In this fast-paced and digital world, businesses are under increasing pressure to do more with less. To stay competitive, you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd, streamline your everyday functions, and stay fresh in the mind of your existing and potential customers. A website can be a potent tool to help you achieve all these objectives without breaking the bank.
Aside from directly saving you money, a website will also save you time and effort. And, as anyone that runs a business today knows, time = money. With that in mind, let’s look at how a website can save your business money:
Offer Self-Service Online Support
It’s no secret that scaling up customer support services as your business grows is one of the critical challenges facing small-to-medium businesses. If the only way for customers to troubleshoot or solve issues is via one-on-one communication, this will quickly eat into your time and resources.
However, with a website, you can host a knowledge base with documentation, FAQs, and tutorials for DIY problem-solving. You can also go one step further by providing intelligent chatbots that can guide users to solutions through a Q&A discussion format. This will drastically reduce the number of tickets or phone calls your support team needs to handle.
The vast majority of users will likely face the same issues that are relatively simple to solve. Having actual representatives repetitively provide these straightforward solutions is a massive drain on time and money that can be better spent elsewhere.
Reduce Marketing Spend
Conventional marketing techniques may be expensive and unscalable for several reasons:
- Professional, high-quality printing services for flyers, banners, etc. can be pricey
- Every time your catalog/services/market changes, you’ll need to reprint
- Having to personally distribute marketing collateral takes up pressure time
- You may have to store extra material you may never use
It’s no wonder that many businesses turn to the internet for the bulk of their marketing needs. With over 4.66 billion internet users, a website is like your prime-location banner over the busiest highway in the world.
Implementing SEO on your website pages is a cost-effective way to increase organic traffic through search engines like Google. You can also create a blog and leverage content to drive organic traffic through search engines and social media, funneling readers to your website.
Digital content is also much easier to update than physical marketing material, and you can even keep adding content yourself.
Carry Out Product and Market Research
As mentioned, a website allows you to effectively get an unprecedented volume of “footfall” through your online presence. Using website analytics tools and other techniques, you can carry out market research without physically investing in the stock and then trying to sell it.
For example, you can use “out of stock” banners with preorders to gauge the interest for a specific product. Using Google Analytics, you can also see what content, pages, or products generate the most interest. You can also use A/B testing to test different versions of content, pages, or products to see which performs best.
Except for the initial effort to set up, this doesn’t cost you anything in the long run. However, you will have to invest far less time, effort, and money, than conventional face-to-face research techniques.
Retain and Nurture Leads
A website can be the ultimate tool to stay within a few clicks of your customer base. Using email opt-in forms or newsletter subscriptions, you can generate email lists of interested customers to regularly serve them with new deals, sales, or exciting content.
By actively updating and providing interesting, entertaining, or engaging content, you can also keep customers returning to your website for more, staying fresh in their minds.
Using analytical or CRM tools, you can also build customer profiles to deliver customized recommendations and deals. This will make your marketing efforts more effective and boost your conversion rates.
The numbers back this up, according to Invesp. Acquiring new customers cost up to 5x as much as retaining existing ones while you have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer compared with a 5-20% when selling to a new one.
A website can help you generate leads and qualify them so that you ensure you spend your time on the most lucrative opportunities.
Reduce Your Overhead and Expand Your Storefront
As the recent difficulties within the brick-and-mortar retail industry and online retail’s success can attest to, the physical overhead becomes a significant drag on businesses in this digital age.
The rent for a physical space, the hiring of additional staff, and the associated expenses can quickly balloon your costs. By creating a business website, you can offload a lot of these running expenses.
For one, it’s cheap and easy to attract and sell to customers from different areas using an online store. A web development service in Toronto, for example, can use localization techniques to attract customers in other regions to your services, such as Vancouver.
Many e-commerce platforms and online delivery services make setting up a complex shipping network a breeze. This ease extends to warehousing and inventory management.
Save Time and Money on Recruitment
Just like with customer service, handling all your recruiting process manually can be a significant logistical headache. Today, you can even find WordPress plugins or out-of-the-box solutions to integrating recruiting systems with your website.
Talent will also find your business through your website and launch an application using a recruitment page. By providing job information and specifics, you’ll be able to weed out bad fits and encourage more suitable applicants to apply.
Recruiting solutions can sometimes automatically reject or approve initial applications based on predetermined criteria or alert HR when a perfect fit is found. You will only need to manually get involved once the applications have been filtered, reducing the time it takes to look for talent.
Leverage a Business Website to do More With Less
As you can see, a website can be a complete digital extension of your business. Not only will it help you grow your following and generate interest, but you can implement the tools to help you more effectively convert potential customers and delegate your time where necessary. Furthermore, it can help you save on costly investments in physical assets, keeping your business lean and flexible.