Do I Need A Website For My Business?

If you are asking yourself Do I need a website for my business? then I can already assure you 99.9% that you do need it. It is common for many people to think that the presence in the network of their business, idea, group … it is not necessary or it is simply covered with the use of social media. 

And it is true that these help to bring traffic to the web, to give visibility to parts that we believe essential in our strategy, our brand or our services, but there are many social networks, we can not be in all and in fact what works in each other is a failure. They may not interest us in their form, target audience, or may not allow us to publish the content as we want or need.

Let’s imagine that we need to appear on twitter and facebook (two of the main ones), and that we make an offer or want to tell something to our customers. Although we make our publication, the engagement of social networks is well below 100%, that is, it does not show our publications to all users, or they are not connected and let it pass. This brings us to two questions:

• What if a user searches for the information within two months?
• What if our potential customers have not entered the network for several days?

Things start to get complicated, we are writing on the air, something that never happens with a website.

On the other hand, no matter how much you try in a social network, the result of the page will not be as customizable as on a website, from where we can also shoot the contents we want to social networks.

But leaving behind social networks and their importance in the digital marketing strategy, as one more tool in the process. We must analyze what type of business we have.

For example, let’s imagine that we have a neighborhood store like a bakery, fishmonger or butcher. In this case our customers already know our physical location, they pass through the door of our establishment and it is very complicated for a person from the other side of the city to go to buy our genre, unless it is clear that we have a specific and differentiating product, such as special meats, village bread or some type of special fish. But the truth is that I can’t imagine anyone buying a loaf of bread through a virtual store.

In this case the interesting thing would be to obtain that differentiating product, and publish it on our social networks and our website so that those interested know that you are the only establishment in the city to have it.

Now, if instead of a small neighborhood store with a fixed clientele and unfortunately very little scalable, we had a workshop of handmade beads, a musical group, a clothing store, an association, NGO, or, following the previous example, a butcher’s shop that has lamb slaughtered under the Arab rite, or a pastry shop that wants to manufacture its products by hand.

In these cases the perspectives would change a lot, because the priority of the person in charge of these businesses is to obtain the greatest possible visibility, to show their projects, prices, products, services, achievements  and for this there is nothing better than our own website, since it not only allows us to do everything commented, but also to put a story, image galleries, news about events, materials with which we work.

On the contrary, your website will be indexed in google, it will maintain an internal structure, if it is well designed it will have all the useful content two or three clicks away, it will offer rss services for advanced users and that they can be informed of what we publish without even having to enter our page, since through platforms such as feedly they can be aware of our news, and best of all, we can make our content share on social networks automatically.

All this would be impossible to do on social networks, the cuales can go out of fashion, change their behavior and policies or even close. But without giving them aside, they could receive information from the web and publish it, showing much more dynamism, decreasing the time of publication work, increasing sales and our visibility reach more users, and making our content appear in google.

For all these reasons, the answer to the question of Do I need a website for my business?, in almost all types of company I would say that 99% of the time it is affirmative. In fact, it is likely that while you ask that question, your competition already has it and they are consolidating customers who will later be very difficult to recover.

Remember that even that neighborhood bakery of the example can have a blog, a taxi driver can have a presentation website well positioned for potential customers to find  you just have to study the needs of the project and give it an appropriate solution.

And revenue can come from advertising, sales of services or products and in many other ways. Now that you know that you DO need a website, you just need to know what type and get in touch with professionals, in the long run it will be better than using a template, free platforms, cheap or family accommodations that are not going to do you a real job. But that’s another story I’ll tell you another day.