Have you ever heard someone tell you “I don’t need a website because my store runs great on Facebook shopping” or something to that effect? I’ve even seen many Amazon sellers speak little about the need to have your own webstore even if you’re making millions off your Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) account.
It’s very shocking to me to hear such comments because fundamentally, the people who espouse such thoughts don’t realize that internet kingdoms rise and fall, but websites are pretty much the evergreen platform.
Social Media platforms, WhatsApp, messenging services are facing increasing pressure to reduce their tracking intrusiveness. On one hand they want better big-data to out-do competing ad platforms, on the other hand they don’t want to run into conflict with governments.
No one is spared and it’s going to become harder and harder to just use that “lookalike” audience builder to quickly churn out you ad targeting audience.
People don’t want to be tracked and their fear of surveillance creep is growing stronger each day. So what does your website have to do with any of this?
I don’t think many business owners understand that with the pandemic still raging, most transactions and customer research is done online. Traditional face to face, word of mouth models seem to be getting edged out by your brand website.
Prospective customers will want to find out if:
Keep your website updated, keep it running fast, don’t lose business when other businesses are completely shutting down! If you’re still around in 2021, you’ve done pretty well.
If you need help? Just use check out our web design service.We build for local businesses, clinics, associations and more. (Not to brag, but we’ve been doing this for more than 15 years, so we know what we’re doing)
Having your own website, allows you to build your own audience and grow your own community of fans and followers. You can use a list like Mailerlite and get it integrated to your website.
Offer your subscribers something in return so you can really start to grow your list! A typical email list converts to sale at about 15% if done well, compared to say 0.5% on a social media ad. Just imagine the savings on your ad budget!
As you may have realized by now, any marketer worth his salt will tell you that the old adage “whoever holds the customer list owns the business” still rings true. As long as you are relying on someone or some other platform to provide you the traffic for your online store, you will need to know that if that source of traffic drops, your business drops in tandem.
If that doesn’t make you uncomfortable by now, you might want to have a visual idea of the rise and fall of internet empires.
Even giants like Yahoo who dominated the internet space with Ads and search, have fallen off the top 20 rankings. This means that as long as you are completely reliant on another platform for your business without having your own website, you will be subject to the mercy of the shifting sands of the internet.
Your website is Your brand. Don’t stop investing in it. Have the patience to grow it for the long term.
Many business owners these days are into the social media marketing blitz and they have started to put all their products on platforms like Google Shopping, Facebook Marketplace etc. But one thing that many years of web design has taught me is that YOUR website is YOUR brand. If you let a platform replace your own brand, you will ultimately be overexposed to changes on the platform you are invested in.
You should always always remember that your prospective customers will always check out your website first and foremost (for your contact information, and legit-ness) before they even make an attempt to contact you. Sure, if you’re invested in your Facebook page and you think that you have “no time to update your site” think about what happens when Facebook decides to change up their algorithms and then suddenly you don’t appear on your followers’ feeds anymore.
The nightmare is real, think about MySpace. Nothing is too big or too established to fail. So keep your website updated and in tip-top shape because it is still YOUR platform and YOUR business.
If you would like to have a supercharged marketing website that actually does the heavy lifting for marketing, please contact us at sales@realisma.com for a free assessment of your site. We will walk you through what you can do for your business in increasing profits and getting more customers.