Why your website is key

Why bother with a website at all? There are many businesses who don’t see the need for a website. They’re well established in their line of work, have a strong list of loyal customers, and can barely cope with the work they have already. “Why do we need to attract more business?” they ask.

But a good website can be a lot more than just an online advert.

Seven reasons to invest in a website

1. Be found by the right customers on search engines:

It won’t happen overnight, but well-crafted, search-engine-optimised (SEO) copy, together with some clever backend work, can help your business rank high on internet searches. Instead of you having to work hard to reach new clients, new clients can find you. And, if you already have too much work, your website can help you attract a different type of customer so you can replace some of those time-wasters and low payers.

2. Keep in touch with customers and prospects

Websites make it easy to maintain contact with people and help strengthen relationships, especially when you’re busy. Through email or social media links to your web content, you can let them know what’s happening with you and within their marketplace.

3. Feature and sell your full range of products and services

Unless you have a large showroom and/or salesforce, your clients might not be aware of your full product and service offer. By displaying them on your website, there’s a strong chance you’ll sell more and increase profits for very little effort. And, of course, your website can be the place where people can buy your goods directly, saving you time and money by not having to use third party retailers.

4. Position your company as a thought leader

You can use your site to position your people as experts in their field. It can be a platform for commenting on topical issues within your marketplace, featuring ‘how to’ guides to help your customers do their jobs better, or showcasing any media coverage you’ve achieved or industry events you’ve attended.

5. Show the human side of your business

Websites enable you to feature photos, videos and stories on yourself, your staff, your customers, your local community and your suppliers. All of which will help to further establish the personality of your brand and strengthen business relationships.

6. Double your workforce without paying a penny more in salaries

You can use your website to ‘talk’ to customers via Chatbots. These clever applications aren’t so crazy as they seem. They can be developed to answer common questions and save you or your customer service team a lot of time and hassle.

7. Save valuable admin time

Stop spending hours mailing out product data, fact sheets, terms and conditions, and any other resources you frequently send to clients. Instead, put them up on the website for people to download themselves.

Why you need the best website you can afford

Whether your website is a fully-operational e-commerce site that enables your customers to buy goods directly, or it’s more of an online brochure to tell people who you are and what you do, it really, really needs to be the best website you can afford. Afford in terms of both money and time.

Having an old site on an old platform with content dating back 10 years will kill the excellent reputation you’ve painstakingly built up. In fact, no website is better than a bad website.

Your website is your shop window. It might be the first thing a prospective customer sees of your business and if it doesn’t look and behave ‘right’, they’ll leave the site within nanoseconds having had a poor impression of your business.

Incidentally, the average bounce rate (that’s how many people leave your site without performing an action) is about 50%. That’s a lot of people to lose unnecessarily.

Build it and it will come – or not

It should be clear by now that we strongly believe that if you want your B2B brand to be the best it can be, you really do need a decent website.

By decent, we mean one that’s designed and built to reflect your brand’s personality and reputation. It needs to look great and work efficiently. And it needs to have a good supply of new and shareable content. Unfortunately, it’s not something you can build and forget. If you want people to come to it, you need to give them constant reasons to drop by – and stay.

‍Need help building a new website or redesigning an existing site? Then get in touch. At Brewd, we create beautiful, bespoke websites designed to produce a seamless digital brand experience across all devices and touchpoints.

Next in the series…      

The next blog in our mini-series, “How to build a strong B2B brand”, takes us through establishing your B2B brand as a thought leader.

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