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If you are on the fence about whether your business needs a website, this is the article for you. I will walk you step by step through each stage explaining in great detail everything you need to know so that even newbies and non-techies can follow along.
As of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide – 59.5 percent of the global population. With such metrics, it only makes sense for businesses to tap into the huge online market.
While some people today still believe they don’t need a website, or that only high-tech businesses need one. This couldn’t be further from the truth. A website is essential to any business.
In fact, you can find many successful businesses in traditional low-tech industries such as pest control, cleaning, and garbage collection, thriving primarily because of the leads generated from their websites.
Today personal brands or businesses need websites. From DJs, party organizers, events such as weddings, CV websites e.t.c. Imagine for a moment you are looking for the perfect photographer for your wedding. Chances are very high you will start by conducting a Google search.
You find several results from Google. After going through the first three results you decide to hire the first photographer as their website is professional looking, loads fast, and has detailed information on all their products and services plus a portfolio of their previous wedding photos.
Every day there are billions of similar searches being conducted on Google by customers looking for the exact products and services you offer, from all over the world. The Golden question is, will they find your brand website or your competitors?
In case you are not yet sold, here are some reasons why any business in Kenya regardless of size needs a website.
Drives Leads and Sales
A website designed professionally and marketed effectively will increase leads and sales to any business. Since new potential customers can easily find your business for the products you offer by simply reaching out to their phone or computer and conducting an online search.
Increases Brand Awareness
In today’s fast-paced world coupled with decreased attention spans, getting and keeping the attention of a potential customer can be daunting. Compared to traditional forms of marketing a website can be comprehensively detailed and does not have a time limit like a TV advert that typically runs for a few seconds.
A website will drive significantly more brand awareness for longer at a significantly lower cost. This is the case since a website, is always online (24/7 365), easily accessible from all over the world, and can easily be shared by users.
Test out new Ideas
Research and development are vital to the success and growth of every company. A website offers an easy way to test out new ideas. it’s easier to track and analyze website visitor statistics as opposed to how many eyes balls have seen a billboard or poster.
A company can decide to test a new product, website, menu, color scheme, logo e.t.c. If the change results in a positive increase in these metrics; Website traffic, conversions, and revenue, The idea is then adopted and implemented.
While in a traditional business model testing could cost a fortune, a loss of revenue, or market share. With a website, you can send half your website traffic to a different version to test things out and determine the best of the two. This is referred to as split testing.
Learning, testing, and improving should be a continuous effort. A website makes this process super easy and cost-effective. You can also split test so many variables such as colors, text size, and font size among many others. This allows you to continuously optimize for higher and higher conversions.
Engage With Customers
A website offers an easy way for customers to engage with your brand and each other.
Clients can engage directly with your support staff and with content on your website. You can set up email support channels, Live chats, Conduct polls, Faqs, embed social media feeds e.t.c
Customers can engage with each other on your company’s forum and blog comment section. This can help you build a community of loyal customers that help each other, reducing your customer support costs.
Expand into new markets
A website can enable you to easily expand your business into new markets or offer value addition. Let me explain if your Kenyan company grows and becomes successful. It’s only normal to desire to seek new horizons.
You can easily enter other international markets by as simply registering an international domain such as .co.uk for the united kingdom or .com for a global business. The next step is to create a website with products and services targeted at that specific market.
Don’t forget to conduct market research to understand what works in that environment. You will also need to register your foreign company, or you can use your local company as an international company abroad to conduct business. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, talk with your attorney for the best entity for your situation.
Explain your Value Preposition
A website when compared to traditional marketing such as tv or radio ads, print such as newspaper, poster, flyers, or billboards have limited real estate. By real estate I mean your content or advertisement goes stale very quickly. It’s shown for a few minutes if not seconds, provided you keep paying for it.
A website on the other hand is unlimited and allows you the ability to create as many pages, categories, posts, products, images, videos e.t.c. This allows your company to explain your value proposition to the client in great detail educating them, and winning their trust which leads to a conversion.
The best part is a website will allow you to do all this for a minute of what it would cost you to acquire the same amount of marketing/media real estate via traditional media.
Offer New Products or services
Businesses can quickly integrate new products and services into their websites increasing their revenue and attracting more clients. You can also get feedback quickly on new offerings to get invaluable feedback needed during the development of new products or services.
Introducing a new product or service could be as simple as creating a new post or page. Furthermore, websites allow you to sell other types of products otherwise not possible, such as digital products, which include: online courses, ebooks, software e.t.c. ‘
A business can tap into these new types of digital products to boost streams of income. Digital products are very profitable often with crazy lucrative margins. Since the cost of the product is essential incurred once and every copy sold after that is pure profit.
The best part is the product is automatically delivered 24/7 by the website for download to the customer, Meaning you don’t even have to handle shipping, you only need to worry about collecting the profits from a digital product you worked on for many years in the past.
Of course, nothing is truly 100% passive, and continuous updating and improvement are necessary to keep growing and remain relevant.