- To Establish a Presence
To be a part of your hometown community and show them that you are interested in serving them, you need to be on the web for them. You need to be an active participant in the latest technologies and the latest social marketing to help your community reach out to bring customers to your town.
- To Network
Passing out a business card has always been part of doing business. Now-a-days, having your website available is the inexpensive and simple way to reach the world 24/7.
- To Make Business Information Available
A full size color yellow pages ad will cost you thousands a year, and only reaches you local area. Imagine you information available to the entire world from any computer, notebook or cell phone.
- To Serve Your Customers
Many people, like me, spend our evenings on the internet rather than watching TV. We research, we apply for loans, and make facial appointments…..all on the web, while the businesses we are contacting have already gone home for the day.
- To Heighten Public Interest
Add interesting information to your website that will get potential customers coming to it. Anybody anywhere who goes to your website is a potential customer! Creating content that educates your customers about your products is the new standard.
- To Sell Things
This is probably the number one reason anyone gets on the internet….to buy, buy, buy. If your products are available on your website, you can make sales while you are sleeping.
- To make pictures, sound and video available
A picture is worth a thousand words, but you don’t have the space for a thousand words? The WWW allows you to add sound, pictures and video to your company’s information. No brochure will do that.
- To Answer Frequently Asked Questions
Tired of getting phone calls at work, answering the same questions over and over? A F.A.Q.s (frequently asked questions) page is a brilliant way to answer those questions in detail once for the convenience of all of your customers.
- To reach the masses
The “web user” is the highest mass-market demographic available today. College students, blue and white collar workers, parents, and retirees get on the internet from 2 to 40 hours a week or more.
- Open International Markets
With a website, you can open up a dialogue with international markets as easily as with the company across the street. Websites can be easily translated by the user, and pricing changed to any currency.
- To Create a 24 Hour Service
Business is worldwide but your office hours aren’t. Web pages serve the client, customer and partner 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- To Make Changes Easily
Sometimes, information changes before it gets off the press. Now you have a pile of expensive, worthless paper. Electronic publishing changes with your needs. No paper, no ink, no printers’ bill.
- To Get Customer Feedback
You pass out the brochure, the catalog, the booklet. But then get no sales, no calls, no leads. Marketing 101 says to keep testing the market, but that gets very expensive. With a Web page, you can ask for feedback and get it instantaneously with no extra cost.
- To Test Market New Services and Products
Website customers are the least expensive market for you to reach. They will let you know what they think of your product faster, easier and much less ex-pensively than any other market.
- To Reach The Media
On the web, your business reaches the media without any extra effort from you. The media is the most wired profession today, since their main product is information and they can get it more quickly, cheaply and easily on-line.
- To Reach The Youth Market
If your market is kids and young adults, consider that the majority of schools, from Preschool to Universities offer Internet access for educational purposes. Your market is being trained to go online for their needs. Books, athletic shoes, study courses, youth fashion, etc. needs to be on the Web. There will be nothing but growth in the percentage of the under 25 market that will be on-line.
- To Reach Special Markets
Selling left handed scissors? Camouflage toilet paper? The Internet is the perfect place to be. With the 70 million and growing users of the WWW, even the most narrowly defined interest group will be represented in large numbers.
- To Serve Your Local Market
Having your products, services, restaurant menus, etc. online, keeps your local community shopping local. They buy online for convenience, but then pick it up to save on shipping. It’s a win-win!
- Millions are going online!
The number of people shopping online has snowballed in past few years and is expected to grow at a much faster pace in the future. The reason? The web offers the ultimate variety and convenience. Where else can someone go shopping in their bathrobe at 3 in the morning? Do you have the potential of 70 million people walking into your store? The Web gives potential to have unlimited customers coming to you.
Know your market….who is surfing?
- It’s 2 in the morning….you’re having sleepless night, browsing through the internet. You click on a website and you spend a half an hour browsing and buying.
- Like most professionals and students, you use websites to keep up with the latest fashion trends.
- You search for unusual gifts for friends, which you rarely find in stores because you don’t know what you are looking for.
- You want to get the awesome deal of a lifetime and compare prices easily.
Information gleaned from Stormy S. Knight