10 Key Elements to Include in Your Website Development Strategy for Maximum Impact
In today’s digital age, a website is a crucial component of any business’s online presence. It is often the first point of contact that potential customers have with a brand, and it can make or break the user’s experience. Therefore, it’s important to have a website development strategy that will maximize impact and ensure that your website meets your business goals.Read more
Content Readability and Its Effect On SEO
When improving the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website, it’s all good and well optimizing your content with keywords and meta tags. However, if your content doesn’t read well then chances are that it won’t stay on page one of Google for very long.
Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Is Crucial To Your Digital Strategy
Websites have been a key aspect of digital strategy for many years now and despite the growth of social media, a well-designed website is still one of the most important aspects to ensuring success in the online space. If you’re skeptical as to how important a good website really is, read on to discover 10 reasons why your website is imperative for a successful strategy.
Your website helps you to…
1- Create a Good First Impression
Never underestimate the power of a good first impression. Your website is often the first touchpoint your customers have with your business, so a professional design and ease of use helps to ensure that it is not their last. Ensure that your website exemplifies your value with an appealing design, quick load times and strong branding so that they regard your business and offerings highly.
2- Establish your Credibility
A quality website design also enhances the legitimacy of your business. After all, anyone can create a website on a certain topic, so ensuring that your website is built in a professional manner, highlighting your work, key values and how to contact you is essential to building trust with potential clients from the get-go. This initial trust is critical to establishing a strong dialogue between you and your customers, ultimately resulting in improved sales over time.
3- Create Consistency
Your website is the perfect opportunity to make sure that your branding is consistent. This includes graphics, photos and even tone of voice within website copy. A consistent brand further builds on the credibility you have established with a well-designed website and makes your brand recognizable across different online platforms, including social media posts and paid ads.
4- Share Key Information with Customers
Your website is essentially a hub for information for your customers and should be a one-stop-shop for customers to come and learn about what you do as an organization and the value that you offer to your clients. This makes decision making easy for potential clients as they are able to assess whether your solutions are right for them. By clearly outlining what it is that you do and your key values, you are more likely to attract your target market for whom your services are specialized and grow your business.
5- Simplify Interaction with Your Business
A good website can also make it easier for customers to take action and further engage with your business. Website design nowadays incorporates data capturing forms and contact information, so that your customers know what their next steps are when they wish to engage with your offerings. The easier it is to get into contact with you or purchase your services, the less friction there is for sales, meaning that ease of contact should be a priority when designing your website.
6- Host All of Your Resources
As a home page for your business, your website can also host important resources. Blogs, podcasts and thought pieces can all be included within your website, further establishing your credibility in the market. Other important resources that should be included in your website are testimonials and case studies, which can be referenced by customers who want to know more about the nature of your offering or the level of satisfaction amongst past customers. Whatever the purpose of your resources, having them easily accessible within your website is a must to encourage potential clients to engage with them.
7- Make Your Business Easier to Find
Search Engine Optimisation is a necessary part of any digital strategy. By making your business as easy to find in search results as possible, you can reach more customers and grow your business. The role of your website is therefore critical. Incorporating keywords throughout your site and hosting SEO improving content are some of the steps to creating a SEO optimized site.
8- Improve your Following
Your website can also help bolster the growth of your social media channels. Including links to your social media platforms is a must for your website. This means that if customers are interested in your business but haven’t contacted you yet, they are able to follow your accounts on relevant platforms, allowing you to expand your reach amongst potential clients and encourage long term growth.
9- Streamline Lead Generation
Websites are the ideal place to include forms that can assist you with generating leads. Through these forms, you can construct databases of potential clients you can reach out to who have shown an interest in your offerings or resources. This assists with your CRM activities and is a set and forget the way of having a stream of potential clients filtering through your sales department.
10- Improves Customer Service
Finally, your website essentially provides self-service customer support to your clients. By having information about your work, contact details and services, clients are able to easily get information about your company and answer any questions they may have. To further enhance customer support, chatbots can be incorporated into your website to instantaneously answer questions or point them in the direction of appropriate resources. Even if it seems like a simple step, readily accessible contact details and additional information improves transparency and makes it easier for clients to work with you, further building trust and loyalty amongst your client base.
There are so many reasons why a website is critical to your digital strategy. By establishing an appealing, easy to navigate and information-rich website, you can improve trust between you and your potential clients. Additionally, ease of access to information empowers your clients to understand which of your offerings is most tailored to them, allowing you to best help them. All of these reasons highlighted contribute to higher levels of client satisfaction and greater lead generation potential, ultimately helping your business grow.
If you’re looking for assistance with developing a website and some of the more complicated aspects including SEO and embedding forms, Robotic Marketer’s marketing strategy workshops can assist you in building a website that will help grow your business.
Why You Are Likely To Succeed With A Marketing Strategy
As business owners move forward into 2021, many are considering the changes that need to be made to their marketing strategy for success in the New Year following the countless challenges of 2020.
As the core channel through which businesses communicate their value with potential customers and retain clients in the long-term, marketing should always be a key focus for businesses seeking to expand their operations.
Investing carefully in marketing to grow your business in the digital space is vital to maintain a competitive edge in the face of ever-changing digital marketing services and media platforms.
To facilitate this, a marketing strategy is critical to making sure that your marketing activities are as impactful as possible, acting as a guidebook to allow you to focus on the most powerful actions that you can take as a business.
As specialists in creating tailored, effective marketing strategies for small and medium businesses, here are some key reasons you are more likely to achieve success with a marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy allows you to cover your bases
Marketing strategies outline research-based methods of improving your digital presence and growing your reach. A tailored strategy explicitly outlines actions that will improve customer experience and make your business stand out from the competition.
Whether this be posting regularly on social media channels, having a well-designed website, or creating quality content for your audience, a strategy allows you to cover your bases and ensure that there are no gaps in your marketing efforts.
This means that marketing activities can be focused on tasks that will deliver the highest impact possible and also bring you up to speed with competitors.
A marketing strategy helps you achieve your business goals
A marketing strategy should not be a cookie-cutter approach, but rather a specific approach for your organization me i.e. it is closely aligned with your business goals.
Regardless of the nature of your business and your objectives, a smart marketing strategy will outline key steps to take to achieve them.
Whether you are looking to gain more long-term clients, expand internationally or launch a new product, a marketing strategy will help you to plan and execute marketing activities that will help you achieve your business goals.
A marketing strategy takes the guesswork out of marketing
As a business owner, you want everything that you do to actively contribute to your business whilst avoiding marketing activities that cost more than the benefit they deliver.
A tailored, research-based marketing strategy enables your business to only engage in impactful marketing activities.
By discussing with a marketing consultant and your internal marketing team in developing your strategy, you are being decisive about the activities that will and will not benefit your business, providing clarity in the actions you will take, allowing you to plan and budget more effectively for future periods. For this reason, a strategy takes the guesswork out of your marketing activities.
By clearly outlining what exactly you need to do, you can focus on maximizing the ROI on marketing, ensuring that your marketing activities are cost-effective and aligned with your objectives.
A well-defined strategy allows for better collaboration
When you have a clearly defined marketing strategy, it makes it easy for all members of your organization to familiarise themselves with your key branding, messaging, and image. This enhances the presence of your organization, since having consistent branding is crucial in a digital setting, but also has the added impact of making it easy for multiple team members to collaborate or share tasks with each other.
A strategy establishes a rule book for anyone working on marketing activities and ensures that all marketing efforts are consistent and of high quality. This means that team members do not need to reinvent the wheel when they work on marketing-related activities, but rather have a clear guide to make sure that their work is impactful and in line with the strategy and the goals of the organization.
It helps you with future strategies
Your marketing strategy should not be the same every year. Having a clear marketing strategy allows you to see what worked and what didn’t, allowing future strategies to be adapted around these observations.
If something hasn’t worked in a specific year, you can remove that from your strategy and if you have discovered a new, creative way to engage your target market, you have the freedom to implement this in future strategies.
All of your future marketing strategies will become iterations of past strategies, leveraging the experience and knowledge of your successes. This means that each strategy is more likely to have a significant impact on your business. Therefore, a marketing strategy can be viewed as a valuable asset in the long-term growth of your business.
By putting thought into your strategy now, and revising it in future periods, you can add valuable knowledge and insight into all future strategies, improving the impact of marketing activities and the strength of your brand in the long run.
With so many benefits to your business, a clear marketing strategy is a necessary ingredient to success. With a well-defined strategy, you are likely to gain clarity in the actions you need to take to have a maximum impact on your business and drive engagement and reach.
When planning your business strategy and goals in the new year, ensure that you focus on reviewing your past marketing strategies or implementing a clearer strategy if this is something that has not been done in past.
Investing time into your marketing strategy can lead to immense short- and long-term benefits, allowing you to help your business thrive.
How Robotic Marketer can help
If you need help developing or refining your marketing strategy, the experts at Robotic Marketer are here to help. Contact us today and allow us to help you create an impactful marketing strategy for 2021 that is centered around your unique needs and business goals.
How Google Analytics has changed
Google Analytics is a powerful free and paid web analytics tool for businesses to track their web or app performance. Launched on November 15, 2005, following the acquisition of Urchin Software, Google Analytics has changed significantly in the last 15 years. Google Analytics started with the vision to speed up website tracking results processing, cutting processing time from 24 hours to 15 minutes. This was designed to be an add-on to the web hosting and development tools Google already offered however, it turned out to be a completely new product that outperformed competitors’ products.
Growing from its beginnings in tracking website results, Google Analytics goes well beyond simply analyzing the number of visitors on websites and apps nowadays. Today, nearly 40 million websites use Google Analytics as a part of their business. However, not many businesses understand the importance of Google Analytics and how to gain the maximum value from it. At Robotic Marketer, we monitor and analyze your data and analytics to reveal your secrets to success.
Evolution of Google Analytics
With the age of the internet, online payments, and data collection, companies have an abundance of data but often do not use it optimally. In 2005, Google released V1 of Google Analytics, to help companies improve their online interactivity, recognizing the potential of this data. In the week following the release of the first version, 100,000 new accounts were created on the platform, causing it to be shut down due to high demand. Google Analytics then became available only through an invitation system which enticed other users to use Google analytics. Google also created hype by sharing the stories of customers who experienced 50% growth in web traffic in a year. Since then, Google Analytics transformed from an add-on application to an integral element of Google’s offering.
Growth and development of Google Analytics
In 2007 and 2008 Google made major changes in the V2 platform, where they updated their reporting system, allowing businesses to locate and share data, seeking to promote greater customization and collaboration.
From 2008 to 2012, Google was in a stage of intensive development, launching V3, V4, V5, and creating a new slogan: “Enterprise-class web analytics made smarter, friendlier and free”. During these years, Google enabled users to analyze data and create subdivisions, providing the flexibility to analyze conversions, traffic, customer reports, and build a dashboard. The dashboard was a game-changer as it allowed users to navigate different profiles and simplify data.
In the V4 version, Google took strides with website performance and ROI features, allowing the user to analyze traffic across multiple platforms and implement retention strategies. V5 was a powerful update, allowing users to monitor their data in real-time while the campaign progressed. This version was created with a vision to be developer-friendly and make JavaScript possible for websites and SDK for apps.
Delivering more value
2013 was a huge year with Google introducing 70 new updates to create a better user interface, integrate with different platforms, introduce new APIs, and real-time behavior reports. In 2014, Google introduced a paid version of Google Analytics with additional features like real-time data visualization, SEO campaigns, and a deeper understanding of the data. They added more features to the free version by styling dashboards, creating a better user interface, and rebranding Google Analytics.
In 2016, Google launched Google Analytics 360, replacing Google Analytics Premium with 5 new products targeting SMBs, including audience targeting, increased analysis, and robust reporting. It allowed businesses to combine offline and online data to deliver a personalized experience.
Google Tag was a new product launched in 2017, allowing a user-friendly approach for non-developers to add website tags without any hassle, allowing data to be sent to Google Analytics and Google Ads. The sole purpose of Google Tag was to unify the multiple tags and simplify implementation.
In the following year, Google launched the Google Marketing platform, combining Google Analytics and Double Click Management within a single platform. The platform created an effective marketing suite to buy, measure and enhance the customer experience.
Google Analytics in 2020
2020! The year of data analytics and improved customer experience. From in-store to online purchasing, companies have collected a lot of data and generated more web traffic than ever before.
Google saw this opportunity of massive data collection and launched Google Analytics4 or GA4. The GA4 has machine learning at its core, providing a complete understanding of customers, smarter insights when it comes to the sales funnel, and different touchpoints to improve ROI.
Google Analytics now provides a complete understanding of how customers want to interact with the brand. Online purchasing has provided greater knowledge about consumer insights which showcases the buyer’s journey from acquisition, conversion, and retention.
How has Google Analytics changed the way we do business?
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You can now track how customers find your website.
In 2005, companies didn’t have much information about their customers. They would have several visitors but not a clear understanding of where the customer came from. In 2020, businesses have changed the way they market. Marketers have a better understanding of the user’s journey to the website, for instance, whether it is through EDMs, Instagram ads, Facebook ads or other paid advertisements. Looking to track who visits your website?
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Tracking how much time the user spends on the website (Behaviour Report)
In 2020, the analysis of users is very important as it allows the businesses to understand which page, blog, article or post is generating traffic on their website. The Behaviour Report allows you to make changes to your website or app and showcase the well-performing content to users. Want to understand what your customers think of your website, product, or services?
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Track who is visiting and what they’re browsing (Bounce Rate)
Online shopping means lots of scrolling but less buying. How can you create engagement with your customers? The Bounce Rate is an important metric to determine if the messaging is failing to keep the user engaged with your website.
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Tracking conversions (Acquisition)
Google Analytics has Acquisition reporting as an in-built feature with your marketing plan. This allows you to track conversions and adjust marketing, for instance tracking the successful conversion of a customer with items in their cart and then readjusting marketing efforts to focus on building loyalty with the brand, rather than bombarding them with further promotion. Do you have a lead generation model?
- Report generation (Data visualisation)
Still, going through excel sheets and the data sets? Gone are the days of manually processing complex data. Data visualization with Google analytics has helped businesses make strategic decisions based on market trends and user profiles. Want to know how you can visualize your data?
Reasons Why Everyone’s Outsourcing Their Marketing
Marketing is effective, but it isn’t easy. In today’s modern environment, marketing particularly digital marketing has rapidly evolved transforming the way businesses operate. It’s safe to say most business owners aren’t exactly marketing experts. In order to run an effective and successful business, they need help creating and implementing their marketing efforts. Building an entire marketing team can prove troublesome with limited employees. This is one of the many reasons why businesses should consider the advantages of outsourcing.
To help you understand the benefits of outsourcing marketing consider our eight points below.
1. Results
Outsourcing your marketing efforts and working with a marketing agency means you can and should expect the best results possible. Marketing agencies not only provide a team of experts, but they also want to please you as their client. Agencies provide you with high-quality services because they understand that keeping customers is less expensive than finding new ones. Any marketing agency knows they can be easily replaced by another agency, so they are motivated to ensure you’re satisfied with the work they produce.
2. Collaboration
When you outsource your marketing you gain access to an entire team of marketing professionals with extensive skill sets. Experts that make up the team share different thoughts and opinions on what will make your marketing success so you’re receiving a diverse wealth of experience and knowledge. Engaging marketing teams through outsourcing enables your business to collaborate in ways not previously available.
3. Strategy
Often internal marketing teams become too focused on the ‘what’ that they totally forget the ‘why’. Outsourcing your marketing efforts to a marketing agency allows you to gain an outside opinion from a range of marketing experts. A marketing agency can help identify and develop components of your marketing strategy that may have been overlooked internally.
4. Technology
Not only is the latest marketing technology expensive, but it also takes a considerable amount of time for employees to learn how to use it. Most businesses can’t afford to spend large amounts of money on software they don’t know how to use which is why outsourcing marketing is a viable option for many businesses. Marketing agencies have access to not only the latest marketing tools, platforms and technology (like Robotic Marketer) but a team of experts that know how to use it to businesses advantage.
5. An Outside Look
If you are a business owner, taking a critical look at your business can be hard which is why an outsourced marketing agency is the only option. A team of marketing professionals can analyze your business from the outside and differentiate between what is and what isn’t working. With a wealth of marketing knowledge and experience, they can help your business stand apart from your competition and attract more customers.
6. Team of Experts
There are many aspects of marketing, for example, search engine optimization, social media engagement, email campaigns and strategy analysis. Each aspect requires an entirely different skill set so it can feel overwhelming for anyone to conquer every single aspect. Engaging a team of experts, however, provides your business with an increased chance of success. An outsourced marketing team has an entire range of experts from an SEO specialist right through to a strategy analyst.
7. Saves Time
The primary goal of any business is to make sure every single aspect is running smoothly. In doing so you can focus your energy on bringing in new business. However, doing this takes time and time is something every business owner wishes they had more of. To help free up time and allow you to focus your efforts elsewhere consider hiring people with better skills than you. Outsourcing your marketing efforts to people who are better at a specific skill than you are will save time and help your business achieve greater results.
8. Optimise Spend
No business can afford to make costly marketing errors which is why outsourcing your marketing to a team of professionals will save you lots of money. Consider hiring an employee internally, you have to include their salary, benefits, personal or sick leave. Then you run the risk of hiring them only to realize they don’t fit in with your corporate culture. However, hiring an outsourced marketing agency means you not only gain access to a team of professionals but you know exactly how much you’re paying them.
Rethinking Your Marketing Strategy
During a time of such uncertainty, it is likely you’ve thought about rethinking your marketing strategy.
With reduced demand for your product or services, the thought of perhaps saving some money has likely crossed your mind. It is important to remember that your competitors are likely to be facing the same challenges so during these times of uncertainty there may be several opportunities to rethink your marketing strategy for the better.
There are so many tools available to help you listen to and understand your target audience.
Government restrictions have meant that many individuals are spending more time online, which presents an opportunity to engage your potential target audience by creating useful content.
By continuing your marketing efforts it’s likely your target audience will remember you when some form of normality is resumed.
Below are some key points to consider when rethinking your marketing strategy.
1. Measure your current progress
Before you set out to make any significant changes to your digital marketing strategy, take a measurement as a benchmark to compare to later on down the track.
Aim to measure your progress against both your objectives and your competitors. Consider measuring channel growth, audience demographics, engagement level, social traffic and conversions.
Doing so will allow you to assess who you are engaging with and ultimately what works when targeting certain demographics.
2. Identify Your Audience
If you’re able to clearly identify and understand your target audience, you can better create engaging content that will be useful for them.
Think of it this way, the better you know your target audience the more cost-effective they are to target and convert. Ask yourself an important question, who is my target audience? Doing so will allow you to think about demographics like age, gender, city, country, languages.
This will then prompt you to think about their interests and challenges, which will ultimately lead to what content and platforms they engage with.
3. Create more effective content
Remember creating great content across a range of different digital channels will help engage users and drive them to your website.
All of your digital marketing efforts promote your website and are measured and improved using analytics.
To identify what content people are looking for, start with keyword research. Tools such as Google Analytics enable you to find what people are searching for and how users are behaving on your website.
People digest content in different ways, so to make the most of your content, create a content plan and calendar. Targeting 2-3 channels and doing them well is much better than making half-hearted attempts at numerous channels.
4. Rethink Offerings
In the current climate, there is no doubt rapid changes in customer behavior and market dynamics have occurred. During these times its imperative businesses monitor brand communication and quickly adapt to changing circumstances.
Operating in a timely manner and understanding the importance of changing market conditions will allow your business to remain relevant and succeed during times like this.
Aim to keep tabs on the growing situation as this will allow your business to make any significant alterations to business operations and ultimately better serve your customers.
5. Personalize your message
Remember personalization is one of the most important expectations of customers today. Personalization can significantly reduce acquisition costs and increase not only revenues but also the efficiency of marketing spend. Ultimately personalization benefits your bottom line.
When you rethink strategy it’s imperative to think about personalization. You want to aim at delivering real-time responsive messaging and offers that respond to where the customer is in their journey on their preferred device and in their preferred media.
In the past, we have been able to make changes gradually. In today’s market, however, tomorrow is often too late. Proactively rethinking your marketing strategy will allow you to stay at the forefront of your target audience’s mind. Although change cannot happen all at once, taking small steps to rethink your marketing strategy, can help win today’s consumer.
10 Ways to Improve SEO
Source: Marketing Eye Australia
Remember Search Engine Optimising (SEO) is a long-term game. To improve your site’s ranking (SEO) we’ve made a list ‘10 Ways to Improve SEO’.
Follow these suggestions and watch your website rise the ranks to the top of search-engine results.
- Publish relevant content
Quality content is the number one driver for your search engine rankings, and simply put there is no greater substitute for great content. When you create quality content specifically for your intended users, site traffic increases, which leads to an improvement in your site’s authority and relevance. For each page identify and target a specific keyword phrase and repeat this keyword phrase several times throughout the page.
- Update your content regularly
In addition to publishing relevant content, aim to update your content regularly. Remember search engines feel strongly about content. Regularly updated content is viewed as one of the best indicators of a site’s relevancy, so be sure to keep it fresh. Review your content on a regular basis and make any necessary updates as needed.
- Boost pages with internal links
Internal links are links from one page on the same domain to another. When internal links are used strategically, they can significantly boost the performance of pages in search engines because internal links support the flow of PageRank around your site. In simple terms, the more internal links your page has the higher its PageRank, which is important considering PageRank is a confirmed Google ranking factor.
- Refresh content with diminishing traffic
Aim to complete regular content audits of your page. If you notice that organic traffic to one of your pages is decreasing, consider updating the content. Remember updating content doesn’t always mean rewriting the entire page. It comes down to your target keywords and their competition. Quite often all you need to do is refresh the outdated sections.
- Focus on metadata
When designing your website, each page contains a space between the <head> tags to insert metadata, or information about the contents of your page. The most important type of metadata is ‘title metadata’. This metadata is responsible for the page titles displayed at the top of a browser window and as the headline within search engine results. In terms of a good meta description aim to include generally two full sentences.
- Use ALT tags
A key piece of information that will go a long way in increasing SEO is describing your visual and video media using alt tags, or alternative text descriptions. The use of Alt tags allows search engines to locate your page, which is crucial especially for those who may only use text-only browsers.
- Replicate backlinks from outdated, low-quality pages
When you perform a Google Search, often click on the first result only to find a substandard piece of content. It’s likely you started thinking how this page is ranked number one. Moments like this present opportunities in the sense that if poor pieces of content can get tons of high-quality links and rank in Google, so can you. To do this, find the substandard pieces of content that have lots of links and get the people linking to them to link to you instead.
- Have a link-worthy site
Aim to focus on creating relevant links within the text. Rather than having a link that says ‘click here’ try writing out the name of the destination. If you think about a ‘click here’ link has no real search engine value beyond the attached URL, however if you write the name of the destination for example ‘Marketing Eye Blog’ the description is rich with keywords and will more likely improve search engine rankings.
- Optimise the page speed of important pages
Everyone has clicked through to a page that takes ages to load. In most cases you either repeatedly clicked the refresh button or probably clicked the back button and tried another site. Ultimately slow pages are bad for business and SEO. To improve page speed and keep readers on your site consider reducing image sizes and enabling browser caching. This will allow your users to load your page without having to wait very long.
- Improve the click-through-rate of your top-ranking pages
The title tag of a page acts as the headline of an article. Ultimately it is your job to entice the searcher to click through to the page. If you can write a title tag that persuades people to choose your page over the others, you’ve won. Aim to add powerful words to your title that tap into people’s emotions. Keep your title tags short and sweet to capture the reader’s attention and improve readability.
Source: Marketing Eye Australia
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide
Source: HubSpot
While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin’ out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research.
Well, the need to do keyword research has stayed the same. How you actually do it hasn’t.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of theses queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.
More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years, and how unimportant keywords themselves have become to our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.
Source: HubSpot
5 Reasons Why A Website Is Important For A Small Business
A website is an essential component for any operating business, especially for a small business. Now more than ever, it is necessary for business owners to ask key questions such as, “where are my customers found?” “where is my competition engaging with my target audience?”.
The answer is easy, they are all online.
Therefore, it is only natural that you need to adapt. Whether you need it to establish your brand by raising awareness and engagement as an online presence or to create a steady flow of online traffic which could bring potential customers to your brand. Nonetheless, a website is a necessity.
Here are the five reasons why small businesses need a website:
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Credibility and legitimacy are interconnected with a website
In contemporary times, where the internet reigns supreme, there is an expectation that all businesses, whether big or small have a website. If at times you’ve come across a business that does not possess a website, the chances are you would most likely not associate with the business.
According to HubSpot, website launch and integration generates, on average, over 470,000 website visitors, 1,800 leads, and 300 new customers per month, for different organizations ranging in different sizes.
Overall, a website allows the capability to develop the brand from an online perspective, establishing legitimacy and appealing to possible customers.
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Enhanced accessibility and global outreach
As the online landscape continues to expand, so will the variety of different electronic devices and online channels.
As of 2020, mobile devices and tablets, generated about half of all website traffic globally. As a small business with a readied website, this allows you to reach an assortment of customers and prospects than ever before.
Furthermore, 51% of consumers make use of websites to evaluate and gage online purchases through the employment of mobile devices. “The sky’s the limit” is the best description on why small businesses need to utilize a website.
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The attraction of potential customers online
As a small business, you are always trying to appeal to potential customers.
Possibly you have been applying traditional marketing practices such as television & radio advertising and print promotion activities to gather new customers.
Nowadays, they are deemed to be inefficient and expensive for small businesses. Transitioning to an online focus, allows for a small business to find customers in a new way.
For the most part, your customers expect your business to have a digital presence. Individuals, groups and organizations are seeking and researching the value of your brand and more notably from whom to buy online.
If you do not have an online presence, especially through a website, you will be left behind.
- Access to data, feedback and response
Collecting data, feedback, and customer responsiveness can be difficult to gain if you do not have a website to direct those data forms which could help improve and enrich your small business.
Furthermore, a website can be considerably supportive, with a built-in online chat bar. This allows the customer to communicate while they are on your website instantly.
Also, a webpage dedicated for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on your website, allows you to receive and answer feedback responses which fosters relationships with customers.
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Exhibiting your products and services to the online world
A website is the best way to highlight your products and services online. This offers an opportunity for your small business to show why customers should buy from you.
Look at this process as a narrative; emphasizing on how your small business supports the community, in turn fostering relationships and resolving challenges. The crucial component for a website is to be engaging and personalization.
If you are still conflicted in utilizing a website, I hope the reasons presented above can provide a solution to your online presence predicament. But most importantly, the website must represent the brand itself. It must represent the values of your small business.