Why Website is Importance For Marketing? 5 Reasons to Explain
To be completely candid, this is a bizarre question to ask in the digital age we are living today. Yet, according to studies, there are still nearly 40% businesses that are operating without a website.
When you look at this fact from the perspective that almost 80% of people look for a business online before deciding to purchase from them. Not having a business website just does not make any sense. Plus as a marketer, your marketing options significantly shrink in the absence of a website.
To market your business fully and earn as much as you can from it, your small business needs a website that is relevant and functional. And no, doing business on Facebook isn’t enough. Also, owning a website isn’t expensive.
Let’s now list the importance of website design for your business.
- It’s a place where your content lives.
Whether you’re running a blog or an online store, you need a place – a store – where you keep all your stuff. Your website is the storehouse of all your content. Your posts, products, addresses, everything lives there.
If you don’t get a website for your business, you have no place to store or display your content. You might contend that your social media account is taking care of that. But think about this: your Facebook page or Instagram account is never truly your own. It’s living on a third-party platform, whose policies, algorithms, and changes you can’t control. People lose their Facebook likes, fans, and more every time the company changes its algorithm.
To completely own everything you create and all the effort you put into establishing your brand, it is necessary to give it a secure and permanent place to reside – get a professional website.
- Where to Send your customers when they want more information.
What happens when your customer asks you where they can reach you on the weekends or after office hours? Can they look you up on the Internet? How can they talk to you to find out if your latest range of products is available yet?
If you don’t own a website, you have very limited ways to make yourself accessible to your modern-day clients who are used to having the ease of reach and engagement. Even if you are present on social media, most online buyers would want to do business on a website, on which they find a safer and secure way to conduct a transaction. Or even to look for more products in a more organized way.
Having a website with a business logo is the surety to your clients that you are a legitimate business with a legitimate digital storefront, doing business in a completely professional way.
In the digital age, you need to be constantly accessible to your customers. They need to see you and be able to engage with you whenever they choose, and in multiple ways. Shutting yourself away from your consumers, especially if you are a B2C company, is not advisable.
- Email Marketing
If you’re not aware of what email marketing is, it is a marketing strategy where you send your most potential clients targeted and personalized emails, containing the content they are most likely to engage with, and encouraging them to click on the links given in the email. The links in the email are directed to your website where you customers can engage with you, learn more about you or decide to buy from you.
According to a report by DMA, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get a return of $32 on average. That’s a huge return on investment.
For businesses that don’t own a website, email marketing can’t do much for them. Even if they decide to invest in it, all the earned traffic will go to a third-party platform – the social media where your business page is living.
Essentially, you’re paying to increase somebody else’s website traffic.
Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
And then there’s the risk of exposing that precious (paid for) traffic to your competitors’ presence on social media. Why would you want to do that?
Conversely, if you own a website and all your traffic is going there, even if they get distracted by another product on the site, it’s still your product – it’s still your sale. Email marketing also gives you valuable statistics, improves your brand recognition, helps you establish stronger customer relationships, and builds credibility.
- Your PPC ads need a landing page on your website
PPC are pay-per-click ads. These are targeted ads that especially appear on people’s search results when they are looking to buy a product or a service. If someone likes what the ad is selling, they click on the ad which takes them to a dedicated page where that product or service is displayed along with necessary details.
That dedicated page is a landing page on your website. Choosing not to have a website means not having the PPC tool at your advantage. It also means less traffic, fewer customers, and your complete lack of absence from the scene when people are looking for the products/services that you are selling.
- Analytics and Data
As a marketer, you would probably have an idea of how valuable data and statistics are for the growth of a business. Without it, all the marketing efforts you do are at best good guesses and at worst superficial presumptions.
When you own a business website, you can connect it with Google Analytics, a valuable data tool that provides you with rich, real-time, and actionable data on which you can build systematic marketing campaigns. In addition to Google Analytics, your website’s own analytics can also help you see your business projection.
Analysis can tell you which parts of the business are performing well, which need more attention, and which you can replace with others, guiding not only our marketing but overall business efforts.
The long and short of it
You need to have a business website to do justice to your marketing. Without it, the benefits of digital marketing for your business are almost non-existent and traditional marketing tools will get you only so far in the online world today.
Simply put, all your customers are online (and your competitors), so why aren’t you?
Author Bio
A graphic designer by profession, Carol Alison also work as a freelancer on the side by writing about graphic design, branding and visual designs. Her favorite tools are Illustrator and Photoshop but she’s dabbled with Inkscape and GIMP as well.
