With over 4.88 billion internet users worldwide (62% of the global population), it makes sense why you need a website for your business. Even if you’re not a tech-savvy company, it’s crucial to have a website that effectively promotes your company and the products and services you have to offer.
Many B2B companies continue to practice traditional marketing efforts like cold calling and emailing, and they’re incredibly effective. However, with a website, you have the opportunity to generate even more leads for your business.
Every small business needs a website because it:
- Builds Trust and Credibility
- Enables Prospects To Find Your Company
- Supports Relationship Building
- Displays Your Work Effectively
- Increases Brand Awareness
- Boosts Your Business to the Top of Search Engines
- Showcases Your Company
- Maximizes Your Digital Marketing Efforts
- Strategically Targets Your Ideal Customer
- Gives You a Competitive Edge
- Increases Sales
Builds Trust and Credibility
As a small business owner, building your company’s credibility is crucial. With a website—specifically a good website—you have the opportunity to gain and maintain the trust of potential customers.
Recent studies show that 38% of users stop interacting with websites if they’re poorly designed. To build prospect trust and credibility, you must have an eye-catching website design with user-friendly development. This shows the user that your company is well-established and stands firm with its mission, values, products, and service offerings.
In addition to high-quality web design and development on desktops, it’s essential to optimize your website for mobile devices. Since more users are discovering businesses from their smartphones and tablets, a mobile-friendly site is crucial to maximize the user experience, which helps convert users into customers.
Lastly, if your company has an established and responsive website, you show the viewer that you prioritize the customer experience. If you prioritize their experience with your website, then they’re more likely to trust that you prioritize the customer experience with your company’s products and services.
Enables Prospects To Find Your Company
As humans in a fast-paced world, we value convenience and instant gratification. If there’s a way we can get something done quicker and more efficiently, we take advantage of that opportunity. With a website, users can easily access your business’s information and get answers to their questions when they need them most.
You need a website because it makes your company available at all hours of the day. If a potential customer is curious about your company and the products or services you offer, they can look up your company or what they need on Google. Then, your company is listed under the search results.
For example, if a company’s heating unit goes out in the middle of a cold winter night, they need someone there to fix it as soon as possible. With a website, a prospect can search “HVAC repair companies in St. Louis” and discover your website instantly. Through your website, they can message a representative who can get someone out there to fix it first thing in the morning.
Supports Relationship Building
Whether you’re a small local business or a franchised organization, you both value the same thing: building relationships with customers. When your company has a website, you have the opportunity to build relationships with potential customers and progress your relationship with already existing customers.
Many businesses use their website as a lead generation tool to generate leads for their sales pipeline. On a company website, users have the opportunity to submit their personal contact information to get email marketing offers, receive monthly newsletters, attend webinars, or download free guides. From here, your sales team can integrate their contact information into the sales pipeline and nurture a relationship with them over time. When they’re ready to make a purchase, they can reach out to you to take the following steps.
Displays Your Work Effectively
Your business has a lot to be proud of. When you have a company website, you have the opportunity to showcase all of your successes to your target audience.
On your website, you can share client testimonials and project case studies. For example, if you’re a construction company that’s completed various high-scale projects, you can share images and videos of the completed projects on your website. This allows prospects to see your work for themselves. If they like what they see, they have more reason to partner with your company.
While there are many ways to showcase your work on your website, case studies are shown to be most effective when they’re presented in a visually appealing manner. Marketing collateral is a great way to showcase your work because case studies can be presented in various forms, including videos, infographics, and sell sheets. These can be presented directly on your website or in a downloadable format to gather prospect contact information.
While these pieces of marketing collateral are great for your website, they can also be attached to emails in an email marketing campaign or social posts for increased viewership and engagement. This increases the likelihood of them being viewed and directed back to your website.
Increases Brand Awareness
You need a website for your business because it will help you build brand awareness. In addition to your company’s printed material, it’s another platform to share your logo and brand voice. With a website, you can brand your company how you want to be interpreted.
For example, if you’re a managed service provider or software company, you can brand your company’s voice to be highly technical to establish expertise and build credibility. You can also arrange your messaging to reflect the buying persona of your target audience, such as CFOs or technology managers.
Boosts Your Business to the Top of Search Engines
While having a well-established website is great for building trust, credibility, and a brand voice, it can accomplish so much more if it has SEO value. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means your website is optimized to be boosted to the top of search engines. This increases the likelihood of intended users coming to your website and checking out what your business has to offer for them.
An effective SEO strategy is ideal for increasing conversion rates and boosting online sales. By prioritizing SEO content, you’re more likely to reach your target audience. While there are many ways to optimize your website for SEO value, it’s typically practiced by inserting relevant keywords, internal linking, and backlinking to other credible websites.
Although these SEO best practices are effective for boosting ranking in search results, there are correct and incorrect ways to do it. For example, if you’re writing a blog or a landing page for your roofing company about “best roof types for inclement weather,” you wouldn’t want to overload your content with the keyword “best roof types of inclement weather.” Search engines count against that and can do more harm for your site than good. Search engines refer to this as keyword stuffing. When writing content for your website, make sure you’re keeping your keyword usage less than 5% of your overall word count, so it doesn’t negatively affect your company’s search engine ranking.
In addition, if you’re linking to pages on your own site or citing a credible source, make sure the text you link is relevant and matches the intent of the content. For example, if you’re a commercial cleaning company and you’re writing a blog about how to clean dirty floors, don’t link the phrase “dirty floors” to a page on your website that talks about clean floors. This strays the reader away from the intent of the piece and could be confusing.
Showcases Your Company
You need a website for your business to demonstrate the professionalism of your company. When you have a website for your small business, users are much more likely to trust you and what your company has to offer.
Many small and local businesses believe that they don’t need a website since they have social media profiles. However, this is inaccurate. As a matter of fact, having social media profiles gives you more of a reason to have a website for your business because you can share your website content on your social media profiles. This also provides more content for your social media posts, so you never run out of content creation ideas.
Having a website shows users that your business is well-established with a professional attitude. Without a website, you risk potential customers turning away from your company because they can’t find the information they need when they want it. In addition, it could turn off current customers because there’s no easy way to contact your staff if they have urgent needs or questions. This could ruin your company’s reputation and could negatively impact your sales and customer retention.
Maximizes Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Every great digital marketing strategy should start with a website. Without one, you risk losing out on high-quality business opportunities. You need a website for your business because it is the foundation of every successful digital marketing plan—and here’s why.
When you write social media posts or distribute email marketing campaigns, do you send them just to send them, or do you include a call to action? Digital content distribution without a cause is a significant waste of time, money, and resources and leaves you with little to no results.
A website allows you to share your content online with a clear call to action. A call to action could be gathering their information on the “Contact Us” page or simply asking them to check out your latest article on trends in B2B marketing. Whatever your intent is with your call to action, it’s important just to have one, so the reader knows what you want them to do with this information.
As mentioned previously, SEO is a crucial component to getting your website seen by users. By posting blogs on your website, you’re staying up to date on industry trends and enhancing the SEO value of your website—the more SEO-focused content you have, the more likely your website is going to be seen by more users of your target audience. This is also going to boost credibility and trust between your company and prospects.
Strategically Targets Your Ideal Customer
Traditional sales and marketing tactics can be tedious and time-consuming because reps risk spending more time finding key decision-makers (KDM) and qualifying the company than they do pitching. If a sales rep spends a significant amount of time determining if the lead is qualified and they’re not, a lot of their time is thrown out the window. While traditional sales practices like cold calling are effective, a website helps you target your message toward a specific audience that’s looking for more information about your company’s product or service.
You need a website for your company because it enables prospects to come directly to you if they’re looking for a specific product or service. For example, if the website for your LED lighting company is filled with the keyword “benefits of LED lighting” or “why LED lighting is crucial for commercial buildings,” then users who are interested in LED lighting solutions are directed to your site and have the opportunity to reach out and get a quote from your business.
Gives You a Competitive Edge
Believe it or not, recent studies show that 28% of small businesses do not have a website. However, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 44% of small businesses plan on getting one to boost their virtual engagement.
While having a website itself doesn’t necessarily give you a competitive edge, the content you display on it can put you one step ahead of your competitor. When you post blog content about industry trends, you show your target audience that you’re staying in line with industry standards. This presents you as an industry thought leader and instills trust and confidence in your company’s line of service.
If you don’t think you need a website for your business, imagine the number of opportunities you miss by not having a digital presence. While traditional sales and marketing tactics are still effective, having a website increases the likelihood of customers finding your business.
Increases Sales
Overall, the goal of a website is to increase sales and consistently put new prospects into your sales pipeline. A good website increases business opportunities because it gives prospects and customers another channel to engage with your business. While it may seem unnecessary to your small business, you need a website to consistently grow and prove yourself knowledgeable and up to date in your line of work. When paired with B2B appointment setting efforts, a website can maximize how your company generates and closes business with leads.
Key Takeaways
As 62% of the global population actively engages on the internet, it’s understandable why you need a website for your business. Without an efficient website, you risk missing high-quality business opportunities, losing loyal customers to competitors that take measures to support customer satisfaction, and developing a poor company reputation. A website that prioritizes the user experience increases the likelihood of keeping current customers and generating new sales opportunities.
If you don’t feel like you’re tech-savvy enough to build a website that’s designed and developed perfectly for your target audience, contact the sales reps at Abstrakt Marketing Group to get started!
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