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What are the practical reasons why your business needs a website? And why should every business have its own self-hosted website in 2022?
The Internet is hardly a novelty to anyone in today’s generation. In fact, the world wide web has become a substantial mode of communication and an essential resource in the flow of information for literally every sphere of our existence.
Nowadays more and more individuals and companies opt to own a website, and there are many reasons why they choose to make the investment into their own website.
Popularly reasons why your business needs a website
The article will go beyond the following popular reasons why your business needs a website. We will be giving you four of the strongest reasons over and above what you commonly read about on the internet justifying why many businesses are going online with their own websites, and why you cannot continue your operations without taking advantage of this trend too.
But before that, the following are a list of the common reasons;
1. Credibility and trust:
The first reason why your business needs a website is that it makes you look professional and credible.
This is against the background that a survey conducted by VeriSign indicates that 84% of today’s consumers think a website makes your business out as being more credible than companies who only have and use social media profiles.
Also, a survey of more than 500 consumers shows that 50% of consumers believe that website design is crucial to a business’s overall brand.
Apparently, the fact that a company maintains an official source for all information that you might require concerning their operations makes a certain kind of statement about the legitimacy of their dealings, and customers notice this.
2. Showcase your products and services
The second common reason why your business has to go online with your own self-hosted website is that it allows you to showcase your products and services anyway and manner you see fit.
There are actually several ways you can get a website for free, I mean if you understand what a website is by definition, then your Facebook page is technically a website. Same as your LinkedIn business page. There are other platforms too like Google Maps and online directories which give you free web pages, or whole multiple pages websites.
But these free platforms don’t allow you to showcase your products and services in the manner that you want. They constrain what you can and cannot do. On your own self-hosted website, your content is written and presented in a way that reflects your business plan and strategy.
On a professional self-hosted website, all media and graphic elements are carefully designed to communicate your brand and what it stands for. Also, you can publish content in any format that your need to; video, text, images, documents, live content, or programs. And you determine the accessibility rules for every content.
3. Attract new customers through Google
Google gets close to 6 billion searches every day and trillions of searches every year, even though about 91% of content indexed by Google gets no traffic from Google at all.
Not very good news, yet this easily tells of what would happen when your content becomes part of the 9% that gets traffic on Google, you could draw an immense amount of attention to your products and services.
And it all starts from having your own website with quality content, any business which is not doing this is leaving untold business on the table and making things easier for those who are actively improving their online presence and creating quality content.
4. Reviews and testimonials
Number four on our list of most compelling reasons why your business needs a website is that it affords your the opportunity to influence buyer decisions with reviews and testimonials.
A well-designed testimonials page filled with praise for your products and services will do amazing things for your business. The testimonials page on our site happens to be one of our most visited pages.
You can offer social proof and display your best reviews and testimonials as you wish. If you are familiar with customer behaviour, you know that quite a lot of people are effectively influenced by what they hear in the form of other people’s experiences of your products and services.
In fact, user reviews and testimonials are very important to new customers in their pre-purchase stages. Thankfully, you can help them out and in turn, influence their purchasing decision by showing them your best reviews and testimonials.
And what better way can you do this than by curating and publishing them beautifully on your website, the very place where they are doing their research, and probably going to make the purchase or contact you.
5. Expanded your working hours
That time is a limited resource, is a fact every business person is well aware of. A traditional business working hours can be extended by selling or offering your services online and by implementing customer relations management (CRM) systems like chatbots, automatic product recommendation pages to keep attending to customers even after your physical working hours.
6. Access to a global audience:
It is possible to reach a broad audience in an easy way. You would naturally be targeting your region, but how would you want to serve customers all over the world? The problem with this goes beyond working hours. It’s the differences in time zones across the globe.
This means to effectively serve clients internationally, you must implement strong customer relations services and an automated service delivery system like eCommerce. If this is done well, you’ll only wake up in the morning to check how many sales or conversions were made while you slept.
Closely connected to this would be a language barrier, and you can overcome it by using a multi-site system offering various versions of your website to users based on their location.
This is probably the most pressing reason why your company must have its own website. Imagine selling to Spanish, Chinese, German customers besides English speakers. Expensive, but again, so much worth the investment.
7. Level the playing field
A strong digital marketing strategy implemented using a well-built website allows even small companies to compete with large multinationals for clients and sales.
One factor that makes this possible is the lesser-known SEO fact that Google ranks web pages, not websites. This means a small site can rank quite as well as an established site on search engines like Google.
Realising that you’ll be competing with brands from across the globe is the reason why you cannot compromise on the quality of your website. Note that some of these big names have been online for over 20 years. You surely agree with me that a cheap website built on cheap hosting won’t have what it takes.
The reason I keep making a big deal out of building a professional site is that you could be deceived by some budding designer with their cheap prices, and in the end, you’ll just be throwing away money since you’ll see no results.
Trust me, things can be so bad that your content won’t even show up on Google for months and months, we’ve seen clients come to us with this issue over and over again.
So it’s true, you can compete with international brands, but you can’t expect to be successful without making the needed investment into the quality of your website. Again, this post will help you in choosing the best web designer for your project.
Most Compelling Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Website
Now let’s move on to some lesser-known yet even the strongest reasons for creating and having your own professional self-hosted website;
8. Audience interactivity:
Web sites allow a much better relationship with customers compared to conventional printed materials or advertisements on television or radio. The user can receive information more easily, answer questions, share experiences on a forum (if the page has one), etc.
9. Ease of updating:
You need your own business website because it is possible to change information on your website from virtually anywhere in real-time. If, for example, a website offers some products, it is possible to update prices with just a few clicks, and a google web designer would offer you basic training in how to do these basic tasks.
We will be talking more about your content marketing under the topic of Authority in your industry, but let’s mention here that posting a blog article is as easy as publishing an Instagram post.
And these website updating processes keep getting easier and easier year after year.
This is just to let you know that having your self-hosted website could be as straightforward as having your own Instagram business page. You should easily consider getting a good web designer to build one for you. This page has a number of very good web design companies, you can check them out.
10. Cost savings:
Maintaining a website is far less expensive than advertising on other media like radio, newspapers, or television.
Going online with your own self-hosted website can significantly reduce costs for staff, office space, etc. Also, you can obtain information about your consumers by which you can segment your customer base and target them with specific promotions and offers.
We often try to make our clients understand that their business website is their business Development Office who never sleeps, goes on leave, or closes from work. You would be able to attend to your old clients and win new ones all through your website. Yes, this is how helpful your website is, and the reason why the investment into building a great one is always worth it.
if you’re using social media intensively, you’re probably doing some ad campaigns, and that is alright. But you should see social media ads as complementary to your content marketing strategy implemented on your website. the reason for this is that paying for social media ads is not sustainable, your traffic and sales dip immediately after your stop the ads.
But on your website, you can draw thousands of targeted monthly traffic all for free and sustainably through your content writing and content marketing activities. The day we discovered this truth, we began offering content writing services to our clients. You can reach out to us for help if you’re interested too.
11. Authority in the industry
It’s amazing how the internet affords several opportunities to anyone who cares to take advantage of them. You see, the simple job of these search engines, like Google and Bing, is to show internet searchers where to find what they’re looking for.
This job is well done if the user shows by their behaviour like how long they stay on that page and whether or not they engage in any way with that content, by, for instance, clicking on a call to action button, navigating to other pages of the site, or making a purchase.
In the case that the user clicks the return button and goes right back to the search engine, there is a clear indication that this page didn’t have what this user was searching for.
There’s an iterative process involved here, and after a few occurrences, the algorithm evaluates and reshuffles the search results in an attempt to improve the results by ranking the entries that most adequately satisfy the search intent above the rest.
Taking the fact that 15% of all search queries on Google have never been searched before, this process of improving the results never really ends.
What this means is that so long as you are keen on producing content that answers the search intent of more and more searchers, you’re surely going to be an authority in your industry very soon. And when that happens, you even get users sent to your website when they search for anything remotely related to your content.
The fact that you’re reading this article is proof that this principle is working even for us at EnspireFX. Let me state again that you can take advantage of this only if you have a self-hosted website, and you take your content creation seriously.
If you’re interested, we offer content creation services as a separate service, you can always talk to us about your project.
12. Local Visibility
Your business targets a city or country. Even large multinationals zone their activities into regions and design localised marketing strategies for each region. If you are not doing this, well, you should too.
Type the name of your industry in + your region into Google maps, and see which companies show up. For instance, “Web Designers in Ghana” or “Web Designers in Delaware”, what do you see?
Do the same thing in Google Search. These are the companies with local visibility and dominion within the region, and they didn’t just end up there by luck or by how long they were online. They achieved this with what search engine optimization (SEO) professionals call Local SEO.
You can gain increased local visibility like this only with your own self-hosted professional website. You can talk to your web developer about local SEO, or contact us for help ranking on Google maps, we’ll be glad to help you.
13. Diminishing Social Media Reach
If you’ve been using social media platforms like Facebook from its early days in the mid-2000s, you would see a vast difference in the strategy of these platforms.
Social media reach simply refers to a media analytics metric that measures the number of users who have come across a particular content on a social platform. Closely associated with impressions, social media impression is the total number of circumstances where your content has been shown on a social timeline. Engagement also looks at how people interact with the content that they see on a social platform such as liking, sharing, pinning or retweeting.
The truth is, with the exception of Pinterest, all these networks reward, encourage and aim to keep people on their platforms for longer and longer time. So they give priority to content which is more likely to encourage people to keep on using the app for longer periods.
What this means is that your content will probably be shown to only a handful of even your own followers. If you think these networks are helping your business, then think again, because they’re don’t hire all their engineers just to make your business work.
It is surprising how the same content that Facebook believes is doing well and could reach thousands, is still shown to only a few people, only for it to reach hundreds of thousands when you promote it with a paid ad.
Fading social media reach is the reason why you must change your online marketing strategy to using your own self-hosted website instead.
14. Cultivating Brand Equity
In simple terms, brand equity is how much sway a brand name has on the minds of consumers in making purchasing decisions as compared to other generic alternatives.
Have you wondered why a ladies handbag with a popular designer label priced several units higher than a nameless alternative? Nothing has even been said about the quality of other attributes of the product, yet the label alone seems to be worth so much in the mind of the consumer.
This is the value of building a known and recognised brand. If you could somehow make the world know what it is you do and what makes your services different from other alternatives out there, you would doubtless have such an easy marketing advantage that your business would explode right away.
The big brands we know have invested heavily into their brand equity to make them what they are today. But the good news is that you can achieve a very decent brand awareness within your niche and among your target region with your website.
It all depends on whether you would make the effort of implementing a professional website, or you would rather make others popular by becoming “their user”. This is not to raise your hope with unrealistic expectations, a well-built website will cost you, and that’s a business fact, but you’ll soon know that it’s so much worth every dime.
15. Remarketing
Our last and final reason why your business needs a website is that you can implement remarketing in your advertising campaigns.
Of all the reasons we’ve given, this last one excites us the most, maybe it’s because this one makes you money. Think of running an ad campaign and driving customers to your page. Naturally, some of us make a purchase, but much more won’t.
Remarketing is simply the tactics used by digital marketers to serve ads to people who have already visited or taken action on a website. It is also called retargeting.
The reasons for this are many, it could be that they don’t really intend to buy, are not ready with the funds now, have decided to buy from somewhere else, or that they’re just not through with the pre-purchase state, etc.
So let’s say that campaign ends, and after some months you want to put up another ad campaign, what you ordinarily do is to set it up and run it one more time, and pay to show your ad to more and more people.
This is where remarketing comes in. What if you could target your ad to the exact same people who visited your site, but did not convert? The way this is done is with a code snippet implemented in your site, that tells Google to show the ads to only people who’ve been to your site before but didn’t make a purchase or contact you.
I’m sure you’ve noticed this; you would chat with someone about emails, and after a while, you would launch YouTube, and be greeted with an advert from a site you visited months ago promoting Email. This is because there was a code snippet on the website you visited which is kinda embedded in your internet browser.
So effectively, this advertiser is following you around the internet trying to sell you their services. You can do this on your website as well and increase your conversion rate ten-fold. Feel free to get in touch with us to implement remarketing campaigns for you. We will be delighted to work with you.
This way, you maximise your marketing budget by concentrating your marketing effort on people who have already shown interest in your products or services, as against targeting a whole new audience set. This is how established brands with huge marketing budgets and the ability to hire expert marketing agencies are able to sell so many products on a daily basis, and you can too.
Once again, a free website or a webpage within someone else’s website, cannot give you this functionality, because you need access to the site’s core files.
Conclusion
Does your business need a website? I hope you can answer that for yourself now. We have tried to give you the real and the hard arguments for getting your own self-host website. Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below, or to reach out to us with all your digital marketing ideas. We have an expert waiting to help. Thank you.
