14 reasons why you need

The point here is to have something on the web so you can be found by potential customers or

even partners etc; even if your website simply contains your contact detail with a brief description

you can still generate leads and business.

Below are a few more reasons why you need a website

1. Build Customer Relationships

A website is a great place to build customer relationships this can be done extremely effectively

using email. Once you have a consumers name and e-mail address they could be a customer for

life if they are treated well.

2. Lead Generation

Lets face it we all want to make money online, and the sole intention of many online organisations

is to make money, and turn visitors into customers into loyal customer who use their products or

services again and again.

Creating a website, attracting visitors and funneling this traffic are a great lead generation

technique. A local organisation I worked with on a website visitor conversion campaign found they

increased lead generation by 800% by effectively utilizing the powers of creating an effective

online presence and marketing their website through a variety of channels.

3. To compete against your competitors

Without having an online presence could mean you are missing out on a lot of potential business

meaning your competitors have a distinct advantage just by having an websit. Effectively leverage

the power of the internet and get ahead of competitors by learning by their mistakes and doing

what they do better.

4. To provide business information

A huge proportion of internet users use the internet to find local businesses or a product or

service in general. Using a website to do this, is a lot cheaper than directory inquiries and a hell of

a lot quicker than using a telephone book or directory.

A website containing your business information is available 24 hours a day, this can be printed

and can be bookmarked to return to later. Furthermore potential customers can contact you using

the desired communication channel you display.

5. Global Reach

Ok, a lot of people use the advantage of having a global reach to say things like you can sell your

products to people overseas and people like to buy the latest and best products, yes of course

you can but you already know that. Having a global reach means that people from all over the

world can buy your products, however again it does not have to be a tangible product it could be

an e-book or a series of videos.

6. Open 24/7 365 days/year

Your shop is always open so to speak. Visitors can enter your shop any time of the day before

9am and after 5pm because out of these hours are when people tend to surf the internet, a

perfect reason why you should have an online presence such as a website.

7. Cost Effective Advertising

Offline advertising generally has an extremely low conversion rate. Leaflets and brochures can be

quote costly and once these have been printed and distributed and more often that not thrown

away this communication channel is dead.

However using a website as a communication will always be online; this cannot be thrown away

or discarded. Offline Marketing could be looked upon as a push marketing mechanism, however

having a website uses a pull mechanism, and customers search for your services and find your

website.

Think of a website as a full colour interactive brochure which you can add to whenever you like.

Reduce advertising costs by using just one effective call to action / message and promoting your

website address e.g. learn more about this product on our website, for more information visit

domain-name.co.uk.

And finally on this one alteration to your Official Website can be done quickly and free, this is a

completely different story with marketing literature such as posters or flyers.

8. To Project a professional image not @gmail.com

Lots of very small business nowadays has some kind of website. Nothing looks more

unprofessional than when a company refers to one of their points of contact being your-

name@hotmail.com or your-name@yahoo.com. This says too many consumers that the business

either could not afford or was not bothered about investing in their company brand image, would it

to be nicer to use a more user friendly and professional email such as support@your-domain.com

or contact@your-domain.com, this gives the consumers the feeling they are dealing with a

successful organisation and that their query or contact is being deal with a customer support /

care team.

9. Your website can make you money - sell your products and services

Firstly before I go into this one I would like to tell you two things, I recently attended a Search

Engine Optimization seminar in London and In one of the exhibition hall I engaged in a

conversation with a middle aged woman from Scotland, after discussing the topic of the seminar

we were about to watch she revealed to me that she found her online success selling, get ready

for it, selling books on how to make straw hats, she uncovered that she was able to quite her full

time job 3 years ago to peruse her online career selling books full time, but without the full time 9

5 or later house, she found she could happily sit back and work 1 2 hours per day checking email

and performing general maintenance on her website.

I think this goes to show that you need to be a retail outlet selling top brand labels in clothing to

become and entrepreneur online.

A website can be a great tool in not only promoting your products but selling them to, your shop

cannot be available 24 hours a day but your website can, and its probably worth mentioning again

that people do tend to surf the internet most when they return from work, so why not reinforce

your brand online as well as offline.

Having a website is a great way of automating your business, whilst you are having an evening off

or even sleeping you website can be generating brand awareness, generating leads but more

importantly generating sales and revenue for your company.

10. Word of mouth advertising

With the growing online community and social networking going on nowadays it has never been

easier to like minded people to communicated, but more importantly communicate your website

address or even drop it into an email. Its very common nowadays that a website address could be

posted up onto a website discussion forum by a happy customer and you could expect to receive

hundreds even thousand of visitors to your website from that one forum post or conversation

about your company and the products and services you offer.

11. Effectively reach new markets

An overwhelming amount of people now have access to the internet whether it is through their

mobile phone, pc, laptop or game console. You really cannot afford to miss out on all these

potential customers. It may be that someone didn't mean or intend to land on your website but

people surf the internet in many different ways, more often than not people often refine their

searches on search engine again and again until they get to the website they want, they may

begin searching for car wax and throughout their journey they may find that they done actually

want car wax anymore what they want now is a car valeting service, this is common with website

users in that they do end up on a website looking at products or services they didn't intend to look

at in the first place.

12. Test the market

Many organisations at some point would like to know how their target marketing are going to react

to their new product or service but are afraid of investing large amount of money into creating the

product and then be disappointed by the lack of interest or enthusiasm for it. A great way to test

the market is to expose this new product or service on your website. A typical idea of this would

be if a training consultancy wished to offer a new training program, by adding a small paragraph

on the homepage of your website detailing a brief introduction into the course followed by a click

here for more information or contact us to register your interest, by tracking the number of click

through or page views or even email inquiries can tell you how your market has reacted to your

new offering, this can then determine whether the launch of this new product is feasible. You can

even go a step further and test your new found marketing on piloting product prices etc.

13. Customer Support

Provide a support area or knowledge based for your customers. This can become a hub for all

your customers queries and questions, assistance on products, provide a variety of ways to be

contacted, alternatively use a frequently asked questions to answer the most popular questions or

queries all of this can be done without using staff time, employing new resources or without even

answering a phone.

14. Advertising Seasonal Offers / Special Offers

A website and having the right data capture in place is a great way to tunnel traffic into an email

list. Effectively collecting customers email addresses gives you the power to contact them when

you want to tell them something. You may have a seasonal offer that you wish to communicate,

effective email marketing is a great way to build relationships, generate leads (by offering a free

report or discount voucher in exchange for their email address, and more importantly convert

leads into customers through the use tailored email that meet the demands of your customers.

Building up an intelligent database can have a massive impact on consumer retention and loyalty,

knowing that Mrs Smith loves to buy books by a certain author gives you an opportunity to up sell

and cross sell other books by that author / similar authors and also attempt to sell items that other

people have purchased hence giving the consumer exactly what they want, when they want it a

step on from this is to build an incentivised loyalty program e.g. buy this book and get another

book for half price, all of this is possible.

Every one of your customers can be alerted about this special offer at the click of a button, and

compared to the cost of offline marketing this is extremely low cost with a higher conversion rate

and an even higher return on investment.

If your business is selling ice cream to kids at the local fair your 'customers' are those booking you

for these events, not the kids buying the ice cream. A well designed website is one that caters to

your market and makes you easily accessible to them.

No matter how small or traditional your business is, spending a bit of time setting up your website

will enhance your business.

Let us at The Super Nerds help Create a Website that is right for you and your business.

what do you need to make a website