TABLE OF CONTENTS
1: Your website is a critical marketing tool
2: Your website can significantly improve brand awareness
3: Increase organic traffic to gain new customers
4: Showcase new offers, products and services
5: Your website can improve your business credibility
6: Your website can encourage and improve customer contacts
7: Improve customer service
8: Prominently display your best customer reviews on your website
9: A website is a cost effective way to market and operate your business
10: Your biggest competitors already have a website
Introduction
While there are many reasons for having a website in 2023, this post will focus on commercial entities such as micro, small and large businesses in Australia. Examples outside of the scope of commercial entities may include hobbyists, government agency information databases, educational topics and general blogger websites.
For profit related businesses, an effective digital presence and web design will greatly improve your reach, hopefully resulting in a greater lead and revenue generation. Long gone are the days of simply posting a yearly advertisement in your local Yellow Pages, today’s marketing strategies are much more complex and far reaching in terms of viewer capacity. Aside from improved revenue potential, there are many other reasons why your business really does need a website in 2023.
Having said that, location plays a significant part in whether or not you need a website. For example, a bricks and mortar business operating in a small outback town in Queensland where everyone knows each other may not need a website to advertise their business. On the other hand, a bricks and mortar business in Adelaide and large regional towns throughout Australia may well benefit immensely from a website.
According to Statista, the number of people worldwide who purchase products and/or services online has increased to 2.14 billion over the last few years. In fact, between 2014 – 2021 over 63 percent of the world’s population are avid users of the internet. That’s just under 5 billion people!
If you head on over to our Australian Internet Stats post, you’ll find some very interesting results such as:
In 2021 there were approximately 22 million internet users (89% of the population) in Australia
45% of Australians used mobile phones for online searches
1: Your website is a critical marketing tool
The beauty of a website is that once developed, it’s relatively easy to update with relevant and sales converting data at any time. At Digital Marketing Hub Australia, our websites are designed with both you as the site owner and the viewer in mind. For the most part, our sites can be easily edited by the site owner (that’s you) to convey any message or site intent at any time. Unlike old school marketing such as newspaper ads, Yellow Pages ads, flyers and brochures, all website data is in digital format, meaning it can be changed at any time with little or no costs involved.
Furthermore, the changes are initiated on your website immediately with the potential of reaching a mass audience in line with your current SEO status (ranking, search intent). While this post does not focus on search engine optimisation, it is a critical factor in how visible your website is to your potential customers. You can read more about SEO in another post.
Take a moment and think about other marketing platforms that you may be using such as Meta, YouTube, blogging and email marketing. In most cases, a primary function of those channels is to send potential customers to your website, right? Once there, they will hopefully find the information they need and follow your calls to action and either contact you or make an online purchase.
2: Your website can significantly improve brand awareness
From a digital marketing perspective, brand awareness is the degree of how recognizable and memorable your brand is to your targeted audience. A great web design will enable you to showcase your brand specifically to your targeted audience. It’s a great opportunity to define who you are, what you do, why you do it and what your points of difference are. A website allows you to define your brand through text, logo, fonts, colour, videos and images.
3: Increase organic traffic to gain new customers
Organic traffic is free traffic obtained by utilising long term SEO strategies. I have written extensively about search engine optimisation in other posts.
Compared to the short term strategies of paid advertising such as Google Ads, organic traffic is a long term investment for businesses that intend to become and remain highly competitive in the digital marketplace. The significance of SEO strategies are generally misunderstood by many small businesses, much to their detriment.
Business strategies must be long-sighted and factor in short term costs for long term gains. In fact, even many web designers ignore all but the most basic of SEO requirements when building websites. Long story short, SEO can greatly help your business to be ranked on page one of a search engine results page which is where every commercial business needs to be.
The stats in the introduction to this post imply that over 80% of users will search for their products or services online, so it makes perfect sense to be front and centre of those searches on the likes of Google and Bing.
4: Showcase new offers, products and services
Presenting your products or services to your online audience is another important reason a website will benefit your business. Whilst not necessarily the first contact point for your potential client, it is generally the most crucial and influential contact point.
It provides the perfect platform on which to showcase your business and to provide up-to-date offers and opportunities for your potential customers. Essentially, your website will put a spotlight on your business all day, all night, all year. On a side note, it’s worth taking the time to place call to action buttons or links that are specific to the intent of each web page. This will take advantage of showcasing your offers and assist in converting them into sales.
5: Your website can improve your business credibility
Here are some powerful statistics from sweor.com about the relationship between a good web design and your credibility:
- 50 milliseconds is all it takes for users to form an opinion about your website
- 75% of users will judge credibility of a company based upon the their website design
- 57% of users will not recommend a business if their website is poorly optimised for a mobile user experience
- 47% of users will disengage with a website if the load time is too long
Interesting stats, right? But what does it actually mean! In very simple terms, it means that the majority of internet users will most certainly judge a book by its cover. It’s not just a case of ‘build it and they will come’, your website will take a huge hit if the viewer does not find it credible. This is potentially a huge opportunity for improving your digital presence as you may find that some of your higher ranked competitors have missed the mark on this topic.
Below is an example below of how Apple have improved their design over the years for improved credibility:
6: Your website can encourage and improve customer contacts
For profit driven websites, it’s important that there are several avenues in which your potential clients or customers can contact you. For example, our Contact Us page has four contact options:
- Telephone
- Contact form
- Chat box
As individuals, we all have our preferred ways of communication. As a business owner, it’s important to note that providing multiple options for contact will significantly improve your customer engagement and subsequent sales.
7: Improve customer service
A website that has been designed with the user experience (UX) as a key component will generally provide a better standard of customer service than one that has not. Websites designed for improved user experience will generally provide an effective layout and information stream to give the targeted user the data they need to make an informed decision. That decision should be to either:
- Move deeper into the site
- Conduct an enquiry through one of the website’s contact points
- Make a purchase of a product or service
Furthermore, this information is available 24/7/365 and will often help the view immediately without the need for human interaction.
8: Prominently display your best customer reviews on your website
If you’re already in business and have a digital presence, you’ll know how important testimonials are for your credibility and trust. At Digital Marketing Hub Australia, we display reviews on our service pages such as our Web Design page.
Reviews are currently a ranking factor with Google, therefore we strongly recommend that you have a customer review strategy in place to get some great Google reviews. Social media reviews are also great, however they don’t affect your ranking from an SEO perspective like Google reviews. If your business has been reviewed in third party articles such as magazines, newspapers, videos and other websites, you can showcase these in a prominent position on your own website.
Reason 9: A website is a cost effective way to market and operate your business
A well designed and developed website is a highly cost effective way to market and operate your business. If you are thinking of building your own website and are considering one of the many ‘easy build’ options on the market today, please be aware that a pretty site means nothing if no one can find you online. Web design goes far beyond aesthetics, in fact SEO can be more time consuming and is just as important as the look and feel of the site itself. Consider investing right the first time so you don’t have to pay extra to fix the inherant problems that often come with ‘homemade’ sites.
From an operational view, your website can:
- provide updated news and events via regular posts
- provide documents for download
- contain client data
- house a membership area
- link to third party platforms relevant to your business operations
With many business models, a significant expense is often in marketing your business. While ad campaigns such as Google Ads and Meta ads can be costly (depending upon the cost per click), organic SEO requires minimal ongoing expenses after an initial period of development.
10: Your biggest competitors already have a website
This reason is probably one of the most important reasons why you need a website in 2023. Look around at your competitors who are successful, I bet they all have a website and are ranking well for multiple key search terms. They will generally be on page on of a search engine results page for high value keywords or they will have great social media platforms and email campaigns that direct the viewers to their site.
Generally speaking, if you don’t have a website for your business, you’re missing out on potentially hundreds, even thousands of visitors to your business each month. Even if you work with a 2-3% conversion rate, that can equate to a lot of revenue.
Not only will the vast majority of your competitors have a website, the successful ones will be consistently optimising their sites for SEO and will often develop their relevancy and authority with industry specific posts and articles.
Summary
In conclusion, a website with effective web design, layout, user experience and SEO components is a no-brainer for commercial businesses in 2023. Based on the long term value of a good, optimised website, the short term costs simply pale in significance to the ongoing revenue that your business can earn from a powerful digital footprint.
At Digital Marketing Hub Australia, we pride ourselves on combining visually appealing websites with killer SEO to provide you with a business website that works straight out of the box. Need help with optimising your current website or looking something new and up to date? Contact us at any time to discuss how we can work together to meet your business goals.
