7 reasons your small business needs a website

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Business is driven by revenue. Nothing generates more business than advertising. It’s an undeniable fact: Clients can’t use your products or services if they don’t know you exist.

Some business owners think they don’t need a web site. They might shy away from the cost or feel intimidated through lack of understanding when a lot of technical terms get thrown around. It’s all pretty simple though.

Why Your Small Business Needs A Website.

1. Visibility

There are different ways to advertise. Most hopefully take advantage of free listings in phone directories or through their Chamber of Commerce. For those forms of advertising which take a financial investment, the question becomes where to put the money.

Consider the approach that will reach the most people in your target audience with the least effort. Billboards, paid directory ads, and e-mail lists are not interactive. They are missed in a blink or tossed away before they are read.

Yet the internet is pervasive in our everyday world. Even when a person isn’t looking for you, specifically, they can easily find you if your approach is sound. Your potential client outreach is virtually unlimited.

2. Save Time

Which is easier? Knocking on a hundred doors one by one or letting one hundred people each open their own door at the same time?

When you go about pounding the street, making cold calls, and sending e-mails, the return on investment is slim. You have spent hours or weeks in an activity that may return nothing. Most small business owners are very busy. They wear many hats and the weight of those hats can be crippling.

The internet reaches nearly everyone, all the time. It’s there, even now, doing its job. Make it work for you.

3. Save Money

For those running small businesses, it becomes imperative that every minute is used wisely to maximize profits while reducing costs. Internet marketing is like hiring an employee for the sole purpose of promoting your business. It removes much of the burden from you while at the same time bringing business to your door.

However, unlike a marketing employee, you don’t have to worry it will get sick. Your web site doesn’t need holidays or a retirement plan. It doesn’t care about insurance. Web sites simply works.

Any investment made into it is truly that: an investment. In this case, it is an investment with a very high return.

4. Credibility

Have you bought anything lately? Have you even thought about buying something? Did you search for it online? Odds are you went online to see what you could find. When you see a business listed do you visit its web site? If it doesn’t even have a web site do you pass it by for one that does?

If the answer to all of these questions is “Yes” you aren’t alone. Companies with web site gain instant credibility over the competition.

It doesn’t guarantee that the company with a web site is better than the one without one. But the company without the web site may never get a chance to prove otherwise.

5. Keeping Customers Informed

You’ve worked hard to build your client base. Their loyalty keeps you in business just as much as gaining new clients.

Business changes every day. Maybe you have a special promotion to offer. Maybe you moved to a larger office with all the revenue you’ve gained from better internet marketing.

Print ads become outdated. Phone calls are impractical. But your web site, especially with the integration of social media, reaches all your clients at once.

6. Expanding Your Market

A lot of small businesses have built themselves locally on referrals. That’s great. There’s nothing better than loyal return customers and the referrals they can provide. Let’s look at the math though: You have 10 clients and 7 make referrals. Of those seven referrals, four get in touch. Even if you gained all four as clients you are getting less than half the return on referral business alone. This is where a lot of small business owners find themselves. Their business slowly tapers off and they don’t know why because they are working harder than ever. Sometimes it’s because they have exhausted their local pool of potential clients. Internet marketing allows you to expand to a potentially global market. Even if that is more than you want to take on, it’s better to have the option.

7. Evolution

Sometimes we have been doing the same thing for so long we don’t think much about everything we have yet to explore. Experience brings growth. When you reach out to new people you discover new ways to help them. In return you help yourself as you reveal avenues of business you hadn’t considered.

Even Crimson Web Design is an example. We started decades ago providing technical support to physician offices and billing services with Paragon Medical Technology. We still have many valued clients that are as much friends as customers. Many of them are small businesses and we saw their struggle to build new relationships and increase revenue.

When we looked at what was missing we concluded a vital piece was effective marketing. So we began Crimson Web Design to fill that void. It has helped our loyal clients reach out to new clients and build their business. We gained the benefit of business evolution. Everyone is better off for it and it’s just the beginning.

Our Invitation

We invite you to consider all that the right internet marketing can do for you. We know we can help. Go ahead. Contact us and we’ll chat. Wherever you are today, it can be better. Crimson Web Design is here to help.