Do Small Businesses need a Website? 4 Powerful Reasons

Why Small Businesses Need a Website in this day. We share 4 Powerful Reasons.

The stirrer that I am, well, I posted the image below: About running a business without a website! It brought forth the question; Why small businesses need a website? Is it even necessary? 

Oh, my goodness the discussion that ensued showed me just how many black-owned small business owners still do not get the pure magic of having their own digital real estate. A platform you own, you manage, you decide what’s added or removed.

In fact, below are some of the responses I received.

• If your website is not fully boosted you may end up not making any sales.
• Small businesses do not need a website in my humble opinion.
• You have to boost the website all the time which costs quite a lot so your business is struggling.
• I advise you to start with door-to-door marketing

Seriously? In this day and age?

Having gone through 3 lockdowns, where everybody had to stay home unless for essential trips, do we still have the door-to-door strategy as a viable marketing strategy?

Obviously, all marketing strategies work, if worked properly…

Yet, not only is door-to-door time hungry,

• Door knocking is not sustainable, its exhausting, mentally draining…
• It is not targeted.
• You need more people knocking on lots of doors and following up to be effective, and
• It’s not leveraged.

 

There are so many black-owned and POC business owners who still do not understand the value behind having a website in this digital era.

And many with a website, don’t understand why their websites don’t have traffic. Simply because they have no idea how to drive and attract website traffic.

 

This speaks to a lack of understanding of simple branding and digital marketing. Most small business owners, esp black-led businesses focus on the fast cash they can make with business events, expos, cash in hand from referrals. All good by the way.

Yet, they miss the mark on the potential or actual value they could get, the automation, and freeing of time if they had a well-designed and SEO’d website.

That brings me back to… why you need a website. Before we get to that, Allow me…

 

As our tradition dictates, with every Kalungi Group episode, we present you with an irresistible offer that is either free or so discounted you deserve to gift yourself. And in this episode, we have the 100 for 100 Offer. This is because we know the struggle and the pain most go through to build a sustainable business online. We have been there. So this is to you 100 SME’s getting a professional website built for you for just £100. 

Get Your Website Built by K-Web Social Designs

 

 

Why you need a website – The Foundations

First of all, you need to determine the Goal. WHAT results or end goals your website would be bringing to your brand or business?

Is your goal:

• Lead generation for sales, subscribers, members, etc.
• An eCommerce platform – so sales. 
• For email list building purposes
• Brand awareness – i.e., spreading the word about what you do and who you are.
• Footfalls to your offline store, church, business? Etc. 

Once you are clear on the goal of your website, you then need to get clear on WHO you are targeting.

What kind of human do you want to visit your website and talk about it?

In short Who is your Target Market?

Then you need a Strategy for attracting that target audience to your website.

 

WHY?

Because building a website and hoping it will attract target customers or an audience without a strategy in place to attract them is self-defeating.  

And by the way, with all kinds of social media platforms, traffic isn’t really the problem anymore.

It’s a lack of creativity, with Pinterest and Tik Tok delivering traffic on demand, Bob’s your uncle, or he could be! 😉

By the way, we jumped on the Tik Tok wagon, follow us there

And definitely follow Kalungi Group on Pinterest. 

And now…

 

 

Why a small business needs a website – Nitty-gritty

In the old days, we all shopped local and didn’t know any better. The internet opened our world to the global market. It has opened us to the possibility of having an online storefront and market for customers outside of our location, thus a huge opportunity to grow our businesses even more.

Well, guess what?

A website is your welcome mat to all the above. It is your calling card and digital brochure. It allows customers to find you who would otherwise have never done so even if they are local to you.

 

Having a website frankly allows you to promote your offers while building credibility. You get to distinguish yourself and compete globally unless you choose otherwise.

Following Covid-19 and the global lockdowns, if you’re not on the interwebs today with your own website, you’re frankly not being practical or competitive.

You definitely missed out on opportunities, even from loyal customers, because they could not order online! Your business was closed to Business. 😱

 

If your customers can’t find you online or offline, they will find someone else. Period and they did! 

 

This is essentially why; it is important that every small business have a website.

 

Also, imagine a scenario where you are locked out of your social media platform, where you promote your products. Then overnight, your business is at a standstill. Or maybe the platform shuts down…Does anyone remember Hi5, Stumble-upon, even Google+?

 

That’s why, a website is super important for small business growth, scaling, and expansion.

 

How, else?

Well, if you needed to find out more about our business authenticity and credibility, you visit our website.

You’ll learn so much about the brains behind a mission when you visit their website. 

This alone can help embed and establish your brand both locally and globally. Depending on whether you are doing Inbound marketing (Local) or Outbound marketing (Global) of your website.

People can find you via Google search if you set up your business properly. Without a website, they may not find you in search, or find the wrong kind of info, worse still they could land on a copycat business.

Yet, with a website and the right Whitehat SEO tactics, you will also access analytics that allows you to keep track of your highest-traffic sources. Rinse and repeat…

See it’s never been about hard work, thats a human concept from the industrial revolution, where your efforts earned you a small pay rise and maybe a promotion. Today it’s more about and has always been about smart work

 

Your eCommerce website could be a great place to keep track of your inventory, all your available products, and sales all in one space you control.

 

 

So, let’s talk strategy

I am going to stick to what I know still delivers generic organic traffic as an example…Pinterest.

All other platforms demand you pay some to play big aka attract large traffic. 

Of course, there are so many traffic sources and strategies and they all work, it is up to you, to work them.

 

For us, I started sharing my blogs and offers on Pinterest back in 2015. The platform didn’t even have a commercial option, no ads were available until 2017.

At the time we were attracting 3000 – 10000 page views organically to our blogs and offers. This was so exciting. So much so, I wrote my first book to share the love and help other business owners to get the same.

The Art of Pinterest Profits was birthed, a simple step-by-step process to attract website traffic from Pinterest on a daily basis in large numbers. You can grab a copy on Amazon.

 

The book gave birth to a full-on self-service course your Pinterest Growth Academy which you can do at your pace and build an empire with Pinterest, while others wait for crumbs from Instagram.

 

 

Today we have Promoted Pins.  We spend £50 -100 on Pinterest campaigns and it delivers 10000-50000 page views to my offers, and usually my desired end goal which is subscribers and sales.

Originally, our goal was to see how many click-throughs we would get on our content.

How many would actually visit our website and how many would purchase our products.

Also, we wanted to test and see which platform worked the best for what we offered at the time which was a Network marketing program.

We understood that to succeed one needed to be data-driven so, we learned about tracking, measuring, monitoring, and reading the data and insights, every social media platform offers freely.

From demographics like Age, gender, location, likes of people attracted to our website and products. We understood better who our target audience is and how we could better serve them.

In my humble opinion, insights from these platforms are very important to understand what you get to do next, or change strategy!

 

And most important; all that traffic came to our website. We could re-attract them via our retargeting pixel and show them who we are as a brand.

Our website was and continues to be our point of reference, the mother ship for all our traffic efforts… Not a Facebook page, or a LinkedIn Page, deffo do follow us on there. The lesson here is, none of us own our Facebook or LinkedIn or any social profile pages.

We are not consulted when algorithms change.  

 

 

Why do big organizations have websites – Example.

You could argue yours is a small or even new organisation, and you don’t need one.

And I will say to you,

How you do anything, is how you do everything. And start as you intend to go.

If you keep thinking your business is a small one, it will always be small.

As above so beneath, i.e., as you think in your mind, is what you will see on the ground.

 

Trust me there are always cheap website design deals for small businesses. Simply type into google “how to get a website cheap” And you will be inundated with offers. 

 

So, right now, I would encourage you to imagine your business growth like Amazon.

That you have a website and have integrated your 2-3 most useful social media profiles. You actively share your content and offers to those social platforms consistently.

This is simply how others do it, with no extra help. So no excuses from you my dear friend.

You could even run some ads, spend say £100-200 on an ad campaign, leading to events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

You do have a business budget, right? 🤔 

 

I recommend you spend your cash on Pinterest Ads, esp. if new to running ads campaigns, you will thank me later.

 

Keeping to the topic at hand, we’ll use Website Design as an example:

Keep track of your Ads performance and you could be surprised that by the end of week #1 you notice that you attracted lots of people, some local views/click-throughs looking for Website design Liverpool.

Note their gender, age, length of stay on site, we call these insights.

Based on the results of your weekly ads you can narrow down further the location and age range of your target audience. For instance, we generically focus on Merseyside/Northwest UK area, 25-55 females.

By week 3 our ads deliver an audience mostly from Liverpool L16 and L18 as our biggest audience and inquiries/buyers mostly females aged 25-55, running a small business needing a 5-7 page website for a one-off price. 

Most of them go ahead and buy into our some of our other services including website protection plans, once their website goes public. (Upsell always baby)

 

So now by your 4^th week, your ads should be super targeted. Pinterest will deliver that exact person to your website.

By the way, here is Why Pinterest… Your traffic will continue to flow to your website LONG AFTER your ads have been turned off. Cherry or what? 😊 💗

 

Long after your ads have been turned off, you will be attracting people looking for website design via your pins. Their location, their age, even their interests are shown to you via your analytics.

I encourage you to deep dive into keywords that work in your niche before you run your ads. You will then find out which kind of words the people looking for your products/services typed into the search via your insights and better still your google analytics.

You cannot access these without a website/weblink you can track now, can you?

 

By the time you are done running your ads and tracking your efforts for 60-90 days, you’re going to have a clearer idea of your target market and customer avatar.

This information will help you create generic social media content that speaks your target audience and customer language, thus attracting them. 

It will speak to how you brand your products/business so that when you post content on your website and social platforms, you know exactly what they are looking for and thus develop content that attracts them, without even running ads regularly.

 

Just understand that you could run some ads and speed up the process, or learn Content Marketing and attract generic traffic, or both and leverage your digital assets better.

But doing nothing and not having a website aren’t options in this time and era.

That’s a recipe for frustration, the bandied about hard work mantras, that steals your joy as you work every hour God sends. Or worse still quitting on your dream… Not cool.

 

The Joys never end so…

Let me end by saying that your marketing efforts should begin and end with your website.

Without a website, many of your potential customers will be unable to connect with you online.

I believe you can compete with bigger brands better online, which could be much harder offline.

So, if you put aside a budget, however small, and have a website designed and optimized by a professional you could be in the sauce.

An optimized website with local SEO done properly can show up in targeted search results for people who didn’t even know your brand existed.

In today’s shopping habits, people love the convenience of shopping from home. Therefore, a business, small or otherwise without a website would miss out on these customers.

Think about it, the millennials and younger generations, may not even consider your business worth it.

They have grown up with the internet and consider it an essential part of life. So, think about your future customer too and get your website built by pros.   

 

Why do small businesses need a website today, are you still on the fence as to why you need a website? It is good business practice, more money, more impact, that’s it.

Get it done for the price of a night out

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Julie Syl Kalungi

Email: admin@kalungigroup.com

Facebook: f.b.me/KalungiGroup/

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