Marketing: How To

A: Absolutely. Creating a website is one of the best marketing tools for any small business with a product or service. There are several reasons why you should entertain a website for your small business right away:

1) The Telephone Book argument. Several demographics are naturally shifting to the web for the solution to their problem. So instead of looking through telephone books for landscaping or plumbing services, keywords are now searched online. You want to work with a marketing company familiar with search engine marketing to optimize your placement within the search engines. Feeding into the telephone book argument is the use of Google AdWords and other PPC platforms that enable you to bid for higher advertisement placement within search engines. With several demographics abandoning the telephone book for search engines, having a website is a must.

2) Enhance your marketing distribution vehicles. With a website, you now have a much broader market. Let’s say you have a very niche product such as organic parrot food and you are a small business in Portland, Oregon. Without a website, you really can only serve the Portland metro area; but an eCommerce website for your products will allow you to expand your market to throughout the U.S and maybe even the world. Yes, mail order catalogs enable you to sell your product to the world as well, but this involves customer service costs; discussed below:

3) Lower administrative, sales and customer service costs. With a website, you can showcase your business hours, products and even a map to your location. Showcasing all of this will result in fewer time consuming informational calls. With an eCommerce site, your website platform will act on behalf of customer service staff and take orders from your customers. In fact, your eCommerce site is running 24 hours a day; allowing for order placement when your customer service staff is off. You’ll save money with your sales staff as well; your website will better educate and qualify leads on your product and service.

4) Turn prospects into warm leads. Even with Google Analytics you still are rather blind as to who is visiting your site. Utilize your website to drive visitors to call you or at least join your monthly or quarterly newsletter. Customer and prospect relationship management is the best way to convert prospects to customers, increase sale frequency and sales volume. The only way you can include prospects into a relationship campaign is if you somehow capture their contact information; online works very well for this.