Even in the post-Coronavirus world, in which we’ve seen dramatic scenes of high-street stores temporarily or permanently closed due to lockdown restrictions – all while online shopping via ecommerce websites has largely flourished, the title of this blog post is a fair question.
After all, your business may be a very locally oriented one, with a strong local customer base already. Or perhaps your brand already enjoys a strong profile thanks to social media – in which case, you might wonder whether you actually need to launch a separate website.
Alas, the short answer is that you absolutely do – and here’s why.
Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon
In fact, it practically powers the world. Tens of thousands of searches take place on Google every second, which works out as billions of searches daily.
All the while, people are performing not just general, globally relevant searches, but also searches for local products and services, like those offered by your firm. These searches also encompass all industry sectors, with even the smallest players in those sectors routinely having a website these days.
For these reasons alone, your small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) could be missing out on a huge amount of potential business if it has no official website at all.
And don’t forget that in today’s ‘omnichannel’ world, potential customers don’t come into contact with a given brand purely through whatever high-street presence they may have. Who is to say that competitors of yours won’t be attracting the initial interest of potential customers through Google, with these would-be buyers then popping into the brand’s physical store to purchase?
These elements are all connected – and if your small business still lacks a website, that’s a huge and fundamental component to be missing when you’re trying to market your firm powerfully.
What are the other great reasons for you to have a website?
Not only has it probably never been more crucial for your small business to have a website, it might have never been easier or quicker for your business to set one up. So, here are just a few more of the good reasons to enquire about small business website design right now:
- Online marketing offers a wide range of advantages, including low cost, high return on investment (ROI), straightforward tracking of your brand’s marketing performance, and easy adjustment of your marketing campaigns over time. Your SME’s website can play a potent role in your realisation of all of these benefits.
- It complements your other marketing activity. As we touched on above, your marketing channels don’t exist in isolation from each other. Your brand doing well on Facebook or Instagram isn’t a reason to not bother with a website – it’s a reason to develop a website that will help to convert a sizeable proportion of that captive interest into sales.
- A low-cost website is no longer automatically a low-quality one. It was once the case that you needed to shell out some serious cash just to have a reasonably attractive and functional website, with this serving as a major deterrent to many small firms seeking to establish their own sites. But that’s no longer the case, thanks to the popularisation of platforms like WordPress that allow sites to be put together even by those with no coding skills, as well as the emergence of agencies that specialise in small business website design.
We’re proud to be one of those agencies here at PENNInk Productions, with a longstanding track record of providing a professional, affordable and plain-English service to solopreneurs and SMEs.
Enquire of our team via phone or email today and we’ll be pleased to have a suitably in-depth discussion with you about the possibilities for your own small business website design, not least for significantly bolstering traffic, awareness and sales.
Edward Solomon has over 30 years’ experience in project management, technical education, computer networking, web design and development and is a Digital Business Consultant for PENNInk Productions Ltd.
