Why Is It Essential to Have a Website Designed for Your Business?
Like many small business owners, you may believe your business cannot benefit from having a website or that a website is not within your financial plan. Or maybe you think because you don’t use a computer, neither do your customers. These are delusions. These reasons show why your company REQUIRES a professional website, no matter what size your business.
Today, more and more consumers use the internet to search for the products or services they need. Your small business will gain reliability by having a website. Without one, potential clients will go to your competitors that do. If you already have a website but it is “home-made”, having it professionally redesigned will provide your business with a professional image which will stimulate even greater confidence. For home-based businesses, this is particularly valuable since you do not have a storefront to uphold your products or services. So it is important to have a website designed for your business, and Web Designing Course in Chandigarh will help you in the enhancement of your business.
As a small business owner, you possibly think you can’t afford a professional website, but you can’t afford NOT to. Although the cost of designing a website differs, once it’s up and running, a website for a small business generally costs under $100 a month and, in some cases, as little as $20. Likened with the cost of a newspaper ad, when you consider the potential market you can reach with a website, it is a very cost-effective way to promote your business.
Think of your website as being your online brochure. It is much easier and faster to update information about your products and services on your website than in print material, making it an operative way of letting your customers know about the arrival of new products, upcoming events, special promotions, or any new services you now offer. Unlike print ads which quickly become obsolete, your website can provide current information and news.
A website is accessible to both your regular and potential customers 24/7/365 providing them with the suitability of reviewing your products and services when your store or office is closed. With today’s busy lifestyles, this is a great selling point when making a purchase verdict.
Whether you provide products or services, your website will provide a substitute location to sell them. As a retailer, a website (e-commerce) is a brilliant place to sell your products to a wider market; even services can be made accessible globally. Don’t think you’ll be able to sell your products or services online? Don’t forget, even cars and houses sell online!
No matter what type of business you’re in, a website is a brilliant place to showcase your work. By containing a portfolio or image gallery, as well as testimonials about your work, you can show what makes your business unique.
Providing information to your customers takes time, whether it’s on the phone, face-to-face, in a brochure, or in emails. With an online catalogue you can provide information about your products and services. Once your website is up and running, it is accessible to your customers open-endedly, saving you time. And what is time? Time is money!
Maybe you sell environmentally friendly products and would like to stake tips on how to recycle, or possibly you’re an accountant and want to give your clients guidance on how to simplify their bookkeeping practices. By including a FAQ page, adding articles or uploading newsletters to response all your customers’ questions you can keep them up-to-date. What better way to provide them with value added service than by partaking information on your website?
In order to gain new customers, you need to understand where your predictions go when they are looking to discover suppliers, research suppliers and make a purchase. In today’s world the place where people in most markets go is to the internet, precisely a search engine like Google, Yahoo, Bing. These search engines are the big three (in that order) and account for over 90% of all searches. Google is by far the biggest with about 6 of every 10 searches. To learn more about the market, share each search engine has go to ComScore. With 93% of business decisions starting with a search engine search that means if you don’t have a website, you are only selling to 7% of your market. That is right, you are dipping the potential size of your business by 93%. I would suggest that the same statistic for consumer purchases is lower but still very high, especially for larger ticket items. The larger the item, the more research and shopping people will do. My guess is possibly 40-50% of consumer purchases start with an online search.
If we use the same instance from the paragraph above for the first five years of having a website your costs will be $10,417.00. How many sales do you need to produce to pay this back? If you are in a business to business market my guess is that you may only need one sale to make your website investment worthwhile. If one sale is not enough, it is probably only a handful. The chances of your website generating more than a handful of customers over the course of five years is almost definite given websites are about the #3 source of new customers for the average small businesses. Even if you are in a business to consumer market how much in sales would you need to make the website investment worthwhile…. $25,000 maybe? Producing $25,000 over the course of 5 years from a website is peanuts.