Do you need a website for your small business? 8 reasons why the answer is ‘HELL YES’
Picture this: you’re a small business owner and you close all your clients in your DMs on social media. Your sales process is a million variations of the below conversation.
The really cute bit here is how you don’t have a succinct description for your service offering, so you always have to type out the bits you remember/have saved in your phone notes. 10/10 for efficiency.Sometimes you close in 5-minutes, sometimes you close in 5-weeks…
And in the meantime, you’re still chatting to your prospect (because you post all this great content all the time, and they keep replying and telling you how funny/awesome/smart/brilliant you are).
Your sales chat scrolls away on a chatty breeze that’s too damn delightful to ignore.
Off it rolls into conversation heaven, never to be reread.
Buh-bye chat, and buh-bye priceless opportunity to coax your potential client away from their distracting social media and pull them into your special small business world, where everything is all about you-you-you and what you do.
Gee, if only you had a place. A dedicated spot, where like, all your service offerings live? And like, anytime anyone wants to know about what you do, or make a booking with you, you send them a quick link with all the information? Oh, and there's a button with payment integration or some shit like that?? LOL??!! 🤣
Read on if you relate to my client below, and you’re not sure why you need a business website because “you’ve never got any biz from having it there.”
This post is a follow up to an Instagram story I shared about a wonderful small business owner I’m working with on a homepage revamp for her coaching business.1️⃣ You don’t ‘own’ your social media accounts
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok whatever your social media poison, these third-party platforms are tools that amplify your small business presence, but the accounts you build on them are not guaranteed assets you can count on.
Let me explain.
Instagram can delete or disable your profile anytime they want to. I’m not trying to scare you. It’s just facts. If you build up a following of 100,000 and tomorrow your social media platform of choice accidentally wipes your account, that effort is gone.
When I (aggressively) encourage small businesses to have websites, I’m advocating for freedom from your social media in more ways than one (keep reading for more freedom from the scroll), one of those ways happens to be disconnecting your dependence on your social account as the one-and-only source for your sales.
Having a website that explains who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and how people can work with you is a weight off your social media that will pay off forever, because (unless Armageddon happens) your website will always be there for you. Promoting what you do.
Do you actually trust this face tho?2️⃣ 84% of consumers think a website makes a business more credible than a business that only has a social media profile
Credibility. It’s a thing.
Any Tom, Deborah or Hafizah can set up a social page and claim they’re a lifestyle coach or a decluttering specialist, or a 6-figure sales coach. It’s not hard to mock-up a lifestyle, we see it all the time in those well-researched Daily Mail stories where Kardashians have photoshopped their bums on their holibobs, and we hate it, don’t we?
How dare they lie to us like that.
Those lies usually start on social media, and they start there because it’s so easy to manipulate the truth of a photo or tell a massive porky in a post.
When you’re a small business, your credibility is one of the most important marketing tools in your business building kit. There’s no room for doubt in your profit margin, so don’t create fertile ground to sew the stuff. Anyone can peddle professionalism on social media. Hell, we’ve all been taken in by a guru or two!
If your social media is the club promoter on the street, then your business website is the nightclub.
Your club promotor reinforces the club mission, qualifies the clubbers who’ll pay for their table at the end of the night, and only sells tickets to cool cats. Your website delivers the promise that your social media propounds. Your website is all the things you said you were. Your website is the original source. It’s where you pitch the goods and make sales. It’s where you confirm to your ideal client that you, my friend, are The Business.
3️⃣ Your website is a forever shop window, clearly displaying all your gear
For a tenner a month, you can buy your small business a shop window that the whole world can access and browse.
A website is the only place you can clearly display what you do, your services, and who you work with. It doesn’t matter how good your social media feed is, and it doesn’t matter how frequently you share; no one is scrolling back 3-weeks to read your last sales related post. So unless you’re relentlessly selling your services on your social media (or have a massive media budget for ads), there’s always a chance you’re missing passing traffic.
A business website means always having a clear reference point for your service offerings, and this is particularly important for small business owners who frequently produce sh*t tons of valuable content marketing but (just as frequently) risk burying their 1:1 services/courses/webinars/events in the mix because they aren’t always creating sales material that clearly signposts potential customers towards purchase decisions.
(Hello, sales pages).
4️⃣ Money pouring into your bank account while you’re asleep
If I had a pound for every single time a small business owner told me they wanted to generate passive income, I’d be at least 332 quid richer.
Apart from hosting your sales pages, your business website can host a little shop where keen beans who love what you do can buy your courses, ebooks, meditation recordings, sassy merchandise, and anything else you fancy flogging.
The best bit? Minimum real-time effort for you, maximum effort from your website. All you have to do is connect your site to a payment gateway and watch the money roll in.
I’m not going to go into the intricacies of creating passive income right now, but I promise I’ll do it one day.
5️⃣ 24/7 employee, and you won’t get arrested for slave labour
You can’t hang out with your ideal clients 24 hours a day, but you know who can? Your business website. Similarly, you can’t hang out on social media drumming up interest forever. Your website CAN.
Running a small business is exhausting enough as it is. But, you don’t need to hire a VA or a PA or the CIA to know that you need all the help you can get when you’re starting on your business building adventure.
Your website is the best employee you’ll ever hire. It will never complain about having to work weekends. It loves the night shift (that’s when most of your customers are scrolling for you), and it never asks for holidays.
Amazing.
*GIRL = WEBSITE 6️⃣ You can make your audience paaaart of your wooooorrrld
Look at this trove. Treasures untold. How many wonders can one website hold?
Great question, Ariel.
A question you’ll never get to answer if you keep insisting that your audience only hang out with you on Instagram.
Every time you post on social media, you get a tiny micro-opportunity to connect with your ideal client. What you don’t get is lots of quality time. That stuff? That happens on your website when they fill out your newsletter form and get on your juicy mailing list. That dreamy Little-Mermaid swirly-cavern-exploration experience happens when they’re on your website, downloading your lead magnet and discovering that you’re amazingly talented, supremely helpful and definitely the right service provider for them.
Remember, your audience's attention span is NOT guaranteed on social media, and it certainly isn’t all yours. On Instagram alone, you’ve got to share that attention with over 25 million other business profiles worldwide!
7️⃣ The full brand experience
Your website is the most ‘you’ part of your business, from the buttons to the hero banners to the submission message copy. Your website visually reinforces your brand identify, confirms your identity and positioning through the copy, and helps people get familiar with the look and feel that is YOU.
And no, your social media templates are not a brand identity. They are only one part of your toolkit. Your website needs to echo that social space. Not only does it make you look professional AF, but it also makes you look a lot more credible and put together, and who doesn’t want that for their business? Amirite?
8️⃣ SEO - supersize your presence and boost your biz traffic
Search engines like Google are the school prefects of the internet. They stalk the halls looking for Ronnie Rule Breakers and Lazy Lucy types that don’t explain themselves properly online.
This looks like:
> making sure Google gets who you are and what you do
> ensuring you’re a credible source of whatever it is you do/provide
> scanning your content for structure, intent, quality, ease of use (mobile-friendly), load speed, keywords etc.
There are over 200 SEO ranking factors that search engines use, and I’m not going to go into them all here. Still, I see so many small business owners carelessly sh*t all over basic SEO because they don’t think they need to consider it.
Well, what if I told you that a good ranking could result in more organic traffic to your site and more clients? Would you be interested then?
Thought so.
Final Thought
We all like a deep and meaningful in the DMs. Hell, I love them. But constantly chatting to prospects is not a sales strategy. It’s a sales tactic.
The best small businesses know how to unite strategy + tactics to create $$$ results.
Being tactical alone is not a plan. It’s exhausting, and if you’re like me, then you’re probably a one-person band who doesn’t have the time or energy to constantly ‘BE’ a business.
A business website will decrease the mental load and free you up to be a better person outside of your business (and that’s where we all really want to be, right? Outside. Doing life. Having fun. Eating shawarma.)
Want me to apply all the above to your small business website? Don’t have a website yet? Need a loving nudge?
My most popular wordy service is the Homepage Revamp. Starting at £1,900, I’ll caress your online space and set you up for a first impression that makes your people wanna press all your buttons.
You can start your website adventure by pressing this one 👇👇👇