- Your website is available to everyone, all over the world, all the time, 24-7, marketing your business while you sleep. Of the 7 billion people on earth, 3 billion have access to the internet, and your website. That’s a lot of customers!
- A website gives your business credibility, reputation and trust. It used to be that businesses seemed shady if they weren’t in the phone book, had a phone number and a physical address. Now-a-days, it’s generally accepted that a business must also have a website and email address.
- A professionally designed website boosts your image. A one-man-shop could feel like a large business through a website. It shows that you are not just doing a hobby, and that you really mean business.
- A website makes information about your business available to customers, with no pressure to buy, and ability to anonymously research your products or services.
- A website is affordable continuous marketing. It’s an online ad for your business that you only pay for once. Newspaper ads are important for local advertising, but the days of $1000 full page ads annually in the yellow pages are becoming something of the past. Flyers and television spots are expensive and are hit-and-miss.
- Changing your business information is fast and easy on the internet. Changing photos, wording, pricing and contact information on all of your catalogs, brochures and marketing materials get very time consuming and expensive.
- A website is a multimedia source of advertising. A brochure can have photos, but sound and video make your website a 3-D experience for customers.
- Websites can have a FAQ page – Frequently Asked Questions. This will save you tons of time on the phone, answering the same questions over and over.
- The amount of information you can get on a website is endless. You can provide far more information than you could ever fit on a brochure, flyer or business card.
- With Google Analytics, you can see exactly how many visitors come to your site every day, what times of the day are busier, what pages they are reading, and how they found your website.
- Unlike other forms of advertising, a website allows potential customers to give feedback on your products and services. Companies pay large sums of money to have their businesses analyzed for find their pros and cons. With your website, ask for feedback and reviews for your products, services and customer service. A website allows people to feel anonymous; therefore they will be brutally honest. Take the good comments and pat yourself on the back. Take the negative comments AND FIX IT! Tom Hanks said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” Well, there’s no crying in business. You can’t afford to be offended.
- A website is simply an incredible way to sell things. You can’t beat the exposure. And a website, even costing a one-time $2K-$4K fee, undeniably beats a $1K per month rent on a physical store!