We’re saying that your business’s website is the essential must-have single marketing investment that you can make for your business.
A bold statement, right?
The Problem Statement: Old School Marketing is Expensive and Losing Effectiveness. Period.
The mathematics and the logic of the situation should be obvious:
Media spending – advertising space on TV, local cable, radio, magazines, newspapers, and/or billboards – is expensive and ineffective. Media forces you to spend your money on unfocused coverage. You’re spending so much because everyone can see you.
Are your customers everyone? We didn’t think so.
Direct mail is expensive per piece and requires excellent marketing skills to get right, so that your spending is effective.
Cold calling and in-person sales calls can be intrusive and can turn off the public to your business. Additionally, cold calling to consumers is now regulated.
Worst of all, all of these techniques must be repeated in order to see any measurable effect on your revenues and customer count.
How does creating a business website fix these issues?
Understand just one simple idea: consumers today use internet search to find what they need.
A study conducted in 2012 showed that 89% of consumers in highly economically developed nations (including the US) use Internet search – Google, Bing and Yahoo in most cases – to make purchasing decisions.
This means one key thing to your business:
If your business doesn’t have a business website, or owns a badly constructed site with poor search engine presence, you’re essentially invisible to almost 90% of consumers.
(And this figure was determined four+ years ago. You may assume that the dominating position of internet search is even more now.)
What about Social Media?
Social media is the modern version of word-of-mouth. It requires specific skills in social media marketing to create a following, or a community of advocates. Such work requires time, effort, and trial and error. As well as focus – creating posts and updates that will attract users and keep interest rising.
And there’s also the core problem that people looking for a business or service look on Google, Yahoo or Bing. They usually don’t look on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
However, many businesses do find that they can derive a stream of new prospects and customers from social media presence.
But they – and you – still need a website.
Why a Website Should Be Your Key Marketing Asset
- It’s measurable and testable. You know when anyone visits your website, and you know what they looked at. You can also receive analytics – reports on the performance of your website – to determine how well offers, copy and pages perform.
- Internet presence is relatively inexpensive and scales almost infinitely at no extra cost. Say that you want twice as many readers of the newspaper to see and notice your print ads. That may require twice as many column inches of your ads. And therefore much higher spending. The same brutal mathematics apply to direct mail. Or radio, or billboards.
- A website is “agile” – flexible – it can change whenever you need it to. Websites can be changed on the fly, on a few day’s notice (depending upon whom is doing the work.) Contrast with how you’re stuck with paying for that ineffective and costly phone book ad for the next year.
- Consumers and other businesses view the website as a business’s “home”. Almost every one of your customers probably expect you to have a website – and not necessarily a social media page.
- Your website is your marketing resource for prospective customers. Your site tells your potential new client or customer what you want them to know about you and how you will help them.
- Websites are credible and build trust.
Does a Website Create Business Opportunity on Its Own for You All By Itself?
Probably not. We’ll be the first to admit this.
Your website is a destination for seekers of your type of product or service. A website is usually not a significant “new customer magnet” all on its own.
Your website is a platform and a destination. In order to invite your prospects to take that trip to your site, we have seen the following tactics work well to drive business website traffic.
- Blogging and building email lists.
- Active engagement with social media communities. In other words, the owners (who must like to be on social media) can converse with their audience on social media.
- Videos: creating and posting Youtube videos, with your website as a link from the video, that show personalized messages from the business owners that answer questions or problems your customers tend to have.
- Pay per click (PPC) internet ads such as Adwords. With a strong caveat: you must have expertly created marketing materials such as a “high converting” landing page as the destination of a PPC ad, or else you will be wasting your money.
Our Invitation and Conclusion
If you already possess a top quality website that your customers use to find your business, congratulations. Your business is right there to be easily found online.
If your website doesn’t produce the marketing results or the sales that you’d like, let’s talk. See our contact page, or the top and bottom of any page of this site for contact information.
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