Imagine you run a cost little café and bakery with a small team of passionate bakers and baristas. You offer a range of cookies, brownies and cupcakes that you’ve perfected through lots of trial and error. You’ve also invested in a top-notch espresso machine and have mastered latte art, even creating some unique coffee beverages. However, despite all this effort, your café sees very little footfall. Most people are going to the nearby café, which only has a good ambience.
Now, think about it from a customer’s perspective. They’re searching for a nice bakery or café near them. The first thing they do is go to Google and search for “cafés near me.” Your café appears in the results and the person is interested. But they can’t find any more information about your place online. So, they move on to the next result, which is the nearby café. This café might have average food, but they have a website with a menu and a phone number to book a table. The person books a table there and you lose a potential customer.
So, read on and find out the various benefits of having a website for a small business.
Table of Contents
- How can Websites Help Small Businesses?
- Not-So-Comprehensive Guide to a Comprehensive Website
- What Do Agencies Bring To The Table?
- Concluding Thoughts
- Frequently Asked Questions
How can Websites Help Small Businesses?
Wondering if there even are any good reasons small businesses need a website? Well, allow us to convince you that there are multiple! Contrary to popular belief, having a website is essential for businesses of all sizes, not just for lead generation. A website represents your brand online and serves as the digital home for everything related to your business. Here’s how a website can benefit your business:
Take the example of a small bakery. A website can be the hub for all information about your business. It tells visitors what the bakery offers and what it does best. You can display the full range of products on the products page, and customers can place orders directly from the website. If someone is considering dining at your small cafe and bakery, your website can showcase the ambience and menu, helping them decide!
1. Information Dissemination
Your website is a medium of communication. So, whenever a potential customer lands on your website, they’re looking to explore around. Your website can provide these visitors with all the information they need.
For instance, the website for the café and bakery would include all the necessary information from the food served and products sold, to pictures of the ambience, to contact information and location. It’s an A to Z guide for everything a person wants to know. Or let’s say you own a gym. The website can display the equipment available, the working hours, and even package details.
This reduces the hassle of dealing with customer inquiries. This also ensures that the leads you generate have a higher chance of converting because they already know all the information related to your business and find it all agreeable!
2. Ease of Interaction
The best part about websites is that they are websites, not just printed brochures! Websites are interactive by nature. You can leverage this aspect of them in many ways. Continuing on the example of the restaurant, if a person lands on your website from Google and gets interested in dining at your restaurant, they can reserve a table right from your website! This saves you the hassle of phone calls! Or let’s say, for instance, your brand sends out a newsletter every week, people can sign up for it right from your website.
3. Lead Generation
Having a website that is ranked on search engines can get you leads! The next time someone searches “Salons in Ahmedabad” or “Stationary near me”, your website will pop up in the results! This way brand visibility increases which would lead to increased brand awareness which will get you leads! The key is to ensure that your website is easy to navigate, quick to load and mobile-friendly. This will retain the visitors so that they can explore the website and learn more about your business.
A web development company in ahmedabad can help you with building a quality website that works smoothly across all devices and loads in just a few seconds! They can also help out with SEO to ensure that your website is ranked high and gets more visibility on Search Engines.
4. Increased Credibility and Awareness
The world has moved online and therefore it is important that not only does your business exist in the offline world but also the online world. Just by the virtue of having a digital presence, the credibility of your business goes up! A website brings a sense of completeness and cohesion to your brand. As already mentioned, your website acts as the face of your business. It helps build trust among the visitors. If you saw a faceless man walking down the street, you wouldn’t trust that guy now, would you? Let’s revisit the imaginary fairytale where you decided to work on your resolutions! In this story, you’re naturally inclined to trust the latter gym which has a website because you know more about that gym. Quick Tip: Telling your brand’s story on your website will help you form a better connection and deeper trust.
5. Sales!
Building an e-commerce website can be a game-changer for your sales numbers! Using platforms like Shopify not only allows you to sell your products online but also makes the management tasks simpler and easier such as adding products, tracking inventory and taking secure payments. Shopify also lets you sell your products through multiple channels such as your website, social media platforms and other online marketplaces! This will make buying your products way easier and more convenient for the customers!
A full-service digital marketing company can help set up your website and ensure the content is error-free. They can also advertise your services and products through social media marketing. Their specialised teams will handle the entire process for you.
Not-So-Comprehensive Guide to a Comprehensive Website
We’ve established that a website can do a lot for your business but this is only possible if you have a well-developed, well-designed website with well-written content! So, here’s a tiny little list of must-haves that you… must have on your website!
- A Catchy Landing Page Copy: This is the main page of your website. The title copy must be crisp and concise and must tell the visitor what your business is all about
- Contact Information: Phone Numbers, Email Address, Physical Address as well as a Google Maps location and all the Links to your social media pages
- Picture Gallery: If you’re a restaurant, a cafe, a gym or any business where the visuals matter, show the visitors those visuals. Make sure the pictures are high-quality and well-shot.
- An About Us page: This is the page where your brand’s story shines! Just make sure there are pictures
- Your Portfolio: If you’re a service provider, this is the page your prospective clients would be the most interested in. Show your best work off here!
- A Blog: A well-written blog can not just help you with SEO but it may also result in the development of a loyal reader base. Collaborating with an SEO company will help you write blogs with strategic and unique topics. They will ensure that everything on your website yields results.
- Products or Services Page: Talk about the products or services you sell. An ecommerce development company can help you set up an ecommerce website which will also allow you to directly sell products through your website!
What Do Agencies Bring To The Table?
Having established the importance of a website for small businesses, the next step is to decide how you’ll go about developing one! Why hire an agency when you can go the route of developing a website in-house using tools like WordPress? It’s simply because agencies bring a lot of expertise to the table to help you develop the best possible website for your brand. Agencies have various specialised teams for web development, design and content focusing on the smallest of details to ensure utmost perfection.
What navigation menu style should I use? How should I structure my website? Should I be writing blogs for my website? What should the frequency be? These are the questions that a website development company in ahmedabad can help you out with! The agency will take care of fine-tuning the details and take the burden off your shoulders so that you can focus on your business operations.
Concluding Thoughts
So, a well-built website can be magical for your small business! It’ll be the face of your brand, helping you generate new leads, provide all the important information, interact with the visitors, sell products online and even tell your brand’s story!
So, if you’re on the lookout for a 360-degree digital marketing agency excelling in website development, content, e-commerce, and SEO, we’d be more than happy to help! Just drop us a message at hello@florafountain.com and we’ll be in touch!
Frequently Asked Questions
The founder and partner of Flora Fountain, Shefali leads the Content and Technology divisions. A one-time engineer who started her career writing front-end code, she took a detour sometime during her 9 years in New York, studied journalism and started writing prose, poetry and sometimes jokes. She now has 15...