Website for Business: How a website helps your business grow?

By Dinesh Kumar

There are still some business owners who wonder if they need a website for business. – if you do not have a website for your business chances are you are out of business or will soon run out of customers.

With the current economic collops due to then COVID 19, many people go online to look for products are services.

The best websites that pop up on Google, Facebook, and Instagram get the customers while others wonder why no one of buying from them.

It is not just a website, but you also need online marketing services to grow your business.

In this guide, we show why your business needs a website and how it will help you grow and make money online.

More and more home businesses are getting started so we wrote a guide that shows the 67 best ways to make money from home.

The definition of ‘running a business” has completely taken a 360⁰ turn in today’s time.

One cannot discard the fact that having a physical store and office is essential for making that startup and creating your local presence. Until you are very much satisfied with your current market and sales, the showroom or store approach is sound enough.

But there is no doubt that the scale of competition has risen exponentially. The businessman is adopting new strategies and techniques to expand their market and promote their brand.

The traditional approaches which are followed for such brandishing involve hoardings, banners, TV advertisements, a local newspaper, pamphlets, and even radio channels.

Business with good enough monetary back up can go with all such medium of publicity, that also as often as possible. On the other hand, businesses that cannot afford such marketing can be left far behind as they must confront a tough challenge and competition with big well-established enterprises. But such a marketing approach has changed completely today.

As per the business survey and stats collected it has been illustrated that most of the business confronts the issues related to channelized and effective marketing.

There are various reasons responsible for such deadlocks, some can face the limitations of funds while others lack time which is being engulfed in their physical stores. Moreover, there is no right guidance and awareness of how to carry on the promotion for one’s business unless you hire a professional marketer.

Amidst all this confusion and chaos, online marketing comes as a solution for beginners as well as existing small scale businesses. Though the size does not matter at all.

With the help of this article, we will address the following key topics to make your business reach monumental heights.

So, let’s begin our journey towards achieving this goal.

1. Identify your business goals

Now here you must work out on a few important aspects pertaining to your business.

• What is the most unique thing about your business or brand?

In this highly competitive business market place, what is the best thing you are offering? How your product or services stand out distinct in contrast to others? Why people should seek you often? You must have clear answers to all these queries. If you do not have any clue, it’s a high time that before you proceed further, you ensure to resolve all the above-mentioned areas of concern.

• What is the average size of the sale you are expecting?

I think we all have gathered here for earning benefits and establishing our own business presence. Keeping that in accord, define the expected sales you are determined to achieve. The tentative ideas of your sales will make you put the right efforts in the most efficient manner. Besides, you will be prepared enough to invest the required amount for achieving your target.

• How far you want your business to expand?

As you define your sale, you need to define the area you are expecting to reach out to or cover. Are u interested in covering your neighboring states? Do you want to spread your business all over the country or do you want to be recognized globally? Dare to think big. Key topic #3 will help you with fulfilling your ideas.

• How much you can invest in promotion and marketing?

Whether you promote online or offline you are bound to spend some amount. The difference lies in the amount of cost. Unlike offline promotions, online promotion does not get too expensive. Secondly, you can cover a large volume of the audience at a minimal cost. Lastly, online promotions involve fewer efforts and time utilization than doing it the physical way.

Once you are lucid enough about the above Why, What, and How, things will be much easier to plan.

2. Importance of website

You must have very well heard marketers approaching you for creating a website or you yourself must have browsed and accessed the premium brand’s website and wondered how elegantly owners have portrayed their business.

Websites are indeed a wonderful medium to showcase your services and products to the world in a well-designed format. Websites are not merely for appearance and showbiz; it actually serves a lot of more essential purposes in the real sense. Some of the technical benefits of the website are enlisted below:

• Keeps your information well organized and systematic
• Helps in managing inventory and data at one end rather than installing separate software.
• Reduces actual manpower involved
• Helps to display product images/services/content in-depth
• Provides the ease of editing, deleting and updating

But not every website catches the user’s attention and generates revenue. There are various reasons for this such as website design, downtime, low bandwidth, poor SEO practices, and many more. But the vital factor is the foundation of your website. If your website is not constructed well, working on all other factors will go in vain.

A good website must have the below points

1. Clean and appealing design
2. User and mobile-friendly
3. Simple layouts and menus
4. Proper navigation
5. Basic pages (Home, Product/Services, About Us and Contact page)

Owning a website for your business is the smartest decision. Its being generously followed any implemented by many businesses today. The purpose of this article is to emphasize how a website can influence your business which is being discussed below.

3. Influence of the website on your business

Irrespective of how big or small your business is, a website for your business can be intensely beneficial, and if build the right way it can drive voluminous traffic and generate fruitful leads. Many businesses ignore the necessity of having a website since it may involve additional time, effort, and cost. Least do they realize that it’s not at all a tedious and complex process? By taking the help of the web professionals you can savor the fruits of a professionally build a website within no time. Key Topic #4 will help you in this regard.

There are numerous benefits as to how a website can influence your existing business. We will try to enlist as many as we can so that you feel the urgency of owning a business website.

1. Create an Online Presence

Social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.… are the most ruling channels prevailing in the online environment. Millions of people are interconnected on these networks making it easier to spread any content with lightning speed. Those having an account in any of these networks can link their business website too. Mere having an account and linking your website is not enough, you really need to be active in this domain. Employ these following tips

• Keep posting updates
• Be regularly active
• Share important information (not necessarily related to your brand/services)
• Post resourceful and DIY videos. They are a great source of attraction
• Share latest release or discounts you are offering via website

Besides, those who are following you and are impressed by your services will further share and recommended to their friends which spreads further to their friends. After all, they share is just a click away.

2. Build a brand reputation

Building the reputation of your business may take its own course of time. Do not be in any haste in doing so. The rule being first delivered at par quality of the products and services you are offering. Convey the same confidently through your website and social channels regularly. Remember ‘eye appeal is the best to appeal’. The more effectively you present your products across the online market with the help of your website, the higher reputation you will build gradually.

3. Establish Credibility

If people do not know you or your business, why would they try to be the first target of your business? Projecting out your establishment, sales achieved and a number of happy customers through the website will build a level of trust among the new customers. Remember you can gain credibility of only the local and immediate market where your physical business is set up as the visitors can interact with you and your products directly. But what about when interacting with huge internet users? Websites are the medium and a credible source to make your business reach out to the visitors.

4. Expanding area of coverage

Since the Internet domain is a worldwide domain, anything published over the Internet has a wide scope of spreading across a vast region. Geographical barriers are no constraints in the realm of creating an online presence. Your business website can be accessed at a global level, giving you wide opportunities for advertising and selling. Besides, marketing and selling through the website is a quite affordable and cheaper option.

5. Converting leads

With your valuable website, you can keep a track of how many visitors were there on your site, which product or service was clicked how many times. With this collective data, you can target your visitors and display the most relevant and sought products frequently. Chances are high that your leads are converted into potential customers. 

6. Interact with existing and new customers

How often have you interacted with the store or showroom manager or how often they ever asked you for the feedback or reviews of any product? Websites give you a great opportunity to build a bond with the existing customers as well as timely attend the new ones. You can easily find which customer has placed what request since you have a track of all the order details that are professionally managed for each customer. Your website becomes a shopping store for them where they can shop at ease and effortlessly as well as securely carry out the payments using various payment modes.

7. Release offers and discounts

This is the most awaiting part every customer looks upon. We all must have experienced this with the super brands namely Amazon or Flipkart when they release their big bonanza sales or bumper clearance offer, that also more or less near the same dates. And how the visitors quickly scan through the dates and start wish listing ASAP. Imagine if the customers had to physically go to the stores on working days for availing the offer. There would be a drastic drop down in the numbers. On the other hand, when the customers get to know about these offers and discounts online, they can immediately rush towards your site to explore more and avail those offers. Such lucrative offers drive a great amount of traffic to your website.

8. Keep an eye on your competitors

Once you launch your business into the online domain, you will witness innumerable businesses giving you a neck and neck competition. Of course, unlike physical stores, you can take a sneak peek in any business website and observe their way of carrying their business, their marketing patterns, and strategies. You can even become their general followers or subscribers just to get the hold of and comprehend as to how other businesses are executing in the market. It is like a cross-check for your own business website and filling up the loopholes here and there.  For example, a few of the cross-check can be:

• The overall website designs
• A check on the product or any service prices
• Features and specifications
• Special offers and discounts
• New additions

9. Collect Reviews and Testimonials

How well your business is doing online definitely depends on the sales you are making, but how well it will do in the future will vastly depend on how many happy and satisfied customers you have served. And the best way to know this is through checking out the reviews, ratings, and feedback provided on the website. Though you need to trigger your customers to leave back a review since not all of them has the habit of sharing their review in an online forum. These reviews are not only response against your product or services but with the help of these, you can be clear enough whether your products are perfectly fine, or you need to do certain amendments. Moreover, reviews act as a great source of reference for the new customers visiting your website. After they view a product on your website, they curiously seek if someone has posted any review. Reviews act as a general opinion of a common user.

10. Easy 24×7 customer support

In case of any query or doubt, how the customers should approach you? Websites give you the provision of helping your customers through the following

• Live chat

This option is feasible enough and the customer can avail instant help over any concerned issue.

• Place a call

There are customers who are not satisfied with a short and precise live chat option. Your business contact number displayed on your website can make them speak to one of the customer care representatives for resolving the issue briefly.

• Email

If the customer needs a refund or clarifies payment doubts by sharing their personal card details, then customers do prefer communicating via Email. Besides, they can attach the necessary documents and images too.

• Fill up a query form

The website has a simple contact us form too for accepting any sort of query of the user. Though customers rarely explore this until and unless the rest of the options are not workable.

Any business website satisfactorily attending their customers by resolving their concerning problems, make their customers stay connected forever.

4. Help on building your own business website.

If you are convinced enough about the impact of the website on your business, then you must seriously start planning to build your business website at the earliest. How you should go about it? Let us walk down.

Let us make things more precise when we say website building. It is not merely constructing your business website and you are all through. The start and end of any website involve:

• Creating a website
• Choosing Domain Name
• Selecting appropriate TLD
• Select a web hosting provider

Do not be taken aback. You must be thinking where in the middle of the website building aspect, domain name, TLD, and hosting provider jumped in. We’ll all these are quintessential building blocks to finally launch your website over the internet.  And none of the above stands optional.  So, let us quickly have a glance at all the above building blocks.

• Creating a website

This is the initial step towards representing your business in the form of a website. There are professional website developers to make your task easier and faster. You just need to provide the right content, images and videos (if any) to construct the website. Those having a little bit of knowledge of computers and software can very well build the business website using any CMS (Content Management System). WordPress stands as the most sought out among all. Beginners gel up easily with this CMS. Download WordPress for free and start using its simple to understand user interface.

• Choosing Domain Name

The website you just created above needs a proper and valid name. This name is referred to as domain name which represents the identity of your business globally. www.saifurniture.com is the website address wherein Sai furniture specifically denotes the domain name. But it is not as simple as it appears to be. Domain names are tricky to frame, and one must consider the critical factors while making the final domain name selection:

• It must be distinct, short and relevant to your business
• Check out if it’s not already reserved
• Avoid hyphens and special characters
• Ensure use of right keywords

There may be also situations when you have decided upon a domain and guess what, that domain name, and its relevant names are all taken up. Going on for different TLDs comes as a rescue in such a case. Let us check out this below

• Selecting appropriate TLD

TLD essentially stands for Top Level Domain extension which is a suffix appended to your domain name. .com is the very well-known TLD extension which is used by massive sites. But there are hundreds of TLDs available now with a wide variety. Whether it be business, clothing, computers, food, etc.… You just name a domain and you’ll get a list of TLD associated to it. .tech, .co, .fashion, .club, .cool, .computers and the list goes on.

Moreover, if you find your desired domain name unavailable, try out the combination with some other relevant TLD.

• Select a web hosting provider

I hope you are still present with us! There is the last selection you must make and that is opting for a good web host provider. Well, we agree there is a lot of ‘choosing’ in the website process. But that’s how it works. Now, what is this hosting provider?  Your website or all the content of your website needs to be put on some server, from where it can be accessed by the internet users. Yes, you got it right. You will be online when your website is hosted on a server. There are various host provider companies that almost offer the same benefits. Which benefits by the way? Check them below:

• Ideal storage

For uploading the sound content of your entire website. Higher the storage, the maximum is the content you can store.

• 99% uptime (don’t know why they leave that 1% of doubt!)

Availability of the website to the users. Low uptime (or downtime) indicates users switching away from your site.

• Good bandwidth or Data Transfer

Amount of data being getting transferred at a given time from the server to the user’s browser. Ensure it’s on a higher end.

• Email facility

A business Email linked to your domain name. Say [email protected]. Well, this will be extremely beneficial when interacting and sharing your details with customers, suppliers, or investors. Gives a feel of professionalism.

• Backup and Security

High security for protecting and safeguarding user’s data. Especially in case of transactions and payments. Backup ensures that if something goes critically wrong, there is an updated backup of your entire website.

• Robust Customer Support

In case of any difficulty or query, there must be 24×7 customer support from the hosting company. You may require this when confronted with a high volume of traffic or maybe switching over to some higher hosting plan.

In addition, the web hosting company also offers the benefit of building your website, registering your domain name with appropriate TLD, and finally host it. Yes, if you wish you can sum up all the website process in one go with the help of a good web hosting company. Also, their experts and professionals are well trained enough to assist you with the right guidance and further maintenance and running of your website.

Last but not least

Your business is your bread and butter. In this hi-tech moving world, you need to be wise and smart enough to put your money for the right resources and tools in order to avail effective and long-term benefits.

In this 21^st century, where people genuinely lack time, they crave something which is readily available on their phone. Your thoughts and business ideas cannot just simply float over the Internet.

Websites become the most mandatory and crucial source for channelizing the interest and demand of your user.  To really flourish your business, you must gift your business a good website.

Read: 4 Useful Types Of Content Your Website Needs