Benefits of a website

Contents

Websites Help Save Money
Websites Beat Yellow Pages
Websites Improve Your Credibility
Websites Improve Customer Communications
Websites are Available 24/7
What Are Your Competitors Doing?

1 - Websites Help Save Money

When you want to update your message to your marketplace, websites are far cheaper and much faster to update than adverts and brochures.

Websites are far cheaper to run than advertisement campaigns, and your adverts can be much smaller since all the information you used to pack into them can be summarised, and replaced with a reference to your website.

Just about any printed matter can be converted to a web page and distributed by email at far less cost and time than by fax, mail or courier.

It is simple and low cost to refer people to your main marketing tool simply by adding your website to your adverts, van signage, business cards, letterheads, emails etc.

2 - Websites Beat Yellow Pages

Suppose you operate anywhere within (say) 100 miles of your company location. Also suppose there is a serious prospective customer who wants your product or service. Now, they can look in Yellow Pages to find you, but ...

How many Yellow Page books do you have to be in to cover your patch?
What is the cost over three years, and how does this compare to the cost of a website spread over three years?
How flexible are the Yellow Page adverts, especially if you change name / address/ phone number / product line / marketing message etc? With a professional website you can change all your text and pictures yourself which allows you to change your mind or add/delete stuff whenever you want.
Do you know how few people use the Yellow pages these days? Do a survey of your friends, family and business colleagues, and see how many use the Internet even just to find a telephone number (it is so easy to Google "Company Name" and then get a number). And with a professional website you can get statistics on how many people visited, how they got to you, and where in the physical world they came from.

So, if you want the best of both worlds, keep your Yellow Pages but reduce the size to an absolute minimum and fill it up with details of your website address! Similar arguments can be made against print advertising in general.

3 - Websites Improve Your Credibility

It is surprising how many potential customers research you and your credibility on the Internet, and they nearly always start with your website. There are three options you can give them:

No website, in which case they can give up their research and maybe find a competitor instead.
An amateur and/or outdated site gives a bad impression, and anyway may well be impossible to find on Google unless you are lucky.
A professional website that gives all the right impressions, and is deliberately easy to find in Google.

The choice is yours!

Researchers want to know who you are, what you do, how you do it and what your track record is. You can answer all of these questions with a professional website, something that you can never hope to do with print based advertising without resorting to ruinously expensive brochures which quickly may become dated.

They also want the assurance that you are professional, up-to-date, and interested in catering to their needs at their convenience. A website will do this for you too.

Websites can do far more than sell products or services. You can have pictures, details and prices, the very latest company information, hours of operation and maps indicating the location of your company. They can supply your prospective customers, suppliers and business partners with important and timely information.

4 - Websites Improve Customer Communications

If you choose, it is easy to set up a system where people can login to your website so as to be able to receive reports, emails and the like. They will have joined up because they want to, and therefore they really want to know what you are up to.

Also, if you choose, you can write interesting articles on your site, and (as an option) people can comment on them, and this is an excellent way to communicate with current and prospective customers.

5 - Websites are Available 24/7

Many people check your credibility outside of normal working hours when you may not be available to answer the phone even if they do call. Your website is available all the time, constantly giving people the message you want them to receive.

With a "Contact us" page, people can leave a message for you outside of working hours, which is really convenient for them. Wouldn't it be nice to come to the office in the morning to find an email from a company of which you have never heard, saying words to the effect of "Let's do business ... "?

And if you offer shopping on your site, of course your shop is available worldwide, all the time. No more receiving midnight messages on the answer phone from prospective customers on the West coast of the USA ... just a nice order in the shopping system!

6 - What are Your Competitors Doing?

Check your competitors. Do they have websites? If yes, ask "Why" ... there must be a reason, and that reason may well be valid for you. And visit their websites. Typically they will be a mixture of good and bad, and figure which ones give positive impressions of their companies, and ask yourself if you could do better, or what would happen if you cut corners and did much worse. And think about this: if prospective customers cannot find you on the Internet, they will certainly find your competitors!