How a good business website can influence your customers.
Many small business owners have a hard time understanding how a website benefits their business. Especially in the short term.
While the owner of a small or medium business understands how it runs, how well it does from month to month and also understands the use of marketing their brand, most don’t understand the way a well built and designed website can have a positive impact on their bottom line. This is reflected by the 2012 abs.gov.au statistic that only 44.6% of businesses have an on-line presence of any kind.
Yes when you sit down with a website designer they tend to use a lot of three letter abbreviations, SEO, SEM and SLA. But probably the most important three letter abbreviation that is important to any business owner is ROI.
Return on Investment is important to your businesses bottom line. Websites and your business should be complementary. A website should reflect the brand, existing marketing and existing advertising you already do and provide your business with a potential new customer base. When looking at investing into your online image, whether that is a new website, updating an existing one, Social media marketing or Google adwords it is important that your business is able to quantify the results from the money spent.
That return can take many forms, from direct sales, to increased customer participation on your website or social media pages. Increased brand awareness from having a functioning, elegant website with content designed to boost your rankings in search engines can lead to higher top of mind awareness in potential customers which in turn leads to higher sales for your business over time.
In vying for the consumer dollar your competition will try to take every advantage to make sure they are the ones who customers think of when they go to purchase. And a business website can make all the difference – whose business website or Facebook page has the information on what’s in stock, which site can let a customer reserve an item for later pick up or better still which business website will let a customer find the item they are after, let them know if its in stock, let them order it, pay for it, and arrange delivery?
And a large percentage of customers research their purchases – over 75% of all Australians have access to the internet – especially purchases involving larger cash outlays, on the internet, through Google and through comparison of businesses websites, Facebook pages, or Google business pages?
This product research by customers often results directly in a purchase.
If your business isn’t on the web, doesn’t have a website, Facebook page or anything else asides from a directory listing who do you think will leave a greater impression? You or your competition?
And leaving you with one other thing to consider.
Did you know that a business is able to claim some of the costs associated with website and online marketing??
Look at this post from business.gov.au
David.