If you are starting a new business, having a website CAN BE essential for success in the modern market, but not always.
Websites can be powerful tools to promote your business, drive sales, and increase your customer base but are they always necessary?
Here’s the annoying answer.
It depends.
Here are some benefits of having a website for your new business.
Increased Visibility
With a website, you can reach more customers and give them easy access to information about your business. Your website can act as an online shop front and showcase what your business offers. You can also use a website as a platform to promote your business’s products and services and increase your visibility online.
Increased Customer Engagement
Having a website allows you to interact with your customers in a more meaningful way. You can use your website to provide customers with helpful content and resources. You can also use it to build relationships with customers and encourage them to buy from your business.
Increased Sales
Having a website can help you to drive more sales. You can use your website to showcase your products and services, as well as offer discounts and promotions. You can also use it to collect customer information and create targeted campaigns to increase sales.
Cost Savings
Having a website can save you money on advertising and marketing costs. You can use your website to promote your business, rather than spending money on expensive ad campaigns. You can also use it to collect customer data and use it to create targeted marketing campaigns.
Improved Customer Service
Having a website can help you to provide better customer service. You can use your website to answer customer questions, provide helpful resources, and make it easy for customers to contact you. This can help to build trust with customers and improve customer retention.
As you can see there are advantages to having a website for your new business.
It can help you to increase visibility, engagement, sales, and customer service. It can also help you to save money on advertising and marketing costs. Investing in a website for your new business is an important step in building your business.
When You Don’t Need A Website
I should add (right away) to the above line.
Because you might not need a website right away, but it might help later.
If you’re like many entrepreneurs, including myself, you might have already found yourself spending too much time building your business plan (or website) than anything else. Most of us have done it, let’s be honest.
Do you need a website right away?
That depends on a few factors:
1. What type of business are you building?
2. With relation to your new business, how’s your network?
3. Do you live in a densely populated area or not?
If you’ve developed a huge network over the year you could launch your business pretty quickly. I’ve seen some friends of mine go into business with no website, no marketing, and no business cards, and start making great money quickly. One example is in consulting, and another in contracting.
They had a skill set or product that was relevant to people they already knew and the sales started coming in pretty quickly. To the point where, a year later, in some cases, they still haven’t built a website. Word of mouth is still a top driver for a lot of businesses.
If you’re looking to have an online business then yeah, you need a website. But if you’re starting a business around a skill set such as consulting, contracting, food industry work, etc. You might have a lot of other options to pursue that could get you much faster sales than waiting for your website traffic to get to where it needs to be.
My wife started a gluten-free bakery a while back and she started by going to farmers’ markets. We barely had a website for her for the first couple of years because we didn’t need it. Although we have two websites now, one is just for online orders which are normally picked up at her store…and we only did that because the system helps organize orders much better than taking them over the phone (people still use the phone? wow.)
Here are some questions that are helpful when deciding when you need a website:
Why would I need a website?
How would a website help me build my business?
Can I start selling products or services locally first?
Take the time to really decide if you want to spend the time on building a website. Especially, if you have to do it yourself. If you haven’t built websites before, it can take a long time even with all of the amazing resources out there today.