Exposure – interactive business card that can be seen by anyone worldwide searching for your products or services. There are searches every day online for your product or service, are you being found? If you aren’t, a competitor is.
Easy Access – After finding you online it is easy for them to contact you directly (through email or contact form on site, fax, or phone).
24/7 Availability – If you cannot be reached, your website can. Any time, any place. Offer FAQs to help with customer service 24 hours a day. Gain trust and loyalty from customers by giving all the details and answers to their questions before they even ask you! Let them get to know who you are and build confidence in your company.
Think about the questions most people ask about your business:
- What services do you offer?
- What products do you carry?
- What are your prices?
- Where are you located?
- What are your business hours?
- What are your return or refund policies?
All of these questions can be answered by your website for you at any time of the day or night. Make your website and it’s a 24 hour customer service representative or commercial about your business!
Credibility – Just as a quality website will add to your credibility, a bad website or no website will diminish your credibility. Today’s consumers do their research. Marketing agency Hubspot estimates that up to 78% of internet users conduct product research online before purchasing. This includes both online products and researching local businesses that they’ll eventually buy from.
If looking for a new auto mechanic, it’s not likely you will drive around until you find one and bring your car into the first one you find. Instead many consumers will do research online to find reviews and compare other websites. The information found on these websites will determine where you place your trust and spend your money.
So if you can’t be found online you will not be part of a potential client’s potential research process. Many local businesses get passed over for this reason, they simply can’t be found.
If you are online, active on social media, and routing traffic to your website, consumers will form a sense of trust. This is today’s business model after all. If you aren’t online a consumer will assume that you are not up to today’s standards of business.
If your competitors are doing all of this and you aren’t it puts you far behind them in the minds of a potential customer that doesn’t know better. If consumers don’t know you exist and your competitor is easy to find online they will get the business 99% of the time, even if your products, services or prices are better! If you don’t have a website yet, you are losing out on business.
Businesses are expected to have an online presence, anything less makes you seem like you don’t take your business seriously.
Brand Image – Take the opportunity to add personal feel and an identity to your brand. Introduce yourself to potential clients with any words, pictures, or videos you’d like. Capture the feel of your company’s spirit! This gives consumers something to identify with, another trust builder. This also makes you stand apart from your competition.
Start marketing online and through social media to find new local customers and use your website as a welcome center to educate them. Introduce them to what they’ve been missing.
Excuses for why businesses don’t have a website:
- My industry isn’t technical
- I don’t have time to make a website right now
- It is too costly
While it may be an initial cost to set up a website for your business you must think of it as an investment. Invest in a tool that will represent your company and help you do the work, rather than dump money into costly traditional printed marketing materials. Consider ways to recoup your expense faster by adding online marketing to pull in a more locally targeted customer base. This will give you a faster return on your investment (ROI) and increase your business volume.