White Paper
Why Wigan businesses need to have a professional website in order to secure prosperity and surviving shifts in the market place
The past decade has seen a profound shift in the marketplace, where the ‘old’ sales pitch – based around trying to convince businesses to consider buying a website – has completely disappeared from every cold-caller’s script. Instead, today the only question to ask is: what do you mean your business doesn’t have a website?
The need to have a website is no longer just about being able to compete online, in many cases it’s now also about smart bubsiness-sense and even long-term survival.
Whether your business operates in the local market or sells to a global audience, an online presence is – for most – now a part of your core business strategy, and in many cases a key part of your marketing.
Traditional media channels are not nearly as effective as targeted, well-optimised sales pages on the Internet, where your target audience is actively searching for what you offer. Additionally, the costs of traditional marketing typically far outweigh operating a decent on-line marketing strategy.
The bottom line is simply this: if your business is not competing online, you’re missing out on a huge percentage of potential sales and business growth opportunities, and possibly even locking your company’s potential for growth, effectively sealing its imminent fate.
Companies in Wigan are just as prone to this dilemma as any other company on the planet which operates at the public level and depends on sales for survival, growth and prosperity.
The message is clear enough: your company needs a website. Wigan businesses need websites too in order to remain competitive as well as establishing and maintaining an online presence to create, develop and put into effect lead-generation systems as part of their key marketing strategy.
But it doesn’t stop there. Just as the message shifted from ‘this is why your business needs a website’ to ‘you MUST have a website’, conditions in the market place coupled with other variables, such as the ever-growing number of businesses with websites, is now pushing the bar ever upward.
The new message is this: your business needs a professional website. Period. Anything less than this, is going to hurt your bottom line.
A professional website – or rather, how professional your website looks and feels – is a direct reflection ‘perceptually’ to the quality of your company and the services and/or products you deliver.
The flaw in this perception is of course the fact that a website is not necessarily reflective of your company. Dell or Apple would still be very efficient companies if they had ‘bad’ websites. The concept of how professional – or not – your company is, is merely a perception of the visitor to the website.
The key fact in this process is that you – as a company – have a great deal of control over that perception, because the concept of how professional your company is, arises – in this case – from what your website conveys.
When the visitor to your website has nothing else to factor in when it comes to making a buying decision, your website becomes your one-time-chance of converting your visitor to a client.
Simply put, a badly designed website will always convey poor quality. If you don’t take your website seriously, nobody else will.
Despite this fact, many companies still take shortcuts and cut corners when it comes to their online presence. Businesses with this attitude tend to view any cost related to their online presence as just that: a ‘cost’.
Smart companies on the other hand will view these costs and part of their business running costs and more: as an investment. It is marketing after all. Your website is your sales representative; it’s your very best embasador, working for you 24×7. Just like you wouldn’t send your best sales rep out to an important meeting in a shoddy suit, having a badly designed website represent your company is not only marketing suicide, but also a huge lift for your competition.
Smart companies in Wigan who can already see the business sense in owning a professional website will be positioning themselves as serious competitors in their own niches and locking into a huge long-term potential that will ensure both their survival and prosperity.
Jose Gonzalez Ltd provides a whole range of online marketing tools to help small local businesses establish a professional presence online and market themselves competitively in their own respective niches, whether at the local or global level.
Jose Gonzalez
Jose Gonzalez Ltd