To provide basic information that establishes credibility – just as a listing in the Yellow Pages shows you are serious about your business, having your own company domain reinforces your legitimacy as a serious business.
What Your Website Can Do For Your Business
- Sell your products and/or services.
- Reach your local market - people not only shop but research products online.
- Expand and re-enforce your off-line marketing - make business information available to customers and clients 24/7.
- Educate your clients and potential clients about your business.
- Encourage purchases with promotions, coupons and “Internet Only” specials.
- Obtain feedback from customers.
Think of a Yellow Pages Ad - provide your basic business information
- What do you do?
- What are your hours?
- How can someone contact you?
- What methods of payment do you take?
- Where are you located?
- How long have you been in business?
Making a Sale
- Before people decide to become customers, they want to know about you, what you do and what you can do for them. Think of your website as the clerk who works 24/7 even when you don’t.
- More information can be put on your website at a lower cost than any other communication medium.
- Use the web as a low or no pressure sales tool that gives people information they want on their terms. By providing detailed product information and pictures you can turn the “just looking” browser into a customer.
Encourage Purchases
- Give your customers an extra incentive to visit your store or purchase from your web site, by providing them with "coupons" and information about sales directly on your website
- Customers can simply print the coupons from your site on their own paper, so you get a wide distribution without incurring any printing or postage costs.
Serve Your Local Market
- If you are located in greater Houston metro area, there are enough local customers with Web access to make it worth your while to consider Web marketing.
- In these busy days people have less time to “shop” around by going place to place. Many people pressed for time use the internet to narrow their choices to those locations that have the products or services that they need and are “on their way”.
Save Money
- A website reduces postage or other distribution costs since your brochure is already in your prospects hands.
- A website reduces printing cost since it can reduce or replace your 4-Color brochure and miscellaneous order forms.
- A website can reduce phone charges because you don't have to FAX immediate information to prospects, or explain your product on expensive 800 lines since your information is on-line.
- Product information, sales, even coupons can be updated on short notice, if not immediately.
Answer Frequently Asked questions
- Whoever answers the phones in your organization can tell you, their time is usually spent answering the same questions over and over again.
- These are the questions customers and potential customers want to know the answer to before they deal with you.
- Post them on a WWW page and you will have removed another barrier to doing business with you and freed up some time for that harried customer service person or yourself.
- Knowing that the information is available 24/7 can make the difference between buying from you or from your competitor who does provide that service
Service Customers 24/7
- Ever missed “the time” to call that customer in another time zone? Either it is too early or too late to call. We're not all on the same schedule.
- Doing business internationally is even worse. Not only do you have to remember time zones but local holidays as well.
- Web pages serve the client, customer and partners 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No overtime either.
- Customize information to match needs and collect important information that will put you ahead of the competition, even before they get into the office.
Customer Feedback
- You pass out the brochure, the catalog, the booklet. But it doesn't work. No sales, no calls, no leads. What went wrong? Wrong color, wrong price, or wrong market?
- Keep testing, the marketing books say, and you'll eventually find out went wrong. That's great for the big boys with deep pockets, but who is paying the bills? You are and you don't have the time or the money to wait for the answer.
- A website is a great way to get instantaneous feedback from your customers, through customer surveys, contact forms, and e-mail addresses at little or no extra cost.
- Feedback forms can be built into Web pages and can get you the answer while it’s fresh in your customers mind, without the cost and lack of response of costly business reply mail.
- People are more likely to answer question on the web when they can submit anonymous answers when they chose to be on the site instead of being called at home or stopped at a mall.
Reach the Specialized and/or International Markets
- Do you think that your business isn’t one that will benefit from being on the internet?
- With millions of users of the WWW, even the most narrowly defined interest group will be represented in large numbers. Since the Web has several very good search programs, your interest group will be able to find you, or your competitors.
- You may not be able to make sense of the mail, phone and regulations in all your potential international markets, but with a Web page, you can open up a dialogue with international markets as easily as with the company across the street.
Make pictures, sound and film files available
- What if your product is great, but people would really love it if they could see it in action?
- A picture is worth a thousand words, but you don't have the space for a thousand words?
- The WWW allows you to add sound, pictures and short movie files to your company's info if that will serve your potential customers. No brochure will do that.
That sounds good but I don’t have a dotcom budget.
- Even Amazon.com didn’t start looking anything like it does today. (Take a look at The Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org if you want to see what the web looked like in 1995 or in Amazon's case when they debuted in 1998)
- Remember, you can start small.
- One of the nice things about the web is that it is easy to add or subtract content.
First Steps
- Get a Domain Name
- Domain names are cheap at less than $10 per year.
- Assess you business needs
- If you are a business that only works via referrals then maybe all you need/want is a domain and 1 page website so your clients don’t receive a “page not found” error.
- Are you in a regulated profession or industry?
- If so find out if there are any regulations that your business needs to comply with before going live on the Internet.
Plan your site
- Research your competitors’ websites
- Looking at what others in your business have done with their websites will help you find focus on what you want and sometimes even more important, what you don’t want.
- Decide who is going to create and maintain your site.
- Do you or one of your employees have the skills or desire to learn the skills necessary to do a create a website that reflects your business?
- Or should you hire a professional.
- How often will you change your site and who will make those changes
Additional Resources
- goSmallBiz.com - Sales and Marketing - Website Marketing
- WiserWays - Dos and Don’ts for a business site
- HP Business Center - How to Guide