Why Should Your Small Business Create A Website?
Updated: May 6, 2020
It's 2019, you are spending night and day working hard on your business but you aren't seeing the growth that you want... but you don't have a website!
Why your business needs to create a website is to raise brand awareness, help automate your sales process, help automate your marketing process, collect customer data, and to connect with your audience.
Too often businesses believe that a website only exist for visual reasons and they don't take advantage of the huge potential to reach their audience.
There are specific tools and systems that you need to set up so that your website can work for you.
Raise Brand Awareness
The internet is the biggest communication tool that you have as a business.
I hear from so many entrepreneurs that a website is a business card. A visual design for your brand.
But the website can function as so much more for raising your brand awareness then simply being an online billboard.
Your website can be ten Billboards, it can be interactive, you can allow people to download resources from you, you can add photos, videos, and more.
Your website becomes an extension of what your brand represents and how much it gives.
What kind of experience do you want your guests to have online?
You can make your website a simple and easy to understand page, or you can make it a very detailed aesthetic experience.
A business card is front and back. Two Flat designs…. no one is excited to receive your business card unless they have specifically asked for it.
With a website people can actually enjoy their experience, they can feel like you are giving them something by just going to your site.
This is extremely powerful with brand awareness. People begin to understand more of what your brand represents, what it really cares about, how you want to be perceived.
Not taking more responsibility of how your website represents your brand is one of the bigger mistakes that I see small businesses and entrepreneurs making.
Automate Your Sales Team
Although websites can function as a visual home for your brand, they are essentially a tool for your business. With the technology that exists today, your website should be an automatic tool for your business.
Essentially, websites should be working for you…
They should be helping your business grow and scale.
One way that a website can do this is by automating your sales process.
As Russell Brunson says, "get rid of your sales team!"
What this means is that a website can function as a funnel for your sales process.
A sales funnel means that when somebody comes to your site and wants to buy your product they go through a series of steps that contain different offers.
Let's say you were selling shoes on your website.
Someone comes to your side and clicks on a blue shoe that they want to buy.
Before they are able to purchase the shoe, they are shown an offer for a red shoe. This red shoe is offered at a 50% discount that they are only able to take advantage of at this one time. Otherwise the red shoe is offered at a full price on the rest of the site.
This is a small example of a funnel. Someone tries to purchase an original item and you offer them a second item at a discount.
Pretty easy to understand and seems simple, but this simple funnel can be extremely powerful for your business.
High-end marketers are leveraging this type of a system to make LOTS of money.
Using this automated system, you will not have to worry about a salesperson pitching to your customers every time that they purchase a product because you are already taking care of that.
These funnels can be bundled for all types of businesses, all types of products, and all types of services.
Leveraging this automated sales process for your website is exactly what you need to grow and scale your business.
Automate Your Marketing Team
Marketing has not always been thought of as a process for websites.
But what you are beginning to see more and more of, is website platforms including marketing as part of this process.
Wix for example just recently added a bunch of new features that includes email marketing and email automations as part of the platform.
You still have to pay separately to use the marketing but it is included in one place.
With other website builders you will need to find an email marketing platform like Zoho or Drip and integrate that into your website.
But as more entrepreneurs start their journeys, these platforms are beginning to realize the importance of having everything in one place.
So how can you automate your marketing team?
I will use Wix as an example because I am more familiar with their platform.
Using the Wix Ascend, this works like the other marketing platforms, you are able to set up automatic emails that are sent depending on what your customer does, create social media posts and videos for your marketing efforts.
Let's say that your customer just purchased the shoes that you are selling on your website.
Once they make that purchase, you can have an automatic email already set up that sends them a thank-you note and possibly even a coupon for a future purchase.
You can also set up automatic emails when visitors subscribe to your email list, when they fill out a form, memberships, and more.
There is also an entire email marketing area for your email list.
So if you have a blog or a podcast and want to inform people one, two, three times a month you can set all of this up on the Wix platform.
If you have a very good sales funnel setup, email marketing becomes an extremely important part of how you will make sustainable money for your business.
Your email list is the one part of your marketing that you own. If Facebook changes their rules or if Google changes their algorithm, it will not affect your email list in any way.
This is why having an email marketing in the same place as your website is so powerful.
You can also create social media posts from your Wix dashboard.
The potential to automate your marketing is exactly why your business needs to create a website.
Collect Information!
One of the biggest advantages to having a website for your business is to collect information...
Without having real data to make decisions by, you will never truly know how the decisions you are making are helping your business.
You are able to collect any information that you want on your customer depending on how you set up your website.
You can have a custom form that people need to fill out every time they purchase something where you can gather valuable information.
You can build surveys on your site that collect valuable information.
You can connect Google analytics to your site to be able to see where people live that visit your siten, are they using desktop or mobile, what pages are they seeing, and how you are getting your traffic.
This kind of information cannot be overstated. Your business has to be using this information to understand who their ideal customer is so that you can provide the best product or service that you can to that specific person.
Without having a website that can easily collect all of this information, you are having to guess or you have smaller numbers to work with.
These numbers will help you with your paid advertising as well…
When you set up a Facebook advertisement you are able to tell Facebook exactly who you want to be targeting.
So you can put in a specific age, a specific income level, their interest, and a number of other things that can help you identify your audience more specifically.
You will also be able to test different parts of your marketing by using these numbers.
If you want to see if your audience likes product A or product B you can see how many people visit each product to determine which one they like more.
Collecting information for your business is extremely important to know if what you are doing is actually working.
Creating a website for your business is the easiest way that you will be able to collect a TON of data.
Connect
The internet is the biggest communication tool you have as a business owner.
There is no better way to connect with your audience than to use the tools you have on the internet.
Social media has already built out an entire audience for you to be able to connect with using your brand.
But you do not own social media... and if social media wants to change their rules and you are not aware of these rules, your business can suffer.
This is why it is so important that you begin to establish your own media on your site.
Creating a blog post, a podcast, or videos for your business is the best way that you can connect with your audience on a large scale.
Having your media on your own site allows you to connect with people who are interested in your specific business.
With social media, you are connecting with people who are interested in your topic or your industry or similar products.
But when people go to your site, they are interested in what you have to offer and what you have to say.
Having a blog that people can connect with you and understand you more and hear your voice more will help your brand identify with your audience.
Giving your audience a chance to connect with you is so much more powerful than what you may believe.
By talking directly with your audience, you are able to get real-time data. You are able to ask them questions and able to pick their brains on why or why not they like your product or service versus another product or service.
By having this available on your side and connecting with your audience, you are giving yourself an opportunity to create a culture around your brand.
As we mentioned above with raising brand awareness, this is an opportunity for you to show what your business is about.
Connecting with your audience and owning a place where you can host this conversation, is exactly why your business can benefit so much from creating a website.
Conclusion
1. Expand what you think a website can be for your business. It is not just a business card... it is an interactive, multi-paged business card capable of growing your business.
2. Automation is a huge benefit for websites. Don't just get a website and have it look good but find out ways that your website can work for you like automating marketing and sales.
3. Websites allow you to not only engage with your audience but collect info at the same time so that you can continue to provide better and better services or products to your customers.
If you got value out of this article and understand a little better why websites can be good for your business then please like this post or comment and tell me what you feel is missing!
Building a website is not easy but if you can focus on the parts that are actually going to help your business then you will have an advantage over others who are trying to build their site the wrong way.