What if we were all born alike with very little in the name of differentiation? Could people recognize us?
Or
What if we dress like a military parade with extreme standardization? Could people recognize us?
Or
What if we were the Burj Khalifa of Dubai which can be seen from miles around?
Which do you think would be the ideal marketing scenario? Without doubt, the third! People know you, recognize you and can easily make a decision whether to approach you or not.
Something similar is the situation with businesses and website, more so small businesses. If you plan to stay small & have a well-defined niche’, you could go without a website. But sooner or later, competition would kill you. And competition these days could be your neighbour shop or enterprise online.
Business websites and more so for small businesses is thus a necessity. Why? What do they get you? Well, they get you the following:
It guarantees visibility & your clients expect it
A website can get you visibility anywhere on the planet. It’s just that one should know the exact URL and you ought to take some efforts with Seeing your identity. A website is like a perennial door that your clients/ visitors can knock on irrespective of where the door or your clients are located. And best of all, with every business of every shape and size having some or the other web presence, it is just a matter of time before you would feel the heat from competition to start your own website.
With technology it’s as expensive as posting brochure
Things which bring obvious advantages to life invariably find competition which bring about price reduction. With websites too things like word press have reduce the price and efforts to make websites. Today they are as expensive as printing a clutch of colorful, graphics-heavy brochures. But what they get in terms of visibility can never be replicated by any brochure irrespective of their liveliness and layout.
You can post your side of the story and control the narratives
Prior to the advent of digital communication & the net, the supply-side stories with respect to products, their usability, usefulness, changes, replies to negative publicity etc was a thing for large corporate with larger PR budgets. With the coming of websites and the medium of blogs, businesses of any size and type can post their side of the story and tell the world things that they think are the reality.
You can go asking your clients to tell you what exactly they need- anywhere in the world & extend the reach of CRM
Getting customer feedback was at one time possible only for the MNCs or Kirana shops round the corner. For everyone in between, it is nothing beyond guess-work. With website and their ability to remain interactive, businesses of any size can get instant feedback from clients as also gauge their likes, dislikes, wants and wishes. With these in place, even a single-person business can flourish like never before irrespective of business type and complexity.
You can sell your own products
With the modalities of online businesses being available to all and sundry, a website can be a great way to promote one’s products be it created or franchised. The medium of websites are especially useful for those making/ manufacturing niche products and whose ability to otherwise engage in constructive marketing is fairly limited. This feature of websites has been a boon to people in the hinterlands selling handicrafts, very niche home furnishings and food items which cannot otherwise be sold easily.
Your website can be of great help to your employees and associates vis-à-vis their daily activites for you
With a stable internet connection, your website can double up as your office- without occupying any space anywhere! From the confines of your home or a shared office facility, you can now run an office while keeping ever detail of your business on the cloud- exactly where your website is. In fact, these days with technology going the way it is, your website could be a repository of all information needed to run a business- including accounts, CRM and production details. A virtual ERP can now be an annexure to a website in a seamless whole! All this results in saving time, space, money and men!
A website is thus of great importance to any business- more so if you are small!
Small today doesn’t equate weak and unimportant. It stands for speed, agility and increased one-to-one interaction!
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