Every business dreams of a flood of customers. Every good business owner realizes the importance of having a web presence. However, there's a segment of people (still today!) who love to make excuses to not have a website. Whenever they are confronted with the question as to why they don't have a website, they usually have an excuse up their sleeves already.
Let's understand why is a website necessary and 10 excuses people make to not have a website - however lame those may be!
Did you know that out of internet users in India are set to reach 627 million by the end of 2019? And that 87% of this huge user base are avid internet users that have had accessed the internet in the last 30 days? With a population of 1.37 billion as of 2019, small businesses and organizations really don’t understand the amount of traffic they are missing out on simply because they make excuses to not get a website up and running.
Stop and think of a business that does not have a website. It’s hard, right? Even most brick-and-mortar brands have a website, which gives them the opportunity to reach out to customers that reside way beyond their city limits.
Just like the building your business resides in, a website is a virtual piece of real-estate that puts your brand on the map. Without one, your company may as well not even exist to those live anywhere but your city. And this really goes for brands that offer online products and services. You should have had a website, like, yesterday. It’s simple - if your business’s information is not out there to be found, you are a lot less likely to succeed in the long run.
A website provides a place for potential customers all over the world to go to preview your products and/or services, learn more about your brand, and what you can do to solve their problem. With the ever-changing digital world we live in now, websites are a necessary and convenient tool that attract your ideal customer and make it easy to purchase what you have to sell.
People are much more likely to check out your site than physically driving to your business and viewing your products and learning about your services. If they don’t have to ask anything, the better it is for you. And the easier they can find the information they are seeking virtually, the more likely you will attract the sales you desire.
The benefits of establishing a website for your business are limitless, here are just a few:
● Accessibility
● Ability to track who visits your site and what products they look at
● Increase sales and number of customers
● Spend less on brand promotion
● Increase conversion rate
● Boost leads, sales, and overall revenue
Read our amazing blog post detailing 20 benefits of having a website and why is it important for businesses of all sizes. Click here to head over.
If you still haven’t got on the website creation bandwagon, I bet we can guess several reasons that are holding you back from using the internet to exponentially grow your business. There are a few common excuses people make to not have a website that we are going to explore, as well as provide solutions to eradicate them once and for all.
1. "I'm a small business owner"
There are hundreds of small businesses in India that do not have any online presence, and many of those have no intention of creating one. Isn’t that nuts? In an era of competition, small businesses still hold on tightly to the excuse that their brand is not big enough to have an online store front. They simply fail to realize that a simple online presence would perhaps add just the magic they need to help them grow.
Remember the vast amount of daily internet users we talked about earlier? Think about how many opportunities small businesses are missing out on! Hundreds, if not thousands. A properly designed website can take the work out of engaging with your target audience, which can help you gain quality leads and result in substantial growth.
2. "I don't need a website in my industry"
This is even more of a reason to get a website created! Why? Because that means you will have less competition to fight through for visitors to land on your page. 61% of internet users worldwide turn to the internet to research products and services before purchasing.
You will never know if you provide a very specific product or service that no one else offers unless you put yourself out there and build an online presence to come up in the search results!
3. "I can't afford it"
Many people who are brand new to internet marketing believe that website design and development requires thousands of dollars. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Nowadays, having a website designed and developed is as easy as clicking a mouse! There are many freelancers available online and you can get in touch with them to have your website created OR you can check out the many do-it-yourself website creation platforms out there, such as Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly, just to name a few.
We understand that these are not the best methods to go about it namely because we’ve all heard horrendous stories about freelancers taking up projects only to leave it midway or not delivering sites as promised. Also, most of the do-it-yourself website creation tools such as those mentioned above, are quite resource hog and have their own restrictions. Not forgetting to mention that they’re bad for SEO as well.
Building and establishing a website is the cheapest it’s ever been! There are many different kinds of website building tools scattered around the internet that you can learn and use yourself without draining your bank account.
4. "I already have plenty of customers"
That’s awesome! You may have a good number of consumers today, but what happens when they find a competing business that promises more tomorrow? Out of all internet searches done via mobile, 50% are done with the hopes of finding local results. From that percent, over 61% of those searches end up in a sale. Think about all those potential customers and leads you are missing out on!
Naturally, customers have the right to (and will) keep searching for the best products and services for their money. If your competition has a website with an easy-to-access portfolio or storefront, you can bet that you may lose that once loyal consumer. Without a website, you are bound to fall behind in your business.
5. "I already am on social media"
That’s fantastic! That means you are not too far behind on the internet learning curve and have managed to establish your beloved brand online. Even if you are working hard to post content consistently, what is that content linking to?
Even if you have hundreds or thousands of loyal social media fans, they are not as likely to end up as paying customers without a website that can provide them with more insight into what you do and capture their contact information for you to retarget.
Businesses with an established website achieve six times the leads as those with just active social media accounts.
6. "I just use Facebook and Instagram"
We understand that it relates to the point above (i.e. social media) but we get this a LOT so decided to give it a separate heading for itself.
It’s great that you are using Facebook and Instagram for promotions of your products and services. But have you wondered how much time you are dedicating to it? If you are doing it yourself, then you’re not utilizing your time properly. Having a website and having it maintained by a professional means that you focus on growing your business and leave the promotional postings on Facebook and Instagram to other people who can do that chore for a meagre price.
Most website design and development agencies also do social media management for clients. So why not use them and have the best of both worlds?
Also, have you given a thought what would happen to your business if you rely only on Facebook, Intagram and other social media outlets, if they shut your page and profile down? You may not have experienced it but it is not uncommon. In fact, these are quite regular occurrences when such platforms bring down a page if a competitor leaves bad reviews (again very common event) or due to billing failures or even a technical algorithmic glitch.
Read this post to know more about people being kicked out of Facebook and the scam that ensues:
This will spell disaster for your business which you nurtured so well on social media. Imagine the hard work that you put in to bring your page followers in the thousands only to wake up one terrible morning to have them all gone, in a snap.
Having a website saves you this common potential nightmarish experience. You don’t have to be dependent on social media giants to manage your business. That is how a smart business owner should be.
7. “I do not have the time to maintain a website”
Do you have time to respond to WhatsApp conversations, read the newspaper, and check your email? Then you have plenty of time to manage a website’s maintenance. If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can easily outsource this chore to a virtual assistant.
There are also many website designers that offer a maintenance service free of charge for 6 months to 1 year, which means you don’t have to worry about the small actions it takes to ensure your website it up-to-date.
8. "I'm not tech-savvy"
Well, this would have been a valid excuse about a decade ago when you had no choice but to hire a technical brainiac to create your online piece of real-estate, at a hefty cost. And if you wanted to make any changes, you had to be patient with their schedule, plus emptying your wallet out again.
Thank goodness those days are over. Now, even those with the least bit of technical skill can put up a website - go ask my mom!
With many DIY platforms to choose from, as well as professional yet affordable web development companies available at the click of a mouse, this excuse doesn’t really hold up anymore.
9. "Our customers are not tech-savvy"
Most of the business owners who told us this excuse meant that their customers are not able to operate a computer. Most of them believe that being “tech-savvy” means to do ‘stuff on the computer”. We know this isn’t true and the reality is in fact quite different.
People tend to forget that almost everybody today carries a smartphone. So, anybody who has a smartphone is actually tech-savvy! Websites are not built for computer users only. Rather, the shifting focus from computers to mobile devices has even forced a company as gigantic as Google to give preference to websites that are built with a mobile-first approach.
That means, a website that keeps the mobile navigation and design in mind, and optimizes it, is worthier in Google’s view than one which is not.
So, don’t think that people who are not able to navigate their way around a computer cannot be your customers. Anybody having a smartphone can have easy access to your website.
Search engines nowadays, in fact show businesses on a phone depending on the location of the phone’s user. So if your potential customer is around your store looking for your kind of products or services, you have a higher chance of showing your website to him and lure him to your place of business. Think about the amount of business that you can generate!
10. "I will just use a landing page service"
Landing pages are great tools when used correctly. We personally love many landing page services such as Clickfunnels, LeadPages and many others. However, you should treat them as secondary tools, not primary.
One cannot expect to have all the information on a landing page. A landing page is meant to drive traffic onto that particular page that has a very specific conversion goal. For example, if you want people to give you their email address, you can use a landing page builder to create a page and talk about your services with an option to opt-in with their email address.
You definitely do NOT expect to write a 15,000 words write-up about your business on a landing page because people are not going to read it. No one bothers to read 15,000 words on a page.
However, if you have a website you can split those 15,000 words throughout many well thought-out pages for easy consumption. Not only will your visitors find it easy to read but they’ll actually be able to make sense of it all if you have structured your site well.
Also, there are many disadvantages of using landing page services. The foremost of them is their restriction to create content and the limitation on how to use them on a page. Some of the landing page services do incorporate HTML coding nowadays but if you really had to do this, why not do it on your own website? Why should you be tied to a landing page service then?
Secondly, their limited customizations may not sit very well with a lot of people. They may be a tad easy to setup but you will never be able to gain 100% full customization as your heart desire. This is one of the biggest reasons why many people eventually fall out of the landing page scheme after a while.
Thirdly, the cost. As is with everything else in the world, the cost of landing page is a big factor. As dreamy as they make it look from the outside, the cost of landing pages aren’t extremely affordable to say. Some of the good ones out there, charge almost a $100 a month. That is quite a lot of money to pay for a service that is restrictive and is not yours!
Think about that for a second. If you really want to use a good landing page service and are ready to pay $1200 annually, why not pay a professional web development company much less to have your own website? Having your own website means no limitations to design capabilities and a ton of more features to experiment with.
In Conclusion
You need a website. In whichever year you are reading this, your website will become a vital tool to your business’s longevity and overall success. Without one, there is no doubt you are missing out on potential leads, ideal clients, and paying customers.
Websites are a much more efficient way to provide your audience the value they want and the expertise they are searching for. They also give your brand a professional edge that is crucial to remain competitive against other businesses in your niche.
Do you still have an excuse for not having a website?
Get in touch with us today.
Speak your heart out.
