6 Reasons Why Every Small Business Needs a Website

A website is the online identity of a company. Today, 72% of small businesses own a website. If you haven’t created one, you are among the 28% of enterprises that don’t have a digital presence. 

Moreover, 87% of buyers are researching goods online before purchasing, making a website essential for business growth. There are plenty of competitors ready to fill the gap in no time. 

Thankfully, creating a website is not difficult. What matters is understanding its significance.

Read on to learn about the main reasons why you should create a website: 

1.    You Can Educate Potential Customers

A website is a platform that allows you to communicate with your audience and showcase your knowledge. Marketers publish valuable and helpful content on a website’s blog to educate potential buyers. They consider their target market and their pain points and upload content accordingly. 

Users who get new information from your platform are likely to visit it repeatedly. By exhibiting your expertise, prospects will gain respect for your knowledge and develop a strong relationship with your brand. This is the first step toward developing a positive reputation. 

Additionally, every visit will expose potential clients to your products and services. With time, visitors will start relying on you for getting information, and will prefer purchasing their goods directly from your platform. 

2.  You Can Earn Consumer Trust

A website enables you to share more than just a product with your visitors. It can be your company’s culture, BTS shots, video clips of events, or reviews from former customers. 

These are all elements that help to build brand credibility. People have an abundance of options when it comes to purchasing goods. But they prefer the brand that has repeatedly proven reliable. 

Build this confidence by showcasing behind-the-scenes insight. Share pictures revealing the hard work your team puts into each product. If your small business has a limited budget and professional photography is not possible, you can acquire lowcost stock photos. These pictures are readily available online. The best part is they are great quality, and you can edit them too. 

You can also share consumer reviews which are sure to boost brand credibility. Videos of employee trainings, workshops, and seminars also play a significant role in building consumer trust. 

3.  Business Expansion Will Not Be a Problem

A website can help you to quickly expand your business. The process is budget-friendly and time-efficient. All you need to do is modify your search engine optimization strategy.

For instance, if you were initially targeting the locals of New Jersey only, you can opt to target your international clientele.

Besides focusing on local SEO, ask your SEO expert to create an exceptional strategy for global clients. Local SEO is useful for obtaining maximum leads from local searches, whereas international SEO targets people from the countries you want to grow your business in. 

Similarly, you can easily add a new product line to your existing website, giving your customers more variation in categories. This is how a website can help you transform a small business into a well-known international brand. 

4.  Your Business Will Become More Efficient Than Ever

You may get a lot of foot traffic, but handling multiple customers at a time is not easy. It requires more workforce, which increases your expense. A website on the other hand, automates multiple things, saves time, and reduces expenses.

With a website, you can run all business activities from product selection to payment collection smoothly. Once each and every detail about the product is easily accessible on the website, potential customers will not require your assistance. They will understand every feature through written text, images, and videos. They can even view different models, styles and colors of the same product.

All these features help your customers add products to their cart, make payments, and check out with ease. This automation also enhances customer relationships. Chatbots readily respond to consumer queries and notify you in case there’s need for additional assistance. This approach offers more efficiency whilst allowing you to allocate your time to core business activities. 

5.  You Are Able to Create Your Online Presence

Most buyers do their research online before making a purchase. If they are unable to find your name, it will leave them with a negative perception of your brand. Ultimately, this will drive your sales down, and business will decline. 

Therefore, creating an online presence is essential for almost every business. Even your existing clients expect your business to be present in the online world. A website allows them to look at your entire product line and, most importantly, to purchase goods directly. 

Some buyers who typically prefer buying goods from your physical store may also find a website useful to compare your prices with other brands. With time, the same buyers may also start purchasing goods directly from your website. 

6.  You Can Target Your Marketing

A website helps you steer marketing efforts in the right direction. Thankfully, there are various data analytic tools available today. Google Analytics, Clicky, Smartlook. Hotjar and Clarity are a few of them. These tools track the number of website visitors, bounce rate, region, gender, age of website visitors, and a lot more. 

This way, you get to understand whether your marketing tactics are providing positive outcomes. Offline marketing strategies like billboard advertisements, newspaper ads, and TV commercials come nowhere near to being able to provide similar information.

On top of that, a website helps you target the leads with most potential. Most website owners use Customer Relationship Management software to track consumer history. Once they check the record and get to know the prospects who are most interested in the brand, they use a retargeting strategy to convert them. In other words, a website helps you invest your marketing budget in the right way. 

Conclusion

Now that you’ve read through the above points, you must have a better understanding of where your business currently stands without a website. So, make the right move and reap all the benefits a digital presence can offer. All you need is a well-designed and feature-rich website. If this does not form part of your skill set, Sustainable Digital is here to help you out. Get in touch with us to discuss your professional business website today!