The internet has developed quickly, and businesses of every size now have a website. Traditional trades in particular have moved in to keep up, building sites to get a position in the online market.
Yet many businesses hesitate before building one, because they are not clear what it will actually do for them. The hesitation costs time, and time in this market is position. So here is what a site does.
1. It establishes the brand
A customer who searches for a company online and finds nothing, with no site to open, is a customer who is hard to win. For existing customers the effect is worse: no site reads as no substance, and trust drops.
The old idea that good work advertises itself no longer holds. Customers now search as a matter of habit, and they buy through what they find. A site lets customers anywhere reach the business, understand what it offers, and enquire; and on many sites, complete the purchase. That is how a website produces new customers, and how a brand gets established quickly.
2. It shows what the company can do
A site can describe the company and its products completely: the profile, the track record, what the product looks like, what it does, how it is used. Anything you want a customer or a partner to know can be on it.
That is a demonstration rather than a claim. Customers and partners can see the substance for themselves, domestically and abroad, which is what raises confidence on both sides.
3. It costs less than the alternative
Acquiring customers through a physical operation is affected by opening hours, location, service quality, how the product is displayed, rent. The cost of each customer keeps climbing.
A site is open continuously, by definition, and costs less to build and maintain than a shop. It also frees the business from the fixed pattern and the limited footfall of a physical location: the product range can be presented in more than one way, and promotion can take forms that a shop cannot.
The economics are the point. A site is cheap to run, reaches widely and lasts, which is a combination no other channel offers.
4. It spreads information and raises recognition
This is an era of information flow, and information travels fast to an extremely wide audience. Handled properly, a site raises recognition and exposure online, which is where potential customers come from.
For a new business this matters more than for an established one, because nobody knows it yet and a new brand is hard to sell. A site borrows the internet’s three advantages, speed, reach and persistence, and uses them to shorten the period in which nobody has heard of you.
5. It raises competitiveness at the point of decision
Most customers buying something they do not fully understand check online first. If the company has a site, they trust it and buy. If it does not, they buy from a competitor who does.
That is the whole mechanism, and it happens whether or not the business is aware of it. The site is not competing with the competitor’s product; it is competing with the competitor’s website, at the moment the customer is deciding.
6. It opens markets
A site gives the business a presence online that it controls, where it can present its culture and its products in its own terms. Putting it in front of the market works like print or television advertising, at a fraction of the cost and with far more flexibility.
In practice, almost any business can generate enquiries through a site. What varies is how well the site is built and how consistently it is maintained.
7. It allows direct conversation
Contact builds the relationship, and the relationship is what turns a customer into a repeat customer. A site can carry an enquiry channel staffed by someone whose job is to answer, which puts the business in direct contact without the customer travelling to a shop.
The convenience runs both ways. The customer asks without leaving their desk; the business answers without staffing a counter.
8. It is where buyers look, and where they find you
Purchasing departments of large organisations and individual buyers do the same thing first: they search the internet for new products, new suppliers, new services, because it is the cheapest and fastest way to do it.
A site puts the product range where that search arrives, and lets the buyer complete the transaction. Being findable is not a marketing flourish; it is the entry condition for being considered at all.
The starting point
In an internet economy, a website is what lets a business address a national market, or an international one. The internet is where unexpected things happen to ordinary companies, and a website is where that starts.
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