve the shopping experience for your customer. And it’s available 24/7.
You can provide info on new products or in-depth details of a product you just launched.
You get an upper hand over your competition when you go the extra mile and help your customers with whatever results they want to achieve by interacting with your business.
Marketing becomes scaleable and painless
A business may have a great product but if marketed poorly, the chances of its success become pretty slim.
A business may have an average product but with good marketing efforts, it might perform quite well.
Websites can be used as a great tool for achieving marketing objectives such as getting visitors, increasing brand awareness, getting leads, or making sales happen.
Let me explain this further by taking a marketing objective into account.
Say, I have started a flower business, it’s new and very few people know about it.
I create a website and describe what the business is about in a clear way and show want types of products are available.
As the shop is new, I have not started to get visitors directly from search engines. For that to happen I have to apply SEO practices. SEO stands for search engine optimization and it means to optimize your website so that it appears in the search engine for keywords relevant to your industry.
The visitors sent by search engines are called organic traffic meaning it’s free and the people searched for a keyword and found my business.
SEO is a long-term game, but it’s totally worth it and can give phenomenal results. And Content creation is the best way to make use of SEO.
The other way is Paid Search or search engine marketing.
With SEM you pay the search engines to send visitors for certain keywords.
In our case, we might take the keyword ”best bouquets for her”.
Whenever someone, searches ”best bouquets for her” in search engines, our ad shows up in the search results every time someone clicks on the ad we pay the search engine to send traffic to our website.
Digital has no boundaries, meaning, a business is no longer bound by geographical factors.
You can show your ads to people of different states or countries and sell your products.
Without a website, you cannot use these methods.
And so is the case with social media.
Whenever your business decides to run an advertisement or post organic content be it on social media or search engines, your website is the best place to send the people who are clicking on the ads and post.
And the reason is simple,transaction does not happen directly.
You need to build trust, first and then the transaction becomes easy.
The content/ads bring in the attention, and once you seize the attention, it’s time to build trust.
And there is no better way than communication to build trust.
Websites are the best place for deeper and better communication to happen because there is less distraction, less noise.
Social media platforms are noisy and it’s hard to keep the user’s attention long enough for meaningful conversation to take place.
A business that works on building relationships and trust with customers does not need to fear the competition.
Eventually, the customers become an advocate for the business and there is no better marketing for a business than its own customers marketing it.
Building a website is a critical step no business which wants to be a brand should ever compromise.
Do you have a website?
Comment below.
